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Bob Moses

McComb and Liberty, Mississippi

August–September 1961

1

I am Bob Moses. I first came to McComb in August of 1961 with a simple purpose: to break the Solid South by applying pressure at its strongest point. I sought out the worst part of the most intransigent state, placed myself on the charity of the black community, located a few brave souls who would support civil rights workers, and set up a voter registration school. If enough people could find the courage to go down to the courthouse, confronting the system designed to oppress them, then blacks all over the South would take heart, the country would take notice, and maybe, one hundred years too late, the federal government would take action. Was my effort a success? I would be reluctant to say that. When I started out, I hoped that no one would be killed.

A few years earlier I was headed down a different path. With an M.A. in philosophy from Harvard and a job teaching mathematics at the prestigious Horace Mann School in Riverdale, New York, I was a part of what W. E. B. DuBois termed “the talented tenth”—a black man who could succeed in the white playing by white rules. I had had an elitist education since I was eleven, passing a city-wide competitive exam to attend Stuyvesant High School in downtown Manhattan. President of my senior class, I received an academic scholarship to Hamilton, where I was one of three black students at the college.

It was at Hamilton, thanks to my French professor, that I discovered Camus. I read The Rebel and The Plague and began asking hard political questions: “Can revolution be humane?” “Can the ‘victim’ overthrow the ‘executioner’ without assuming his office?” For a time I believed that the only change worth working for was a change of heart, and so I joined a group of campus Pentecostals who traveled on weekends to Times Square to testify to the coming of the Kingdom. I considered becoming a preacher like my grandfather, but my father had his doubts. “That’s not just any job,” he said. “You’ve got to be called.” The pacifism of the Society of Friends also impressed me. One summer I attended an American Friends Service Committee international work camp in France, where I met people who had been part of the Resistance during the Nazi occupation. The following summer I went to Japan, where I helped build wooden steps up a slippery hillside for the children of a nearby mental hospital. Before I flew home, a Zen Buddhist monk invited me to spend a week at his home. Through my travels and study I learned to think before I spoke and to mean what I said, but I wasn’t the serious brooder people took me for. What I loved best about the Quakers was their folk dancing and hootenannies. Back in my room I listened to Odetta, and out on a date I would strut down Amsterdam Avenue whistling show tunes.

In the fall of 1956 I began graduate work in philosophy at Harvard. I was convinced that the analytic method, with its insistence on clarity and precision, represented a significant advance in thought. Previous philosophers had relied on metaphor and rhetoric to make muddy water appear deep. I sat in the back of the class during Paul Tillich’s lectures, shaking my head and muttering, “It’s all poetry.” More to my taste was Wittgenstein’s axiom: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” If philosophy could streamline its language and define its terms, then it could attain the accuracy of mathematics with its postulates and proofs. Before long, however, I tired of thinking about thinking and the meaning of meaning. In that remote realm of tautologies, indexes, and surds, I was in danger of forgetting that the meaning of life was no abstract speculation but my immediate and concrete concern. I returned to Camus’s dictum “I rebel, therefore we exist” and to Lao-tse, who taught that the way to wisdom consists in living one life well—starting small, a step at a time, with what is near, with what is at hand.

Then in the spring of 1958 my forty-three-year-old mother died of cancer; my father was so distraught he had to be hospitalized at Bellevue for several months. I dropped out of Harvard, accepted a job teaching math at Horace Mann High School, and moved back to Harlem to look after him. My father and I had always been close; we used to have long talks about what America denied and offered. Like many of his generation, he had been hamstrung by the depression. Intelligent, articulate, and handsome, he sacrificed his talents for the sake of his family, accepting a low-paying job as a security guard at Harlem’s 369th Division Armory. He and my mother scrimped and saved to ensure that my brothers and I would get ahead. The stress and strain took their toll: my mother once suffered a minor breakdown, and my father would sometimes slip into fantasies that his name was not Gregory Moses but Gary Cooper—a man brave enough, in spite of his cowardly town, to stand up for what was right.

