Pillar of Fire (12 page)

Facing open rebellion, Anderson went to Montgomery to seek counsel among the pastors gathered during the bus boycott, including Daddy King, who advised a substitute motion for the removal of the rebellious deacons. Under Baptist rules, King pointed out, Anderson required no specific accusations—a generic charge of malfeasance would do. With this strategy at the showdown debate, Anderson's partisans routed deacons led by Deacon N. D. Walker, a physician of grand manner and a rolling bass voice, who had been wealthy among peers even before his daughter married the founder of
Jet
and
Ebony
magazines in Chicago, sealing an alliance deemed worthy of Tabernacle. Walker's threat to leave the congregation backfired unexpectedly, as a number of members shouted that they would feel well rid of him, and Anderson withdrew his removal motion as a gesture of reconciliation. “That will be your mistake,” predicted a senior preacher from the bus boycott. “Don't ever stop the folk from kicking tail when they are kicking it for you.”

No sooner did Anderson wear down his adversaries than he gave them a fresh line of attack. On an afternoon drive in 1959, his Lincoln collided with another car in an intersection, then careened from one side of the street to the other—killing an elderly pedestrian before it flipped over into a tree. A woeful Anderson testified that the initial collision had knocked him unconscious, but Selma's prosecutors indicted him for murder. Found guilty of manslaughter, he drew a sentence of ten years, and church adversaries cried out that he had brought down unimagined shame upon Tabernacle. The conviction stood until overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court not long before Bernard Lafayette first asked to use Tabernacle for a mass meeting.

Lafayette beseeched Anderson through winter into 1963, playing on his bus boycott connections without success. For eight years, running parallel with the rise of the modern civil rights movement, Anderson had gained stature as a survivor in a luminous pulpit, but he told Lafayette he could do no more because Selma was not as modern as Nashville or Atlanta. The active possibility of being retried on the manslaughter charges still held him vulnerable to whim or conspiracy, Anderson believed, especially when his enemies at Tabernacle boasted of their ties to Selma's white aristocracy.

Stymied in Selma, Lafayette followed Sam Boynton's advice to search for aspiring voters among illiterate yeoman farmers in the surrounding hinterland. He wandered farmhouse doorsteps for a month before receiving surprise invitations in March from a settlement in Wilcox County so remote that it had to be reached by pole ferry across a lake, so inbred that nearly all families were called Petteway. By official record, no Negro had applied for registration for more than fifty years; the county defended itself with this fact, arguing that Negroes did not desire to register. Lafayette first held meetings on nonviolence to introduce the very idea of farmers going to town without their rifles, and after a final purging of fears, at which several volunteers disclosed to relatives where family valuables might be dug up if they did not return, he escorted a solemn procession that drew stares on the streets of Camden. Nonplussed courthouse authorities, eyeing specially alerted Justice Department observers, accepted registration applications from all eight unarmed Petteways. Several signed with an “X.”

 

I
N
M
ISSISSIPPI
, where Moses conceded that the movement was “powerless to register people in significant numbers anywhere in the state,” Hollis Watkins joined twenty or so volunteers determined to maintain a bare presence in the Delta towns—faces in plain sight, making even solitary trips to the courthouse. Five projects centered around Leflore County and its small county seat of Greenwood, stretched across a confluent loop of three meandering rivers—the Yazoo, the Tallahatchie, and the Yalobusha. The White Citizens Councils maintained southwide headquarters in Greenwood, which remained among the world's trading centers for cotton, and Medgar Evers had revoked the local NAACP charter for lack of activity since the Emmett Till lynching. Fear shut Greenwood to the movement so tightly that COFO could not secure an office for five months after a night posse ran them out of a photo studio in August of 1962, and project director Sam Block was obliged to spend more than a few nights in parked cars when host families showed him the door with fearful apologies. Conditions were no better next door in Sunflower County, where it would take more than a year to match the eighteen applicants arrested with Fannie Lou Hamer on the first try.

