When Everything Changed (20 page)

Freedom Summer was a huge success in the way SNCC had intended, drawing far more national attention to the brutality of Southern resistance to civil rights. But that very fact was as irritating as it was welcome.
How could the veteran
organizers not be offended to see the TV crews grow excited over the news that two bodies had been found in the Mississippi River and then quickly lose interest when they discovered the victims were black men, not white students?
The white volunteers themselves
were embarrassed that stories such as “They Walk in Fear but They Won’t Give Up” talked all about them and failed to mention the heroic local blacks or the indomitable SNCC workers.

The white women were assigned to jobs where they would have the least contact with the white population, such as teaching in the Freedom Schools, where local youngsters were prepared to register to vote. Going out to actually register people in the community—the highest-prestige job, and the most exciting—was almost always delegated to men.
Although most of the women
did not complain, they certainly did notice that the male volunteers were, as one Freedom School teacher remembered, “running out… being macho men… you know, ‘we’re going to go out and get our heads busted and we’ll come back to here where you nurse us… and otherwise service us and send us back out again.’ ”
One of the few young white
women who was able to get a field-organizing job was Jo Freeman, thanks to the hand-cranked mimeograph machine that was sent to her by friends. “Until you’ve written out three hundred mass-meeting leaflets by hand, you don’t know how valuable this was to any project director,” she said. “And I went with the machine.”

Many of the new arrivals
felt the coolness from the start. The summer volunteers were “often viewed as a kind of disposable labor and public relations source,” said Elaine DeLott Baker, an experienced organizer from Ohio who had gone to Mississippi to stay but still felt she had “arrived too late to be incorporated into the culture of trust that was the hallmark of… the Beloved Community.”
Susan Brownmiller, a white
New Yorker who went with a friend to work in Mississippi, reported to a black organizer, who said with annoyance, “I asked for volunteers and they sent me white women.”

“
I
T HAD THE APPEARANCES OF A NECKING PARTY
.”

The Civil Rights Memorial at the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Alabama, honors “40 Lives for Freedom”—the men and women “who lost their lives in the struggle for freedom during the modern civil rights movement” from 1954 to 1968. Among them are Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley, remembered as the “four little girls” who were getting ready for a service at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham when a bomb exploded. Johnnie Mae Chappell, who was walking down a road in Jacksonville when she was killed by white men who simply wanted to shoot a black person, was later added to the list in honor of the victims of “random racist violence” during the era.

The only other woman on the list—and the only woman to be killed during a civil rights protest—was white. Viola Liuzzo, a 39-year-old Detroit housewife and college student, was shot by members of the Ku Klux Klan while she and a black volunteer were driving between Selma and Montgomery after the Selma march of 1965. Liuzzo was a solitary figure, and the civil rights movement seemed unsure exactly what to do with her when she was suddenly thrust upon them as a martyr. Her participation had mainly involved marching in a few demonstrations in Michigan, and she had driven down to Selma alone. She seemed less like a classic civil rights worker than one of Betty Friedan’s
Feminine Mystique
heroines, looking for a commitment to something larger than her home and family.

Early in life Viola Liuzzo had made bad choices that haunted her—quitting school at 14, marrying and divorcing by the time she was 16. Then she turned things around, and by the early 1960s she was living a proper middle-class life in Detroit with her husband, Jim, a teamsters official, and five children. By all accounts she was a devoted mother. But she had no interest in either housekeeping or neighborhood social life. Trying to explain Liuzzo’s decision to go South, her only close friend, a black woman named Sarah Evans, said she was “searching, looking for something.” Her husband and children simply said that she had a huge heart.