My only civil rights activity at that time was to participate in the Youth March for Integrated Schools that Bayard Rustin sponsored in Washington. Then, one day in February 1960, I saw a picture in the New York Times of the sit-ins that had just begun in Greensboro, North Carolina: a row of neatly dressed black students sat at a Woolworth’s lunch counter, while a crowd of white toughs in duck-tails and sleeveless T-shirts waved a Confederate flag and shouted at their backs. Some of the students tried to read books, others stared calmly at the camera. I was struck to the core by the determination on their faces. They weren’t cowed, and they weren’t apathetic—they meant to finish what they had begun. Here was something that could be done. I simply had to get involved.

Over spring break, I visited my father’s brother, a teacher at Hampton Institute in Virginia. One day I saw some students picketing stores in Newport News. I slipped into the line of march and suddenly felt a great release. All my life I had repressed my resentments and played it cool. Now the sense of affirmation and the surge of energy that came from this mere gesture at protesting were exhilarating. I had had a taste of action and wanted more. That evening I went to a mass meeting where Reverend Wyatt Tee Walker of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference spoke. He talked about the need to collect money to defend the Reverend Martin Luther King from legal harassment, mentioning that Bayard Rustin was directing a fund drive in New York.

When I got back to Harlem, I volunteered my services to the Committee to Defend Martin Luther King, and so every day after school, I devoted time to organizing a Harry Belafonte fund-raising rally at the armory where my father worked. But I didn’t feel right licking envelopes while others were putting their lives on the line. I confided my discontent to Bayard Rustin, whose advice I respected.

“Go down to Atlanta, Bob,” he told me. “I’ll write to Ella Baker to tell her you’re coming. She and Martin will find something for you to do.”

As soon as my teaching duties were over for the summer, I packed my bags and took a bus headed south.

The Southern Christian Leadership Conference office wasn’t much: a small room, three women, three desks, three telephones. They were in the midst of a voter registration project and wanted me to do the same boring tasks I had done in New York. I soon found myself talking a lot to Jane Stembridge, a short, peppy blond with piercing blue eyes, a fiery spirit, and a crazy haystack of unruly hair. She was a southern girl, a minister’s daughter, who had left Union Theological Seminary to become the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee’s first executive secretary, a job she carried out with dispatch from her desk stuck in a corner of the SCLC office. We spent animated afternoons discussing Kant’s categorical imperative, Tillich’s ultimate concern, Sartre’s terrible freedom, and Camus’s authentic versus inauthentic existence. More pressing were our debates about the civil rights tactics of Martin Luther King and the SCLC, which we called “Slick.” They were in the process of replacing Ella Baker with Wyatt Tee Walker—part of a larger plan to promote Dr. King as the leader and spokesman of the black revolt. Jane and I thought the whole approach was too hero-worshipping, media-centered, preacher-dominated, and authoritarian. We agreed with Ella Baker, the midwife of SNCC, which we called “Snick,” who had very definite ideas about organizing. She believed that the Movement ought to seek out the small farmers, sharecroppers, and plantation workers and start building at the grassroots instead of posturing in front of cameras. Jane suggested that I should make a field trip to the Deep South to recruit students for an upcoming SNCC conference in October. I would pay my own way and see for myself what conditions were like.

At this time I wasn’t even on the SNCC staff. In fact, several of the SNCC people in Atlanta eyed me with suspicion. Who was this soft-spoken guy in horn-rimmed glasses with a Harvard degree? Why would someone so well educated (and with that name!) just happen to show up from New York? Was he an FBI spy? A Communist agent provocateur? Although I never tried to impose my views, from the start I made it clear that I thought the Movement in America was part of a larger world picture. Ella Baker, whose impact on all of us was enormous, argued that what we were after was much more than equal access to greasy burgers at the five-and-dime. That didn’t stop me, however, from joining any picket line I saw. I marched for hours with Julian Bond and the other Atlanta University students in front of a local A&P that served mostly blacks but refused to hire even one. Another time I was arrested while picketing for the Southern Conference Educational Fund.

“How did you get involved with the SCEF?” Julian asked.

“I heard about it at a lecture.”

“On what?”

“Ramifications of Göedel’s Theorem.”

“Oh,” he said, raising one eyebrow.

As a result of my arrest, Martin Luther King summoned me to his study at Ebenezer Baptist Church. I knew that some people in SNCC had been expressing doubts about me to King; he wanted to see for himself. Face to face, I felt less in the presence of a national symbol than of a troubled man a few inches shorter than I was and a few years older. After some painful silences and a smattering of small talk, King finally said, “We have to be careful. The FBI thinks the whole Civil Rights Movement is a Communist plot. I’d advise against picketing with the SCEF.”

