Читать книгу SNCC: The New Abolitionists - Howard Boone's Zinn - Страница 9
ОглавлениеStokely Carmichael, tall, slim, brown-skinned, gives the impression he would stride cool and smiling through Hell, philosophizing all the way. Arriving in the Jackson, Mississippi, train terminal as a Freedom Rider in the spring of 1961 (he was twenty, and a student at Howard University) Stokely and a young woman Rider made their way past what seemed an endless mob of howling, cursing people who screamed and threw lighted cigarettes; then they went into the white waiting room, where they were arrested. They were part of that extraordinary group of Americans who, in the Freedom Rides of 1961, embarked on a dramatic attempt to expose and challenge segregation in interstate travel in the Deep South.
In Parchman jail, the state penitentiary, Stokely almost drove his captors crazy: when they decided to take away his mattress because he had been singing, he held tightly to it while they dragged it—and him—out of the cell, and they had to put wristbreakers on him to try to make him relinquish his grip; after six fellow Riders had been put in solitary confinement, he demanded the same treatment, and kept banging loudly on his cell door until his wish was granted. When, after 49 days, Stokely and the others left Parchman, the sheriff and his guards were somewhat relieved.
At the time of the Freedom Rides in the spring and summer of 1961, SNCC was one year old and still loosely put together; it had an office in Atlanta with two full-time workers who maintained sporadic communication with affiliated student movements all over the South. But the students who went on the Rides—most of them veterans of the sit-ins—came out of jail to become central figures in a stronger SNCC organization that would now take up forward positions in a no-man’s-land untouched since Reconstruction.
The sit-ins had begun a new phase of the Negro upsurge, in which students—matured overnight into social revolutionaries—started to play the leading role. These same students, in the brutal training ground of the Freedom Rides, became toughened, experienced. And in the course of it all, they somehow decided that the Deep, Deep South, out of which they had just barely escaped alive, was the place where they must go back to do their work.
To CORE should go most of the credit for the Freedom Rides. Formed in Chicago in 1942 to conduct nonviolent direct action against racial discrimination, CORE worked successfully in Chicago, in St. Louis, in New Jersey, to end segregation in restaurants and other public places. In 1947, CORE and the Fellowship of Reconciliation, in order to follow up a Supreme Court decision outlawing discrimination in interstate travel, sponsored a Freedom Ride which they called a “Journey of Reconciliation.” Bayard Rustin, a Negro and a fiercely eloquent pacifist, and James Peck, white (he had startled his Harvard classmates years back by bringing a Negro date to the freshman dance), also a pacifist, were among sixteen Negro and white riders. They rode two buses through the upper South, with very little violence and only a few arrests, and established that most passengers and drivers would not go out of their way to make trouble for people who chose to sit where they pleased.
Again, in 1961, fourteen years later, a Supreme Court decision—this time in the Boynton Case, extending desegregation from carriers themselves to terminal facilities—stimulated action. Early that year, Tom Gaither (mentioned previously as the CORE man in the Rock Hill sit-in) spoke to Gordon Carey, also of CORE, about a “Freedom Ride,” after which a national council meeting of CORE agreed to undertake it, and CORE’s new national director, James Farmer, issued a call on March 13. Farmer himself and James Feck were the first two volunteers, and on May 1, 1961, a group of thirteen, seven Negroes and six whites, assembled in Washington, D.C. for a briefing session on nonviolence. Part of the group riding a Greyhound bus and the others a Trailways bus, they started the long trip from Washington to New Orleans on May 4.
On the Greyhound bus was John Lewis of SNCC, who had participated in the Nashville sit-ins. They made it through Virginia and North Carolina with little trouble, but at the Greyhound bus station in Rock Hill, South Carolina (as James Peck relates the story in his gripping book, Freedom Ride) twenty toughs were waiting. John Lewis was the first to be slugged as he approached the white waiting room. Behind him was Albert Bigelow (famous as the pacifist skipper of the Golden Rule, which sailed into an atomic testing area in the Pacific to protest nuclear warfare), who was attacked by three men. Police first watched, then stopped the beatings, and the group entered the white waiting room. The two buses went on, through Augusta and Athens, Georgia, with long lay-overs en route, and on May 13 arrived in Atlanta, where they stopped for the night before heading into Alabama and Mississippi.