The march from Selma to Montgomery was a follow-up to Bloody Sunday, in which Alabama law officers had attacked six hundred people marching for voting rights. Americans saw television reports of the attack, and thousands drove to Selma to be part of the great protest being held in response. Liuzzo apparently intended to drive down with other students from Wayne State University, where she was attending classes. But in the way of college students everywhere, her companions fell by the wayside when it was time to get organized and go. Viola left by herself, driving a thousand miles in three days. When she arrived, she was assigned the unmemorable job of working at a hospitality desk and then later at a first-aid station. She stayed with a local volunteer, Mrs. Willie Lee Jackson, and befriended her daughter, an unmarried high school dropout with a new baby. Perhaps thinking of her own much-regretted decision to leave school, Liuzzo invited the girl to come to Detroit to live with her family, so she could go back to high school and get a new start.

While she was working at the hospitality desk, she loaned her car to the Transportation Committee, which was headed by
Leroy Moton, a black volunteer
who stood well over six feet tall but weighed less than 140 pounds, and whose slight build and big glasses made him look younger than his 19 years. Moton, who dreamed of being a barber someday, carried an American flag in the march, and people noticed him beaming with pride, occasionally bursting into a few verses of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” After it was all over, Liuzzo met up with Moton and got behind the wheel herself to ferry him and five other passengers back to Selma. The two of them were returning to Montgomery down Highway 80 when they were spotted by a carful of Ku Klux Klan members, who gave chase. “We got pretty much even with the car, and the lady just turned her head solid all the way around and looked at us,” said an FBI informant who was with the assailants. “I will never forget it in my lifetime, and her mouth flew open like she—in my heart I’ve always said she was saying ‘Oh God’ or something like that.” Liuzzo was shot to death. Moton miraculously survived as the car plunged, uncontrolled, into a field.

For Liuzzo and Moton to be in the same car was a terrible error, one many members of the black community could not conceive of making.
Unita Blackwell was also
on her way home from Montgomery that day, just ahead of Liuzzo and Moton. Her passengers included one white woman who the others kept covered with a bed sheet. “Merely seeing blacks and whites together in any kind of equal situation was enough to send white law-enforcement officials and some in the general public into a frenzy, and anything might happen,” Blackwell said.

Virginia Durr—whose white Southern roots did not keep her from playing a leading role in the Montgomery civil rights movement—said that in the end the violent paranoia about integration in the South “always got down to sexual relations between a black man and a white woman.” The obsession with “race-mixing” comes up endlessly in antiblack rhetoric, and for Southern racists, that mixing occurred in only one direction. White men could prey on black women at their pleasure, but let a black man touch a white woman, and civilization fell. The Alabama state legislature, in a resolution denouncing the Selma march, claimed, “There is evidence of much fornication, and young women are returning to their respective states apparently as unwed expectant mothers.” In Washington, the congressman who represented Montgomery said that the marchers were “rabble hired to march for ten dollars a day… and all the sex they wanted.” The theme was not confined to Southerners.
FBI chief J. Edgar
Hoover, briefing the attorney general on Liuzzo’s death, told him “that she was sitting very, very close to the Negro in the car; that it had the appearances of a necking party.”

At the first trial of Collie Wilkins, the Klansman who shot Liuzzo, defense attorney Matt Murphy launched into a tirade about the mixing of the races: “Integration breaks every moral law God wrote…. No white woman can marry a descendant of Ham. That’s God’s law…. I don’t care what Lyndon Johnson or anybody else says.” Questioning Leroy Moton, he demanded to know if the young man “had relations” with Viola Liuzzo. When Moton denied it vehemently, the lawyer wanted to know what other reason there could be for a white woman from Detroit to “desert her husband and children to ride around with a black man.” Finally, after suggesting that Moton was a drug addict, Murphy claimed that Liuzzo “was in the car with three black niggers. One white woman and three black niggers. Black nigger Communists who want to take us over!” Wilkins was freed after the jury deadlocked, repeatedly voting 10 to 2 to convict on a lesser charge of manslaughter. Murphy assured a reporter that there would undoubtedly be an acquittal on retrial: “All I need to use is the fact that Mrs. Liuzzo was in the car with a nigger man” and, he added bizarrely, that “she wore no underpants.” Murphy and the other men accused of Liuzzo’s murder then embarked on a fund-raising tour for the Klan, during which Wilkins was repeatedly introduced as “the triggerman” and honored with a parade in Atlanta. (Wilkins was indeed acquitted at his second trial. Later, all three of the Klansmen implicated in Liuzzo’s death were convicted in a federal trial of violating her civil rights and were sentenced to ten years in prison.)