I didn’t like his advice, but I took it. Then I changed the subject. Could I move my operations for the SCLC over to the Butler Street YMCA where I was staying?

“Of course, of course,” King answered, and we parted on that cordial note of agreement.

When Ella Baker heard about my visit to Ebenezer, she was upset.

“Why, Martin himself is friends with Anne and Carl Braden and several of the other SCEF people. What right does he have to tell you to stay away from them?”

“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “I’m heading south in a few days anyway.”

“Well, I wish I could join you. Wyatt Walker just evicted Jane from the SCLC office, and I’m being sent to New York. When you get to Mississippi, make sure you talk to Amzie Moore. Before I leave I’ll give you his address, and I’m going to give those snooty Atlanta students a piece of my mind about the dangers of red-baiting. I won’t have that. When I’ve finished with them, they won’t say another word against you, Robert.”

The next day Julian came by and apologized. I told him about my plan to tour the South.

“So ‘Moses’ is finally going to Mississippi,” he said, inspecting my face for signs of insanity. “I wish you luck.”

2

One day in late August I knocked on the door to Amzie Moore’s house in Cleveland, Mississippi. He was an NAACP organizer who had been working to change things in the Delta ever since he came home from World War II. The floodlights that radiated out from his brick house and the rifle he held on his lap as we talked testified to how precarious his position was. But he was dug in like a tree by the water and determined to defend himself. A strong, broad-shouldered man who looked like he could handle himself in a fight, Amzie made me welcome immediately, and for a week we reconnoitered the area and discussed strategy. We went from shack to shack, and he showed me scenes that I’ll never forget: children with swollen ankles, bloated bellies, and suppurating sores; children whose one meal a day was grits and gravy; children who didn’t know the taste of milk, meat, fruits, or vegetables; children who drank contaminated water from a distant well, slept five in a bed, and didn’t have the energy to brush the flies from their faces. We were in the Delta, but it might as well have been Haiti.

“What can be done?” he asked me simply.

I mentioned the sit-ins and demonstrations going on elsewhere.

“No. No. That won’t work here. They’d squash that like a bug and nothin’ more would be heard. It’s the politicians who control things in this state. If you can hurt them, things will change. The key is the vote.”

Amzie convinced me that the best tactic was not to attack segregation head-on, but to focus exclusively on voter registration. Unlike the other NAACP leaders I had met, he was enthusiastic about bringing in SNCC workers and recruiting local students to help.

“It’s the young people who are gonna carry this thing through,” he said. “The adults are too afraid. But if the students show enough courage and commitment, they’ll back them up.”

Amzie showed me a booklet put out by the Southern Regional Council that outlined the voting situation. Mississippi, as usual, was the worst: although 40 percent of the state was black, only 5 percent of those eligible were registered, and most didn’t dare vote. We taped a map of Mississippi on the wall and hauled out Amzie’s old Underwood. He extemporized on life in the Delta while I typed up a rough draft of a voter registration project to present to SNCC. A few years earlier, Amzie and a Catholic priest in Mound Bayou—Father John Lebouvre—had set up a voting school in his church. That would be our model. We would run off copies of the state constitution, and SNCC workers would teach the local people how to register. We knew we faced a tough, dangerous job, but my eyes gleamed with the vision of thousands of black people descending on local courthouses and gaining control of the Delta.

“Don’t get starry-eyed,” Amzie would caution. “Things are gonna get real ugly round here before they get pretty. I’ve seen how mean these whites folks can be.”

At the conference in October, Amzie Moore outlined our voter registration proposal. SNCC, which could never resist a dare or a challenge, was impressed with Amzie’s presentation and decided to go ahead. I was named director of a voter registration project to start the following summer.

I taught one more year at Horace Mann, saving as much money as I could for what was ahead. Each night I read up on the South, studied the Mississippi constitution and maps of the state, planned, meditated, and then, before going to bed, listened to Odetta sing “I’m Going Back to the Red Clay Country.”

When summer came, I returned to Mississippi, but it looked like the project wouldn’t get off the ground. SNCC was in disarray over the question of whether voter registration wasn’t a diversion from “direct action” demonstrations against segregation; Amzie was swamped with personal problems. Then a letter came from Curtis Bryant in McComb. He had read about SNCC’s voter registration plans in Jet and wanted us to set up a project in Pike County.