Sunday, May 14, when the buses left Atlanta and crossed into Alabama, was Mother’s Day. That day the Greyhound bus was stopped, its tires slashed, outside of Anniston, Alabama, and surrounded by a mob. An incendiary device hurled through a window set the bus on fire, and those on board had to make their way out, choking, through the dense smoke, while the bus burned to a charred iron skeleton. Twelve of the passengers were hospitalized briefly for smoke inhalation, but the riders assembled again and took another bus into Birmingham.
In the meantime, the Trailways bus, an hour behind the other, was arriving in Anniston, the driver insisting he would not go on unless the group sat segregated. Eight hoodlums climbed aboard the bus and began beating the Negroes in the front seats. When James Peck and retired professor Walter Bergman moved forward to try to dissuade them, Peck was knocked to the ground, bleeding, and Bergman received a crushing blow on the head. The whole group was forced to the back of the bus, which went on to Birmingham.
Peck tells of his group’s arrival in Birmingham, of the mob lined up on the sidewalk near the loading platform as they got off, with young men carrying iron bars following them as they went into the white waiting room and towards the lunch counter. Then the attack came. Peck and Charles Person, an Atlanta Negro student who had been in the sit-ins there, were dragged into an alleyway, six men working on Peck, five men on Person, with fists and pipes. Peck, battered into unconsciousness, awoke to find the alleyway empty, blood flowing down his face. His friend Bergman came along and they managed to get a cab to Rev. Fred L. Shuttleworth’s house, where they saw Person, a gash in the back of his head, his face swollen.
Peck was taken to the hospital and lay on an operating table for several hours while reporters plied him with questions and doctors sewed fifty-three stitches in his head. At 2:00 A.M. Peck was discharged from the hospital, and then a brief nightmarish episode followed. Waiting outside the hospital for Rev. Shuttlesworth to arrive in a car, he was told by police to get off the street or be arrested for vagrancy. Returning to the hospital, he was told by a guard that discharged patients were not permitted in the hospital. He went back into the street, and, fortunately, the car arrived to pick him up.
A Southern Regional Council report on the Freedom Rides, discussing the bus-burning and beatings in Anniston and Birmingham, commented that all this took place “while police were either inactive, not present, or strangely late in arrival.” Police knew in advance of the arrival of the buses in these cities, but they simply were not on hand as the violence unfolded. When Birmingham police chief Bull Connor was questioned on this, he replied that protection was not available because so many of his men were off for Mother’s Day.
The entire Freedom Ride group assembled in Birmingham the next afternoon, ready to go on to Montgomery. No bus driver would take them. They waited for an hour on the loading platform while a mob gathered, then sat down in the white waiting room. It became clear that they would not get out of Birmingham, so they decided to fly on to New Orleans to participate in a mass rally there marking the May 17, 1954, Supreme Court decision. A bomb threat cancelled their first plane, and another mob gathered at the airport. After six difficult hours, they finally left Birmingham at 11:00 P.M. and arrived in New Orleans at midnight.
That was the end of the first Freedom Ride. It was at this point that SNCC and the Nashville student movement entered the picture. A new phase of the Freedom Rides began.
Ruby Doris Smith, spending more of her sophomore year at Spelman in the SNCC office than with her books, recalls clearly the tension in Atlanta when news came of the Mother’s Day violence in Anniston and Birmingham.
I remember Diane Nash called the Department of Justice from Nashville, and Lonnie King—you know he was head of the Atlanta student movement—also called the Department. Both of them asked the federal government to give protection to the Freedom Riders on the rest of their journey. And in both cases the Justice Department said no, they couldn’t protect anyone, but if something happened, they would investigate. You know how they do.…
When the news came that the Riders could not go on by bus, that they were flying to New Orleans, an excited discussion went on over long distance between Nashville and Atlanta, the two centers where SNCC had its strongest contingents. The Ride, they decided, should continue. If it didn’t, it would prove that violence could overcome nonviolence.
The indomitable Diane Nash was quickly assembling a group of students in Nashville, determined to go to Birmingham and continue the Freedom Ride from there to Montgomery, then into Mississippi, then into New Orleans. They were joined by some members of the first Ride, including John Lewis and Henry Thomas. Ruby Doris Smith raced around Atlanta trying to raise money so that she could go along, but many Atlanta Negroes thought it was too dangerous, and tried to dissuade her from going.