A dry 1962 harvest left the cotton crop low to the ground, more accessible to mechanical cotton pickers. Sharecroppers earned even less than usual, ate less, and were vulnerable in great masses to displacement. “So that you had a lot of Negro families who were destitute,” Moses reported, “who were just rock bottom poor, poverty which you just can't imagine in most parts of the United States…in which the mothers were not able to send their kids to school because they didn't have shoes and they didn't have winter clothes.” In Leflore County alone, the nation's surplus food program sustained 22,000 people between growing seasons—more than 40 percent of the total population, including many Indians and not a few whites, as nearly a third of the whites were tenant farmers. The local role was merely to distribute cheeses and other staples bought by the federal government to support agricultural prices, and no one imagined that two of the nation's poorest counties could or would spurn free food for their own needy, until Leflore and Sunflower counties publicly terminated all food relief in October. Only a minuscule fraction of those hit by the cutoff were Negroes who had tried to register. Nevertheless, in the surly mood after James Meredith's forced integration of Ole Miss, county officials exercised what amounted to a nuclear war option to prove they gave no succor to racial agitators.

As winter hardened, and the counties blamed the ragtag Delta projects for conditions of famine, the COFO workers appealed to Northern support networks for survival donations. Future SNCC leader Ivanhoe Donaldson entered the movement by driving a carload of relief supplies from Michigan State down to Mississippi over Christmas vacation. (He wound up in jail even before reaching Greenwood.) By early 1963, a Chicago group led by crossover comedian Dick Gregory was donating supplies by the ton, and on February 1, Harry Belafonte gathered up sympathy and money for Mississippi at SNCC's first national fund-raising concert, in New York's Carnegie Hall.

Relief trucks pressed heavily against the logistical freeze in Greenwood, as young workers who lacked safe beds and an office suddenly needed storage space for shipments of food. In crisis, COFO secured one room of a dry cleaning plant called the Camel Pressing Shop on McLaurin Street, which held the workers but not much cargo. To break the lockout by the local churches, Hollis Watkins, up from Hattiesburg, shared the lesson of his success with Methodists, and James Bevel finally gained entry through Rev. D. L. Tucker to Turner Chapel AME. Freedom songs spilled from the first tentative church meetings in Greenwood, but the tiny, two-story structure quickly proved too small. Aiming for Wesley Chapel—with its ample basement and central location—Bevel obtained from presiding bishop Charles F. Golden a stiffening order that the pastor and congregation must admit the starving to sanctuary.

Acute hunger transformed the paralyzed COFO project into a refuge of desperate hope. Recipients in the food lines met registration workers hand to hand, eye to eye, and registration workers seized every chance to tell them they were hungry in large part because they were second-class citizens, and that they would remain so until they laid claim to the right to vote. Of the few sharecroppers who began following the COFO staff down to the registrar's office, nearly all were illiterate—better than 80 percent by the estimate of Bob Moses. As such, they were just the opposite of the exemplary, educated registrants that Justice Department lawyers and COFO's own projects normally recruited. The sharecroppers came instead from the great masses being pushed for decades into big cities without education or prospects. (“This is why you have your big problems in Washington and Chicago,” Moses soon testified before Congress, “and I don't know whose responsibility it is.”)

In the fresh mayhem of the Greenwood COFO office, Moses spent hours discussing a trap within the circular powerlessness of racial subjugation itself: how to gain the vote without literacy, and literacy without the vote. One theoretical remedy was somehow to remove the literacy requirements in favor of universal suffrage, but such ideas touched the rawest nerve of the conflict between race and democracy. “We killed two-month-old Indian babies to take this country,” one white voter explained succinctly to the press, “and now they want us to give it away to the niggers.” On the literacy side of the trap, against generations of ignorance and segregated, dilapidated Negro schools, COFO workers grasped for small-scale relief from Martin Luther King's new Citizenship Education Program, which offered intensive, one-week adult literacy courses near Savannah and Charleston. James Bevel and Diane Nash petitioned King to open a third citizenship school in the Delta. Nash urgently lobbied for the schools at the Carnegie Hall fund-raiser, but King's administrator, Andrew Young, rejected the plan as unrealistic. “The chances are that you would be closed and the property confiscated in short order,” he wrote, “that is, if it wasn't bombed first.” Young's worry was hardly far-fetched; he had inherited his program after the Highlander Folk School suffered such a fate in Tennessee. He teased Nash in a postscript over her edgy, possessed mood, which was common among those who left and reentered Mississippi's reality warp. “Diane, you really should have stayed over a day or so in New York so we could have ‘done the town,'” Young advised. “Then you'd have had to go back to Mississippi and work hard to get rid of your guilt.”