“White folks around here are really upset about these Freedom Riders,” Amzie said. “Maybe things down there won’t be so tight.”

So one day in early August I moved my base of operations to McComb, a tough railroad town in the southwestern part of the state.

Bryant, a brusque, energetic man with a high-pitched voice and a warm handshake, was one of the stalwarts of the Movement. He ran a barbershop in front of his house in Baertown, a small black community the city fathers had deliberately zoned outside the town limits. He also operated a loading crane for the Illinois Central, whose tracks, along with the Gulf, Western & Ohio, cut right through the heart of McComb. On the west side of town were paved streets, a few blocks of retail stores, and the white suburbs, spread out under a canopy of shade trees and embroidered with flowers. On the east, Burgland, the all-black town with its shabby stores, ramshackle houses, and dirt roads. The general air of grinding poverty was broken by the occasional brick house of somebody who worked for the railroad.

Bryant took me in and introduced me to as many people as he could. “This is my friend, Bob Moses,” he’d say. “He’s here to help us, so I want you to help him.” Ernest Nobles, who ran the local laundry, said he’d keep me looking good; Aylene Quin promised food at her restaurant; Mama Cotton provided housing; and Webb Owens, “Supercool Daddy,” volunteered to go door-to-door with me to raise money for the Freedom School.

At first, children stopped playing hopscotch and huddled together as I walked by. “He’s a Freedom Rider,” they whispered. Their wary parents would pass me on the road without meeting my eyes, but I could feel their stares and questions jabbing into my back. Many were frightened; I meant nothing but trouble. I would tell them, “Get ready, the Movement is coming your way,” but that wasn’t anything they wanted to hear. One man stooped down behind the tomato plants in his garden to avoid me. Another time, a little girl came to the front door and said, “Mama say she not here.”

It was hard work, but a few listened. I would take out a registration form and ask, “Have you ever filled one of these out?” They would shake their heads and look uneasy. Voting was white folks’ business. “Would you like to sit down now and try?” I would encourage them to imagine themselves at the county courthouse in Magnolia actually answering the twenty-one questions, interpreting a section of the Mississippi Constitution, and stating in a paragraph the duties and obligations of citizenship. Whether they passed or not was at the discretion of the registrar, whose job was to see that they didn’t.

People listened and gave what they could—a nickle, a dime, a quarter—to support a handful of SNCC workers. Soon I was joined by John Hardy, Reggie Robinson, Travis Britt, and a few others who had been in jail in Jackson for taking part in the Freedom Rides. Also, several of the local students got involved. One in particular, Brenda Travis, always bright-eyed and brimming with questions, would sit on a family’s porch talking to them for hours if necessary until they were convinced of the need to register. Thanks to Curtis Bryant, who, in addition to being head of the local NAACP, a deacon in his church, a Sunday school teacher, and a scoutmaster, was also a high official in the Freemasons, we were able to set up a Freedom School in the Masonic Hall over the Burgland grocery store. Saint Paul’s Methodist Church, across the street, agreed to let us hold meetings there too.

One day in early August I was at the Freedom School preparing for class when a slim, serious-faced young man, who was about twenty, came in. He scrutinized me with wide-eyed intensity.

“Are you Martin Luther King?”

“No. I’m Bob Moses. Why did you think I was King?”

“I heard talk about some big secret thing goin’ on, so I come to see for myself.”

“Where are you from?”

“Summit.”

“What’s your name?”

“Hollis Watkins.”

“Are you in school?”

“No. But I got plans.”

“I’ve got plans too.”

I told him about the voter registration project, and even though I wasn’t Martin Luther King, he wanted to help. His friend Curtis Hayes would help too. They began to recruit. People related to them as the sons of local farmers who dressed and acted in down-home ways. I soon learned to scrap my suit and tie for boots, bib overalls, and a chambray shirt; the other SNCC workers did the same. Those of us from the North learned to slow down to the rhythms of the South.

The people flocked to our school. When we explained the power of the vote, they squirmed in their chairs and glanced at each other. One heavyset woman up front fanned herself harder every time I mentioned the word freedom. Within a few days we sent several students to the Pike County courthouse in Magnolia. When they learned that they had passed, we held a party that lasted long into the night. It seemed for the moment as if everything would be easy. Then the local paper, the Enterprise-Journal, ran an article on what we were trying to do. Whites became alarmed. The next day, the registrar rejected our students, and that evening one of them, in an incident apparently unrelated to voter registration, was shot at. As the news spread, I noted the panic in people’s eyes; they saw a connection. Fewer and fewer came to the Freedom School.