Meanwhile the Nashville group had left, early in the morning of May 17, 1961. Eight Negroes and two whites were aboard a bus headed for Birmingham. Police got on the bus oh the outskirts of Birmingham, ordered two students to change their seats, and arrested them when they refused. The rest of the group was arrested (the reason given was “protective custody”) in the Birmingham terminal, after making their way through a crowd and trying in vain to get a bus driver to agree to take them on to Montgomery.
The Riders spent a night in jail. Then, early the next morning they were driven 120 miles to the Tennessee border by Birmingham police chief “Bull” Connor, and let out in the middle of nowhere. Diane and the others made their way back to Nashville and started all over, joined by more students, including three whites, so that there were now seventeen in the group. That same afternoon they were back, by bus, in the Birmingham terminal. It was May 19. Five days had passed since Mother’s Day.
Ruby Doris Smith, her money finally in hand, flew from Atlanta to Birmingham to join the Nashville group:
I was alone.… When I got to Birmingham I went to the bus terminal and joined the seventeen from Nashville. We waited all night trying to get a bus to Montgomery. Every time we got on a bus the driver said no, he wouldn’t risk his life. The terminal kept crowding up with passengers who were stranded because the buses wouldn’t go on. The Justice Department then promised Diane that the driver of the 4:00 A.M. bus would go on to Montgomery. But when he arrived he came off the bus and said to us: “I have only one life to give, and I’m not going to give it to NAACP or CORE!”
The students sat outside on the ramp for three hours, and sang Freedom Songs as dawn broke over Birmingham. Then they were startled to see the same bus driver return and, still grumbling, begin to collect tickets for the trip to Montgomery. Joined by two Birmingham Negroes and some newspapermen, but with no other white passengers aboard, the bus headed for Montgomery.
That trip to Montgomery took place on Saturday, May 20. The day before, a political drama was enacted on the longdistance wires between Washington, D.C. and Montgomery, Alabama. On Friday, President John Kennedy, concerned ever since the bus-burning and beatings of Mother’s Day, telephoned the Capitol Building at Montgomery to talk to Governor John Patterson. Patterson had said, just before the Anniston-Birmingham violence: “The people of Alabama are so enraged that I cannot guarantee protection for this bunch of rabble-rousers.” Patterson was not available to answer the phone and President Kennedy spoke to the Lieutenant-Governor.
The President said, in this conversation, that it was the federal government’s responsibility to guarantee safe passage of people in interstate travel, and that he hoped Alabama could restore this right without the need for federal action. That same evening, a representative of the President, Justice Departmentman John Siegenthaler, flew to Montgomery to confer with Governor Patterson. Then he telephoned Attorney General Robert Kennedy in Washington, relaying Patterson’s assurance that he had “the will, the force, the men, and the equipment to fully protect everyone in Alabama.” Apparently, this promise of safe conduct led the Justice Department to arrange for a bus driver to leave the Birmingham terminal with the Freedom Riders. The F.B.I. notified the Montgomery police that the students were coming, was promised that precautionary steps would be taken, and told Washington that therefore no federal action was needed.
Ruby Doris Smith tells of the students’ arrival in Montgomery:
There were police cars all around the bus, and helicopters flying overhead. But when we got inside the Montgomery city limits, it all disappeared. It was around noon when we got to the terminal and got off the bus. Paul Brooks went to call cabs for us. People were meantime gathering nearby, and a CBS cameraman was taking pictures. Suddenly a large man with a cigar hit the cameraman. He kept dragging him all over the street, beating him. The cameraman was small. There was not one policeman around.
About three hundred persons had gathered at the terminal, but apparently only about twenty-five or thirty participated in the actual violence that followed. These had clubs and sticks. Fifteen of them clubbed one newspaperman, Norman Ritter, head of the Time-Life News Bureau, when he tried to come to the help of another newsman.
One of the first of the Riders to get off the bus was James Zwerg, a young white man from Appleton, Wisconsin, tall, slender, dressed neatly in an olive-green business suit. Several women screamed, “Kill the nigger-loving son of a bitch,” and a group of white youngsters moved in, pounded at Zwerg with fists and sticks, and sent him bleeding to the pavement. Then others stomped his face into the hot tar of the roadway, while women shouted encouragement.