Liuzzo was far from the only white housewife in the North who felt the call to go to Selma and bear witness. Watching the news coverage of “soldiers shooting down those black children” from her home in Boston, Betty Riley Williams, the former marine’s wife, felt she should be in Selma with the marchers. “I was a coward because I kept thinking, ‘What if I get there and I get shot? Who will bring up my children?’ I’ve always felt a little ashamed about that, but that’s how it was. I know other women have gone and they’re proud they did it, but I couldn’t do it.” Yet Liuzzo has somehow always remained an orphaned martyr, the dead civil rights protester who no one wants to claim. Civil rights activists, black and white, almost all felt that she had behaved recklessly in driving with a black man on an open highway. And while the general public did not indulge in paranoid fantasies about drugs and necking parties, many did believe she had neglected her responsibilities to her family to go on a quixotic quest to get justice for strangers.
A poll by
Ladies’ Home Journal
found that 55 percent of the women questioned felt she had no right “to leave her five children to risk her life for a social cause.” A little more than a quarter thought she did have a right to go. In a follow-up focus group, the magazine brought together eighteen Northern suburban women, and none of them seemed to have much sympathy for the idea that a married woman should put herself at risk for anything other than her immediate family. And the definition of what was risky appeared to be expansive. One of the women admitted that, as president of a club, she had gone out of town for three days. When she added that she had gone by plane, there was a long, and apparently disapproving, silence.

“T
HE DAY MIGHT COME WHEN WOMEN AREN’T NEEDED
.”

In the fall of 1964, after the summer volunteers had finally gone away, SNCC’s regular members held a gathering at Waveland, Mississippi, to regroup.
Sandra “Casey” Hayden, a longtime
white organizer from Texas, wrote a memo with several other white women that proposed addressing the question of sexism in the organization. They argued that men’s sense of superiority in the civil rights movement was “as widespread and deep-rooted and every bit as crippling to the women as assumptions of white supremacy are to the Negro.” The memo would go down in women’s history as one of the first attempts to expand the modern civil rights movement’s concerns to include gender as well as race. But at the time, very few people paid much attention, and Stokely Carmichael—who would soon become chairman of SNCC—joked that the proper place for women in the organization was “prone.” (Carmichael would both repudiate and repeat the line in later years.
In an interview in 1995
, he said he “would not have been taken seriously as a leader of an organization like SNCC if I had not taken seriously the leadership of women. A woman like Ella Baker would not have tolerated it.”) The black women were generally dismissive of Casey Hayden’s memo. “White women in the movement… said they were forced to type instead of being able to go out and organize. Well, I wanted them to stay in the office and type as much as the black guys,” said Joyce Ladner. “If they went out in the community, they were a lightning rod for all of us to get hurt.” Black women had plenty of complaints about black men, but they had no intention of sharing their dissatisfaction with the general public. “There was always this united front in front of white America that we were supporting the brothers,” said Josie Bass. “But part of my anger of racism was the anger of how black men treated black women and blamed it on racism.”

Meanwhile, SNCC was moving into its black-power phase. After several years of being jailed and beaten by whites, of seeing their friends killed by whites, and of witnessing the murderers shielded by whites, many of the black organizers were tired of fighting for integration, and overwhelmed by an understandable—if not necessarily practical—desire to have all white people go away and leave black people to themselves. Joyce Ladner found she went through a period “when I started to really dislike white people.” The feeling was so strong that when her former roommate, who was white, called to say she was coming to visit for the weekend, Ladner could not bear to deal with her. “This thing had taken hold of me,” she recalled. “I think maybe I took it out on her because she was the closest white person to me. But it was very—it was bad, so uncomfortable. I felt so awful that white people had treated us this way.” (Eventually, Ladner apologized to her ex-roommate, and they resumed their friendship.)