Meanwhile, farmers in nearby Amite and Walthall counties heard about SNCC and asked if we could help them, too. As dangerous as McComb was, the surrounding areas, with long histories of violence, were much worse. In Amite only one black was registered; in Walthall, none. If we had serious difficulties in McComb, what chance did we have in those places? But I knew that if we turned down the farmers, we would lose the trust and destroy the hope of the people. If we shied away from the toughest areas, everyone would know we could be intimidated, and the fragile project would fall apart. We decided that John Hardy should take on Walthall while I went into Amite, a name that meant “friendship” in French and “trouble” to me.

On Saturday evening Curtis Bryant drove me to the farm of E. W. Steptoe, a small man with prominent ears, a wide smile, a weather-beaten face, and as I was soon to learn, an indomitable spirit. A few other farmers were there. One was Herbert Lee, short, self-effacing, with a touch of gray in his hair. He had grown up down the road, married a girl from nearby St. Helena Parish, raised a large family, and made enough money planting cotton to buy some land, a house, and a car. Only men like Steptoe and Lee, with the self-sufficiency of the independent farmer, had the courage to stand up to the threat of white reprisals.

In the fifties, Steptoe had single-handedly started an NAACP chapter in Amite County. He bought a batch of membership cards and sold them to the local farmers for two dollars each until more than the necessary fifty signed up. When the sheriff found out, he and twenty men surrounded the meeting place, confiscated the secretary’s membership list, and frightened people so much that even Steptoe’s friends turned their backs on him.

“You’re goin’ too fast,” one said. “Why don’t you quit that mess?”

“Ah, we are one hundred years too slow now,” Steptoe replied.

“But you’re just gonna go get yourself killed.”

“I know my life is at stake,” he said. “I know they wants me dead. But if they kill me, I would hate to know nobody else was workin’ for the young peoples, for the unborn generation, but me.”

Steptoe made an immediate and lasting impression on me. Sometimes he spoke so slowly it seemed it would take him all day to finish one sentence, but I always felt sure it would be worth the wait. No one convinced me more that the common man knew through hard-earned experience truths that few politicians heeded.

“I spent years tryin’ to win the friendship of white folks,” Steptoe told me. “I drove them places and waited hours until they was finished; I swam in creeks to rescue their cattle; I chopped wood for an old widow woman. Anything folks wanted done, I done it. I didn’t ask for no money; all I wanted was thanks and appreciation. But folks just took advantage. The more I helped them, the more they hated me.

“These people here don’t have no conscience. The only thing they wants is to keep the Negro down. I come to the conclusion that it wasn’t no friendship that you could gain from the white people by tryin’ to do what they say, or tryin’ to obey their laws, and rules, or whatnot; one day I said, ‘Now, look, Steptoe, you must take a stand and try to gain the vote, that seems to be the importantest thing that you can do.’”

“Do you think these people will work with me?” I asked Steptoe. “Do you think they really want to register?”

“Oh, yes, they wants to redish. I know that they are very anxious to redish so they can vote.”

“Okay then, if you think we’ll be successful, I’ll come back tomorrow at ten o’clock and go to church with you.”

“Good. I’ll be expectin’ you.”

Sunday morning we drove down to a small church where several of Steptoe’s cousins were deacons. It was an old clapboard church with gingerbread trim and wooden benches for pews. The people clapped and A-mened and shouted “Yes, Jesus!” and “Praise the Lord!” to everything the preacher said. He got so pleased with himself he began to dance in place, the signal for everyone to stand up and dance and sing and make some glorious noise. After the service, Steptoe asked to speak; the preacher looked doubtful. Finally they let him make a plea for the voter registration school starting seven-thirty Monday morning at the Mount Pilgrim Church. I stood by the door and distributed leaflets as people left. Many had fear in their eyes, but still they reached out with eager hands.