“Zwerg never attempted to defend himself in any way,” Ruby Doris Smith recalls. “He never put his hands up or anything. Every time they knocked him down, he got back up.” At just about that time, the cabs arrived for them.
The mob turned from Zwerg to us. Someone yelled: “They’re about to get awayl” Then they started beating everyone. I saw John Lewis beaten, blood coming out of his mouth. People were running from all over. Every one of the fellows was hit. Some of them tried to take refuge in the post office, but they were turned out…. We saw some of the fellows on the ground, John Lewis lying there, blood streaming from his head….
A few of the Riders escaped in the crowd. Others, trying to get through, were caught. Suitcases were torn from the students’ hands; clothing and mail were scattered over the street. (Later, onlookers gathered the clothing together, along with an English composition book that belonged to one of the students, and set the pile on fire.)
One of the white girls was chased by the mob. John Siegenthaler, the President’s emissary to Montgomery, was on the scene, and as he tried to get the girl into his car, someone struck him from behind and knocked him unconscious. He lay on the street while people milled around. In the meantime the police had arrived. Siegenthaler still lay unconscious on the pavement. A newspaperman asked Police Commissioner L. B. Sullivan why an ambulance wasn’t called for Zwerg and for Siegenthaler. Sullivan replied: “Every white ambulance in town reports their vehicles have broken down.” After Siegenthaler lay there twenty-five minutes, police put him in a car and took him to a downtown hospital.
Jim Zwerg got no medical attention for more than two hours. A Negro woman who saw him lying on the street called an ambulance, but none would come. For a long time he sat in a parked car in a state of semi-shock, the blood streaming from his mouth and nose. A reporter again suggested to Police Commissioner Sullivan that Zwerg get medical attention. Sullivan retorted: “He hasn’t requested it.”
One Negro student, William Barbee, from the American Baptist Theological Seminary in Nashville, was knocked unconscious by a group using baseball bats. He lay on the loading platform of the bus terminal for twenty minutes before a Negro ambulance came. He would spend several weeks in the hospital.
Accounts vary about how long it took the police to arrive after the violence began. The Associated Press reported that it took them twenty minutes. Even after their arrival the violence continued; the police then used three or four tear gas bombs to disperse the mob, which had grown to over a thousand. Governor Patterson issued a statement in which he said that “state highway patrolmen responded in force seconds after they were called. Within five minutes, we had sixty-five state patrolmen on the scene. Officers restored order quickly…”
As the news came to Washington, Robert Kennedy telephoned Governor Patterson, but was told by a secretary that the governor was out of town, that no one knew where he was or when he would return. The Attorney General now took several moves: he had Justice Department attorneys go into federal district court in Montgomery to enjoin the KKK, the National States Rights Party, and anyone supporting them from interfering with peaceful interstate travel; he had the F.B.I. send in an extra team to intensify its investigation of the violence connected with the Freedom Ride; he sent a contingent of U.S. marshals to Montgomery under Deputy Attorney General Byron White.
President John F. Kennedy issued a statement in which he called the situation “a source of the deepest concern,” asked Alabama to prevent further violence, expressed the wish that citizens would refrain “from any action which would in any way tend to provoke further outbreaks,” and said that he hoped local officials would meet their responsibilities, that the United States “intends to meet its.”
Their heads bandaged, their wounds treated, the Freedom Riders stayed overnight in Montgomery, in the homes of local Negroes. The next day was Sunday, May 21, and they all appeared at Ralph Abernathy’s First Baptist Church in Montgomery for a mass meeting to be held that evening. Martin Luther King, Jr., flew in from Chicago to speak at the meeting. Over 1200 Negroes and a few whites were there. In the church basement, the Freedom Riders gathered and clasped hands. Someone called out: “Everybody say Freedom!” The group responded. “Say it again!” someone shouted, and the cry “Freedom!” went up once more in the church basement. Then they all went upstairs and sat on the platform as the meeting began.
A crowd of whites, gathering outside the church, began throwing bottles and rocks at the church door. National Guardsmen stood by, for the Governor had that day declared martial law, and some local police were on duty. A group of U.S. marshals faced the crowd. After a while the marshals lobbed a few tear gas bombs into the crowd and it thinned out. But it was still too dangerous to let people come out of the church.