 

A
MONG THOSE
who ogled Bob Moses from a distance was June Johnson, who had turned fifteen in December. One of twelve children being raised by a laborer and a maid, young Johnson had heard grown-ups whispering about the mysterious stranger in a tone very similar to the life-and-death gravity with which they had trained the children never to say a word about Emmett Till, even at home. One morning on the way to school, she led a fearful, half-giggling group of her friends up to Moses, walking a street with hands in his pockets, as always. “Are you from Greenwood?” she asked. When he said no, she asked boldly about the rumors that he was a Freedom Rider. Moses only smiled, asked about her family, and offered to carry her books.

After that, Johnson found excuses to sneak near the COFO office on McLaurin Street. “Honey,” she told her sister, “I heard that they got some good-looking men up at that place.” One afternoon a mischievous friend pushed her headlong into Moses. “What you-all do here?” asked Johnson, recovering from embarrassment. “We hear you-all are troublemakers.”

Moses replied that they were having a registration meeting that night, and asked if she might like to see one of the canvassing notebooks that explained why voting was so important. The girls took the notebook and ran, passing it back and forth like contraband. Before June Johnson could hide the notebook under her mattress, one of her sisters obediently informed their mother, Belle Johnson, whose wrath turned the whole house silent. She ordered her daughter to “trot right back down there” with the confiscated book and “don't bring that stuff here no more.”

 

T
HE
D
ELTA FAMINE
worsened until more than six hundred sharecroppers lined up outside Wesley Chapel on February 20, 1963. Cleveland Jordan, an old cotton-row preacher recruited to supervise the food distribution, kept up a running speech about the connection between poverty and voting. “We just mean to register and vote, and we don't mean to fight and we don't mean to run,” he said, calling to recipients by name. “We just mean to go to the polls and get our freedom.” Kerosene arson struck the Negro section of Greenwood that night, destroying four stores next to the Camel Pressing Shop. When Sam Block told sharecroppers in the relief line that the fire targeted the registration project, Greenwood police arrested him for incendiary public remarks.

Block's quick conviction and six-month sentence galvanized many sharecroppers who had heard him sing freedom songs as they received packets of Spam and cheese. More than 150 Negroes, nearly all from the relief lines, presented themselves at the courthouse on February 25 and 26. They still averted their eyes from white faces out of conditioned inferiority, and only a handful of them managed even to apply for the vote, but these limits only underscored their newfound tenacity. In spite of taunts and shouted threats from bystanders, including their plantation bosses, sharecroppers held their ground on the public sidewalk for two days and vowed to come back. Never before had Mississippi's common Negroes stood in such numbers for the ballot.

Two nights later, a sudden zipper-line of automatic gunfire from a Buick without license plates left thirteen bullets in a COFO car, wounding volunteer driver James Travis in the shoulder and neck as Moses managed to swerve to a halt in a roadside ditch. This attack made Greenwood a small national news item. In the immediate aftershock, COFO leaders decided to reinforce nonviolence against vigilantes by concentrating Mississippi volunteers from outlying projects into Greenwood. They arrived along with important people looking for information. Police at the bus station arrested and manhandled one well-dressed Negro before learning that he was a federal staff investigator for the Civil Rights Commission. From Washington, Attorney General Robert Kennedy himself pushed negotiations to make Leflore County resume the federal food relief, and Medgar Evers reported to his NAACP superiors in New York that he “noticed” a surprising surge of registration activity led by members of Greenwood's defunct NAACP chapter—a portrayal that was almost entirely cosmetic salve for bureaucratic vanities at NAACP headquarters. Pretending to be alarmed, Evers pushed New York for permission to stay ahead of the competition.