The next morning we woke with the dawn and walked over to Mount Pilgrim, a tiny pine-board place that from the road probably looked like a chicken coop with a cross on the roof. I was filled with apprehension. What if nobody showed up? The appointed time came and went. Finally, around eight, the first car arrived, bringing five people. Then a few more cars, until the little church was filled. What a relief! They, too, were willing to take a stand.

I introduced myself, explained the purpose of the school, and for the rest of the morning, we worked on how to fill out the forms and answer questions about the state constitution. The class went well, I thought, but afterward Steptoe looked worried.

“What’s wrong?” I asked. “Didn’t you like the class?”

“It was lovely,” he said. “It ain’t that. Whilst you was teachin’, the sheriff was watchin’ from across the road. I saw him, but I didn’t say nothin’.”

“They would have been frightened.”

“That’s right. He was lookin’ at tags, people’s cars.”

“How did he know we were here?”

“Someone from church.”

“But they’re your friends.”

“There is always a Judas,” Steptoe said sadly.

The next day the people came back, and the day after that, until we decided that three—an old man from the Tangipahoa community, Ernest Isaac, and two middle-aged women, Bertie Lee Hughes and Matilda Schoby—were ready to register to vote.

3

Liberty, the county seat of Amite, was a back-road farming community of about six hundred. The tree-shaded town square was distinguished by a white-brick courthouse from the 1820s with four massive square columns in front supporting a double-tiered set of porches and a small-windowed octagonal cupola on its shingled roof. Whoever built the courthouse had big plans. But even though Liberty was the home of Borden’s Condensed Milk and Tichenor’s Antiseptic and had been important enough to merit a raid during the Civil War, the town clearly had not prospered. In spite of its name, Liberty was a stringent, oppressive place whose spirit was epitomized by a remark that Tichenor, a Civil War doctor, made about his famous antiseptic: “All you need for our boys,” he said, “but not one drop for the damn Yankees!”

Early the next morning, we set out for the courthouse. Mr. Isaac and the ladies were dressed in their Sunday best. The night before it had rained; misty haze hung over the House of Justice. A plaque on the front door proclaimed the town’s motto: Liberty . . . it works.

It almost didn’t work for us.

When we presented ourselves to the registrar, he looked up, stunned; then his face reddened.

“What do you want?” he demanded.

I stood aside, waiting for someone to speak, but all three were frozen with fear.

Finally, I broke the long silence.

“They would like to register.”

“Who the Sam Hill are you?”

“My name is Bob Moses.”

“Are you here to register too?”

“No. I am here to assist these people who would like to fill out registration forms.”

“Is that right? Well, you’ll have to wait.”

He nodded toward a bench on the far wall, gave a sickly grin to someone standing in the doorway, then turned his back on us.

All day we waited. The sheriff, his deputies, people coming for tax assessments or driver’s licenses, the whole town it seemed, gawked and gave us hate stares and muttered remarks. Not until late afternoon were the three, who hadn’t had anything to eat all day, allowed to fill out the forms. As they struggled with the questionnaire, a highway patrolman entered, leaned back in a chair, and watched them go through the whole painstaking process. They smiled with satisfaction when they finished, but weren’t surprised when the registrar, after a cursory glance at their answers, announced the results.

“None of you passed,” he said. “The law says you gotta wait at least six months if you want to try again.”

When we left the courthouse, the patrolman and one of the Liberty deputies followed. As we drove out of town, they pulled up close and tailed us down the road. Ernest Isaac’s hands shook so badly on the steering wheel he could barely keep the car under control.

“I knowed we shouldn’t oughta done this,” he said.

“Slow down to the side,” I said, “and let him pass.”

The patrol car sped by, but only to make a U-turn, and then another, in order to follow us again. For about ten miles we crept down the highway with his car nosing our bumper until he flicked on his flashers and pulled us over.

“Get out of your car and come here,” he ordered. Mr. Isaac gave me a forlorn look and did what he was told.

I walked over to provide moral support.

“What’s the trouble?”

“Go back to your car,” the patrolman said. “I’ll let you know if I need you.”

“I just want to know what the problem is.”

“You’re the problem, coming down here and stirring these people up.”

“I only want to know why you stopped us.”

“That’s none of your business. Now get back in your car.”

I took out a small pad and wrote down the information on their badges.

“What the hell do you think this is?” He threw open his door and grabbed me by the arm. “You’re interfering with what I’m doing here.”

He and the deputy manhandled me back to the car.