While all this was going on, two Atlanta students, who had heard about the violence that noon and had immediately taken a Greyhound bus for Montgomery, made their way through the National Guardsmen into the church. One of them was Frank Holloway, a SNCC worker, who later described that night in Abernathy’s First Baptist Church:
Inside were three or four times as many people as the church was supposed to hold, and it was very hot and uncomfortable. Some people were trying to sleep, but there was hardly room for anybody to turn around. Dr. King, other leaders, and the Freedom Riders were circulating through the church talking to people and trying to keep their spirits up. But it was a relief and like a haven to be among friends.…
Everyone stayed in the church until six the next morning and then left.
The students planned now to continue the Ride into Mississippi and then on to New Orleans. While they waited in Montgomery for several days, staying at the homes of Negro families there, more students arrived to join them—from Nashville, Atlanta, Washington. Five CORE people came into Montgomery from New Orleans. Twenty-seven Riders were now ready to go on to Jackson, Mississippi, where Governor Ross Barnett had said: “The Negro is different because God made him different to punish him.”
At seven-thirty in the morning on Wednesday, May 24, with National Guardsmen lining both sides of the street near the bus terminal, twelve Freedom Riders (eleven Negro, one white), accompanied by six Guardsmen and sixteen newspapermen, left Montgomery for Jackson. Before leaving, they tasted victory by eating in the “white” cafeteria at the Trailways terminal. On the road, a convoy of three airplanes, two helicopters, and seven patrol cars accompanied the bus while, inside, James Lawson held a workshop on nonviolence. On arrival in Jackson, escorted into the city by National Guardsmen, the group was arrested trying to use white rest rooms and waiting rooms. The charges were the customary ones for civil rights demonstrators: breach of peace, refusal to obey an officer.
Several hours after the arrest of the first contingent of Riders in the Jackson terminal, the rest of the group, including James Farmer, arrived from Montgomery, also with National Guard escort, and entered the Jackson bus terminal. Frank Holloway wrote later in New South about this experience:
Behind all these escorts, I felt like the President of the United States touring Russia or something. … At the door of the waiting room a policeman stood there like the doorman of the Waldorf Astoria and opened the door for us. … I guess the crooks in the city had a field day because all the Jackson police were at the bus station… opening doors for us….
Standing in line at the terminal cafeteria, the Riders in this second group were arrested too, and joined their friends in the city jail. All twenty-seven were found guilty, given two-month suspended sentences, and fined $200. They decided to go to prison rather than pay, and were taken to the Hinds County jail across the street. “When we went in,” Holloway recalls, we were met by some of the meanest looking, tobacco-chewing lawmen I have ever seen. They ordered us around like a bunch of dogs and I really began to feel like I was in a Mississippi jail.” Then they were transferred to the penal farm out in the country:
When we got there we met several men in ten-gallon hats, looking like something out of an old Western, with rifles in their hands, staring at us.… Soon they took us out to a room, boys on one side and girls on the other. One by one they took us into another room for questioning.… There were about eight guards with sticks in their hands in the second room, and the Freedom Rider being questioned was surrounded by these men. Outside we could hear the questions, and the thumps and whacks, and sometimes a quick groan or a cry.… They beat several Riders who didn’t say “Yes, sir….” Rev. C. T. Vivian of Chattanooga was beaten pretty bad. When he came out he had blood streaming from his head…. We could hear somebody slap a girl Freedom Rider, and her quick little scream. … She was about five feet tall and wore glasses….
In the meantime, the newspapers were full of excited talk about the Freedom Rides. Attorney General Robert Kennedy, while seeking an injunction in federal court to prohibit Bull Connor and other policemen from interfering with interstate travel, issued a call for a “cooling-off period.” The reaction of moderate opinion in the country (for instance, the New York Times and the Charlotte Observer) was to support this. On the other hand, the very next day saw the arrival in Montgomery of Negro and white ministers headed by William Coffin, Yale University chaplain, all of whom were arrested trying to use the facilities of the bus terminal. Wyatt Walker of SCLC, the Rev. Ralph Abernathy from Montgomery, and the Rev. Fred L. Shuttlesworth from Birmingham—were all arrested that day in Montgomery.
Charges flew back and forth. Governor Patterson of Alabama denounced the Riders and the Federal Government. Twenty-six white students from Auburn University, a state-supported college in Alabama, wrote in a letter to the Montgomery Advertiser: “Governor Patterson referred to the freedom riders as rabble rousers.’ He is entitled to his opinion, but is Alabama to glory in the fact that it furnishes sufficient rabble to be roused?”
In the Atlanta Constitution, editor Eugene Patterson, although criticizing the “theatrical approach” of the Freedom Riders, said:
But that is not the point of what happened in Alabama. Any man in this free country has the right to demonstrate and assemble and make a fool of himself if he pleases without getting hurt. If the police, representing the people, refuse to intervene when a man—any man—is being beaten to the pavement of an American city, then this is not a noble land at all. It is a jungle. But this is a noble land. And it is time for the decent people in it to muzzle the jackals.
Meeting in Atlanta, the executive committee of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference turned down the Attorney General’s plea for a “cooling-off period,” but said there would be a “temporary lull” in the Freedom Rides. It was very temporary, because students kept arriving in Jackson, by train and by bus. Through June, July, and August, the pilgrimage continued, with students, ministers, and many others, white and Negro, coming into Jackson, where police, with monotonous regularity, arrested all comers as they tried to desegregate the terminal facilities. Forty-one Negroes from Jackson joined the Riders. By the end of the summer, the number of arrested persons reached over three hundred.
In early June, Ruby Doris Smith started her two-month sentence in Hinds County jail, sharing a four-bunk cell first with thirteen others, then with seventeen others, then with twenty-three others. She told me later, smiling, speaking softly as she always does:
It was a nice set-up. When the windows were open we could talk to the fellows. We sang. We wrote Freedom Songs. A Negro minister from Chicago sang: “Woke Up In The Mornin’ With My Mind Set On Freedom” so everyone began singing it. It started there…. Other songs were composed—“I Know We’ll Meet Again” was written by a fellow I knew from Nashville and Rock Hill. We would do ballet lessons in the morning to keep ourselves fit. There were different people from different areas. Somebody was giving Spanish lessons. But then, after about two weeks, we were awakened at 4:00 A.M. to find out that we were all going to Parchman State Penitentiary. … It was a long ride in the night. We sang Freedom Songs.…
Parchman was tougher. The prisoners had all their belongings taken from them; they were stripped down and searched, not left with a comb or cigarettes. Even their shoes were taken from them. The women were issued skirts with stripes, then put in the maximum security unit of the penitentiary, reserved for the most dangerous criminals, with whites and Negroes in alternate cells. Each was given a towel, a bar of soap, a toothbrush, sheets, and pillow cases. The cells, Ruby Doris says, were filthy, full of bugs.
The prisoners were only allowed to speak softly, and when they began to sing the guards threatened to take their mattresses away. Elizabeth Wyckoff, a white woman from the North, was quietly telling some of the Greek myths, and a guard said she was disturbing people and began to take their mattresses away. They started to sing The Star-Spangled Banner, and then their sheets were taken away. They kept singing, and their towels and toothbrushes were confiscated. The singing kept getting louder all the time. They slept on steel for three nights, without coverings, with cold air deliberately blown into their cells all night long.
One time, Ruby Doris recalls, she and nine other Negro girls were taken to live in the prison infirmary, where conditions were better. Through their windows they could see the men prisoners going out to work in the fields every morning. “There were fifty, sixty Negro men in striped uniforms, guarded by a white man on a white horse. It reminded you of slavery.”
In jail with Ruby Doris, on the men’s side, were Stokely Carmichael and Bill Mahoney of Howard University. Bill Mahoney had been one of the driving forces behind the decision of students at Howard to continue the Freedom Ride after the CORE group flew to New Orleans. “By that time,” Stokely recalls, “Bill Mahoney decided we should all go South. Bevel said, ‘What do you think?’ and I said, ‘Let’s go on through.’ Here we were, discussing what we were going through and then the call came in that they had sent the first bus off.…”
Stokely Carmichael was brought up in New York, where his parents had moved from the West Indies.
My father really worked hard, day and night. There were times when I didn’t see him for a week. He’d get up in the morning and leave for his regular job—he was a carpenter—then he’d have an odd job on the side, so he’d probably eat at my aunt’s house downtown and go to his odd job, and after that he’d drive a taxi, and then he’d come back and go to sleep. By that time, I’d be in bed…. He died in early 1962. He was a man in his late forties. It was a heart attack. We think he died of hard work….