“Get in, nigger.” He pressed one hand down on my head and shoved. “Follow me.”

The justice of the peace held forth at his blacksmith shop on Highway 51 south of McComb. I was charged with interfering with an arrest.

“But I’m the only one you arrested,” I pointed out.

They exchanged perturbed glances, then conferred in a corner.

“We’re charging you with obstructing justice. Are you ready to stand trial?” the justice of the peace asked.

“Right now?”

“Yes.”

“Can I make a phone call?”

“I guess you can. Where to?”

“Washington.”

“Washington! Who the hell do you know in Washington?”

“John Doar, at the Civil Rights Division of the United States Department of Justice.”

“You want to call them over a little thing like this? Boy, we can’t afford to let you dial long distance.”

“I’m calling collect.”

“Collect!” the justice of the peace scoffed. “You can go right ahead and try.”

The call went through; their faces dropped.

“It’s a case of intimidation,” I told John Doar, “in clear violation of the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960.”

“Call the FBI collect,” Doar told me, “and tell them the story too.”

And so I did.

“Boy, you’ve sure got some friends,” the deputy said. “Too bad they’re all the way up there in Washington.”

The trial was swift; I was guilty as charged.

“The fine is fifty dollars plus five in court costs,” the justice of the peace said, “but I’ll suspend the fine and charge you only court costs if you’ll agree not to return to court for ninety days.”

“I’m not guilty. I won’t pay a penny.”

“Boy, are you sure you know what you’re about? You leave me no choice but to order that you be remanded to the Pike County Jail.”

I stayed in jail two days while all of McComb talked about the “New York Negro” who was too stubborn to pay five dollars in court costs. I would have stayed in jail longer, but without my knowledge, Jack Young, an attorney for the NAACP, came down from Jackson and paid my fine and I was free.

The next morning I resumed the citizenship school at Mount Pilgrim Church.

By the following Tuesday, five people were ready and willing to go to the courthouse. They returned all smiles. Nothing had happened. But later that day we received word that the whites of Liberty had held a secret meeting where they drew up a list of “uppity” blacks and vowed to kill me if I came to town.

4

The situation in Liberty was so tense, I didn’t press anyone at citizenship classes to volunteer. But about a week later Curtis Dawson, a dependable man whom Steptoe vouched for, and Reverend Alfred Knox, a powerfully built farmer and part-time preacher, said they were ready to register. If they had the courage, others would follow their example. Dawson picked me up at Steptoe’s, and we drove to the Liberty courthouse, where Preacher Knox was supposed to be waiting. We didn’t see him on the lawn, so we parked and looked around. We found him outside the post office, where he felt less conspicuous. We were walking back to the courthouse when suddenly three men strode across the street and blocked the sidewalk.

A big, burly man grabbed a fistful of my T-shirt and demanded, “Where do you think you’re goin’, nigger?”

“To the courthouse.”

“Like hell you are,” and he slugged me on the side of my head with the blunt end of a folded jackknife. Blood spurted from my scalp and ran down my face; I fell to my knees and threw up my hands to protect my skull.

“Leave him alone,” Alfred Knox cried, reaching out to help. “Let him be.”

“You stay out of this, uncle,” one of the other men warned.

He clobbered me again on the top of the head and my face slammed the sidewalk. For a moment I felt as if my soul had ascended and I were a disembodied spirit hovering above with a bird’s-eye view of my own beating. I watched what had been my body on the ground tuck up its legs and try to protect its groin. A man bent over the curled form, kicking and punching it until he was winded. Finally, he stepped back.

“Nigger,” he panted, “you’re leavin’ town.”

I watched the three men walk away.

Then I was back in my body, with a stabbing pain behind my eyes, while Alfred Knox pressed a large handkerchief to my head until the bleeding stopped.

“Come on,” he said, helping me to my feet, “you’ve had enough for one day.”

I stood as still as I could, waiting for the nausea to pass.

“No,” I said. “I want to see the sheriff.”

We crossed the courthouse lawn to the office of Sheriff E. L. Caston.

“I’ve been assaulted,” I said. “I want you to swear out a warrant.

“Do you know who?”

“It was Billy Jack,” Curtis Dawson volunteered.

“Billy Jack, you say?”

“Do you know him?” I asked.

“He’s my first cousin.” The sheriff put a hand up to his mouth to hide the smirk on his face. “If you want to waste your time filin’ a complaint, go see the county prosecutor. I can’t help you.”