A very bright student, Stokely was admitted to the Bronx High School of Science, which was reserved for the top students in New York. “I was an avid reader, but had no discipline. All the other kids I went to school with, their fathers were professors, doctors, they were the smartest kids in the world. Their fathers had libraries.… We had Huckleberry Finn. That was our highest book.” In his later high school years, Stokely read Marx; pondered and debated radical ideas.
He was a senior in high school when the Greensboro sit-ins occurred. Soon after, he joined some of his classmates who went to Washington, D.C., to picket the House Un-American Activities Committee. “I was shocked to see Negroes at a H.U.A.C. demonstration. It turned out they had been involved in the sit-in demonstrations I was reading about in Virginia. I was very happy and decided, well, I can try it.”
At Howard University in Washington, Stokely joined an affiliate of the newly-formed SNCC. It was called NAG, the Nonviolent Action Group, and in it were Bill Mahoney (to whom the others looked for leadership), Courtland Cox (tall, handsome, bearded, dark), Joan Trumpauer (tiny, blonde, and soon a Freedom Rider), and Dion Diamond (who later, as a SNCC field secretary, would be locked up for a long time in a Baton Rouge jail). The NAG conducted sit-ins and demonstrations to desegregate public places all around the Washington area. Then came the Freedom Rides.
Bill Mahoney, writing later in Liberation, described their arrival at Parchman penitentiary in mid-June, shortly after Ruby Doris had gotten there. As they got off the trucks, they were surrounded by men who brandished guns and spat at them and cursed. Two white men, Terry Sullivan and Felix Singer, refusing to cooperate, kept going limp as guards tried to move them along. They were thrown from the truck onto the wet sand-and-gravel drive, dragged through wet grass and mud puddles across a rough cement walk, into a building. Then a guard in a Stetson hat approached them carrying a long black rubber-handled tube. It was a cow-prodder, battery operated, which sears the flesh with an electric charge. When the two men refused to undress, the prodder was applied to their bodies. They squirmed in pain but would not give in. Their clothes were ripped from them and they were thrown into a cell.
Stokely talks of their time in Parchman:
I’ll never forget this Sheriff Tyson—he used to wear those big boots. He’d say, “You goddam smart nigger, why you always trying to be so uppity for? I’m going to see to it that you don’t ever get out of this place.” They decided to take our mattresses because we were singing…. So they dragged Hank Thomas out and he hung on to his mattress and they took him and it and dropped him with a loud klunk on his back…. And then they put the wristbreakers on Freddy Leonard, which makes you twist around and around in a snake-like motion, and Tyson said, “Oh you want to hit me, don’t you,” and Freddy just looked up at him meekly and said, “No, I just want you to break my arm.” And Sheriff Tyson was shaken visibly, and he told the trusty, “Put him back.” I hung on to the mattress and said, “I think we have a right to them and I think you’re unjust,” and he said, “I don’t want to hear all that shit nigger,” and started to put on the wristbreakers. I wouldn’t move and I started to sing “I’m Gonna Tell God How You Treat Me,” and everybody started to sing it and by this time Tyson was really to pieces. He called to the trusties, “Get him in there!” and he went out the door and slammed it, and left everybody else with their mattresses….
James Farmer said later: “Jails are not a new experience for the Riders, but the Freedom Riders were definitely a new experience for Mississippi jails.”
The students from Nashville, Atlanta, Washington, and other places who came out of jail as Freedom Riders in July and August of 1961 sought one another out, wondering what they would do next. There was the SNCC office in Atlanta which had linked them all loosely, uncertainly. A volunteer SNCC worker named Bob Moses, just down from the North, was setting up voter registration schools around McComb, Mississippi. Two other SNCC people, Reggie Robinson from Baltimore and John Hardy from Nashville, had joined him.
Through the summer of 1961, fifteen or twenty people on the Coordinating Committee were meeting every month: at Louisville in June, at Baltimore in July, at the Highlander Folk School, Tennessee, in August. Tim Jenkins, a slim, energetic, bright young Negro who was vice-president of the National Student Association, came to the June meeting with a proposal that SNCC make the registration of Negro voters in the South its main activity. That started a controversy which simmered, unsettled, throughout the summer. It came to a boil at the Highlander meeting in August, where the issue was posed sharply: would SNCC concentrate on a methodical, grinding campaign to register Negro voters in the Black Belt? Or would it conduct more sensational direct-action campaigns—sit-ins, kneel-ins, wade-ins, picket lines, boycotts, etc.—to desegregate public facilities?
Even before the Freedom Rides began, Jenkins had been attending a series of meetings in which representatives of several foundations, including the Taconic and the Field Foundations, discussed the raising of substantial funds to support a large-scale voter registration effort in the South. Present at these meetings were Burke Marshall, Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Civil Rights Division, and Harris Wofford, special assistant to President Kennedy on civil rights. Jenkins was asked by the Foundation people to broach the idea to his friends in SNCC.
The Negro students who had gone through the sit-ins and Freedom Rides were somewhat distrustful of white liberals with money and of the national government. The fact that both these elements were behind the idea of concentrating on voter registration, on top of Robert Kennedy’s call for a “cooling-off” period during the Freedom Rides, reinforced the suspicion that an attempt was being made to cool the militancy of the student movement and divert the youngsters to slower, safer activity. Led by Diane Nash and Marion Barry, many of the SNCC people at the Highlander meeting held to the idea that “direct action” should continue to be the primary policy.
Tim Jenkins was also aware of the interest of the Justice Department in moderating the temper of the student movement. He knew that the Department’s conservative interpretation of civil rights law led it to argue that only in connection with voter registration activities could it go into federal court for injunctive relief against local and state governments in the South which tried to suppress the civil rights movement. But he felt that voter registration was the crucial lever which could set progress in motion in the South, and if white liberals and the government were willing to help, why not take advantage of this? Over the summer, he convinced a number of people in SNCC that he was right.
At the Highlander meeting, it seemed for a while that an impasse had been reached between the “direct action” people and the “voter registration” people, and that SNCC might even split into two groups. Ella Baker, advisor to SNCC since it was founded at Raleigh in 1960, helped reconcile the opposing viewpoints. The result was a compromise. Two arms of SNCC were created: Diane Nash was put in charge of direct action projects. Charles Jones (from Charlotte, North Carolina, and the Rock Hill jail-in), fair-skinned, blue-eyed, and self-assured, was put in charge of voter registration work.
In McComb, Mississippi, Bob Moses was already beginning voter registration schools when this decision was made, and about the middle of August, 1961, SNCC people began to converge on McComb. Moses recalls: “I became a member of the staff during a hectic hiring session in McComb in August, when staff hired staff or some such nonsense.”
Money raised by Harry Belafonte began to come through now, and a number of people decided not to return to school in the fall but to go to work full-time for SNCC: Diane Nash, Charles Jones, James Bevel, Charles Sherrod, and others. With Ed King leaving the Atlanta office to go to law school (Jane Stembridge had returned to school earlier), the organization desperately needed an Executive Secretary. Diane Nash telephoned James Forman in Chicago and asked him to come to work for SNCC.
Forman, a thirty-three-year-old teacher, was born in Chicago but spent part of his childhood in Mississippi. He served four years in the Air Force, received a degree from Roosevelt College in Chicago, did graduate work on Africa at Boston University, studied French at Middlebury College, and somewhere inbetween wrote a novel (unpublished). Forman also spent a year working with sharecroppers in Fayette County, and made occasional trips to Nashville, where he met Diane Nash and talked with her about the future of SNCC. She had been impressed by him, and so called on him now.
Forman was just back from Monroe, North Carolina, where he had participated in demonstrations and been badly beaten. In Chicago, he was teaching school and thinking of doing some more writing; Diane Nash, James Bevel and Paul Brooks asked him to come to direct the SNCC office in Atlanta for sixty dollars a week. Forman (strongly built, handsome, with a big shock of curly hair, brown skin, an easy smile, and the features of an Indian) agreed to start working for SNCC in October.
Thus, in August of 1961, SNCC was ready to move. The sit-ins and Freedom Rides had been successful in the Upper South. They had ground to a bloody halt in the Deep South, leaving the participants wounded but determined, the opposition unsettled, the nation expectant. The excitement of the Rides was still in the atmosphere. The students and ex-students in SNCC had a staff, a new Executive Secretary, and a vague idea of general strategy. Now, with their characteristic instinct for both challenge and danger, they turned towards the state of Mississippi.