“Can I use your phone?”

“Can’t help you there either. I’d advise you to get out of town and forget the whole thing.”

Dawson, Knox, and I left the sheriff’s office to the sound of snickers and a burst of laughter.

“What was so funny?” I asked as we stepped outside.

“You know those other two men?” Dawson explained. “One of them was Billy Jack’s brother, and the other was the sheriff’s son.”

“Nice.”

I found a phone booth across the street and asked the local operator to call the Justice Department; it seemed she couldn’t make the connection. There was nothing to do but return to Steptoe’s farm and lick my wounds. I wasn’t about to let the black people of Liberty and McComb see me covered with blood.

When he heard our car rattling up the dirt drive, Steptoe came out of the barn carrying a pail of milk. He took one look at me and grimaced.

“Bob, is that you?”

“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m not hurt that bad.”

Unconvinced, he patted my shoulder, gazing at me with troubled eyes.

Two of his daughters came out of the house, saw my blood-soaked shirt and started screaming. They ran to their father, clutching him and crying, “Do something! Do something!”

Steptoe helped me off with my shirt and wrung the blood out, which made the girls gasp and cry harder. Then he led me to the kitchen, washed me off with a wet cloth, found a change of clothes, and drove me to the office of the only black doctor in McComb, who stitched me up while Steptoe wiped my face with his handkerchief.

Early the next morning, Steptoe approached me as I was dressing and looked apprehensively at the three bandages on my scalp.

“Bob,” he asked with deep concern in his voice, “where are you goin’?”

“To Liberty.”

“Bob, you can’t go back there.”

“I have work to do,” I said. “There are people who are counting on me to help them register, and I need to see the county prosecutor.”

“The people will understand,” he said, “and the county prosecutor won’t help you.”

“It’s something I have to do.”

“Bob, listen to me. I know those people. Don’t go back there. They will be expectin’ you today. They will kill you up there today. Don’t go.”

“If I don’t go back,” I said, “I’m finished. They’ll figure they’ve won. The people want to register; they’re counting on my help.”

“I don’t want to see you dead.”

“Look, don’t worry. If anything happens to me, someone else will take my place.”

“I feel like you’re one of my own kids,” Steptoe said with tears in his eyes and his voice choking. “You’re just that close to me.”

“I know,” I said, putting my arms around him. “I’ll be back.”

In Liberty I told the county prosecutor I wanted to swear out a complaint against Billy Jack Caston for criminal assault. He looked at me as if my brains were oozing out from under my bandages. Then he explained that no Negro had ever done anything like that around there and that all I would probably accomplish would be to get myself killed, but he agreed to file a complaint and call the justice of the peace.

N. T. Bellue, a tottering, toothless old gent with watery eyes, showed up an hour later. When I told him I had filed assault and battery charges against Billy Jack Caston, his tobaccoless pipe nearly fell out of his mouth.

“I want a trial,” I said. “I’ve got witnesses.”

“You’ll get one,” he grumbled, tapping his cane for emphasis, “as soon as I eat my lunch.”

Two hours later I brought Curtis Dawson and Alfred Knox into Liberty. Pickup trucks lined the town square; an angry crowd milled around on the courthouse lawn; the second-floor courtroom was packed with men brandishing shotguns to ensure that the niceties of southern justice were observed.

“Oooah, I never see so many peoples,” Alfred Knox exclaimed. “This ain’t good. This ain’t a good sign at all.”

Dawson, Knox, and I were kept in a back room and brought out one by one to tell our story to the six-man jury. By pressing my ear to the wall, I caught a part of Billy Jack’s version: “We was just walkin’ along when this brash nigger bumped me off the sidewalk. When I told him to watch where he was goin’ he jumped into one of them Jap fightin’ stances and forced me to defend myself.”

While we waited for the verdict, some shots were fired outside.

“If I was you, I wouldn’t stick around,” the sheriff said. “Billy Jack is pretty well liked around here. Y’all better follow me out the back way.”

The sheriff took us to our car and escorted us to the Amite County line. The next day the McComb paper read:

Court Acquits White Man On Negro Beating Charge.

“There’s no turning back,” I told a rally at the McComb Masonic Hall that evening. “We have to keep going down to the courthouse until we get our rights.”