Freedom's Children (18 page)

I instantly knew who he was talking about, Schwerner and Chaney. Mr. Jim said, “What boys you talking about?”

The white man said, “You know damn well what boys I'm talking about. If you all leave them alone, we'll help you all.” Meaning we should stay away from the civil rights people.

I didn't know who that white man was, but some of the cars were very familiar. There was a pickup truck, and there were only two in this area. There was a white ‘63 Ford Galaxy, and there wasn't but two of those in this area. One of the guys had a limp, and I didn't know but one guy who had a limp like that.

Then we heard a shot on the other end, and they let us go on home. But during that time we didn't sleep in the bed. We slept under the bed. The very next day Mr. Bud Cole came over, and we learned about the church burning down. He was beaten so badly, they wanted to take him to the hospital.

Later on that day we went on over to the church. It was in rubble. I had a fear for Michael Schwerner and James Chaney. And also for myself, and more for my father. About spring of 1964 it had gotten dangerous for my family. We received threats in the mail. My father was harassed. They threatened his life and threatened to burn his house. Later on some of them even said he should have died when Michael Schwerner, Jim Chaney, and Andrew Goodman did.

My father didn't want Schwerner and Chaney to come back because of the danger. When they drove up, it was just like a bad dream. They came to the house that Sunday about two P.M. It was after dinner. My father told them that they shouldn't have come. He said, “It's too dangerous. You need to spend the night. Either that, or let me and my brothers ride with you, and we'll get our guns.”

Michael Schwerner said no to the guns ‘cause the movement wasn't about violence of any type. He also couldn't spend the night because he said he had to be back in Meridian. They were having a meeting that evening. I remember even the way they were dressed, where they sat at the table.

The next morning, Monday morning, we were getting ready for breakfast, and the radio station asked anybody who knew the whereabouts of Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman to get in touch with the COFO office in Meridian. I knew and everybody else in the house knew that something real bad had happened to them. The possibility of them being dead was actual fact.

Everything went into a turmoil. My cousins, my uncles, and different people from other black neighborhoods were all in the bushes. They were armed and ready. My uncle and cousins, they don't believe in just giving your life. They believed in protecting themselves. Cars were coming by. Mailboxes and crosses were being burned. The kids were under the beds.

 

I remember when the FBI came. I remember this inspector taking me to the church and talking to me. I was telling him he had to find these people who had done this. He said, “Why do you think they did it?” I said, “They threatened to kill my father, so I know they killed them.”

 

People were just combing the woods looking for the bodies—the Navy, the National Guard, aircraft flying over, helicopters landing and picking back up again. There was no way you could turn around anywhere.

Just before they found those bodies, it rained, lightning, electrical storms for weeks and weeks, night and day. My mama said, “It's the Lord. That's those boys' blood crying.” And shortly after that, they were found.

When I was born, my parents were sharecroppers. We moved to Itta Bena when I was eight or nine years old. My parents owned a small grocery store there. Itta Bena was almost literally divided by the railroad track. My neighborhood, of course, was not mixed. It was an all-black community, and I went to an all-black school. In my neighborhood everybody was poor, really poor.

I left Itta Bena when I was about thirteen and went to live with an older sister in Wisconsin. I came back to Mississippi the last semester of my senior year in high school. It was the winter of 1963, and I was seventeen.

When I got back, I saw all this activity going on. A friend of mine invited me to come to a mass meeting with her. I was absolutely amazed that there were these young black men and women, not much older than I, who were talking about civil rights and the right to vote. They were saying they needed everybody to get involved.

I connected immediately. I knew that was what I needed to do right then. My parents didn't give me a lot of support, but they didn't really try too hard to discourage me.

There were mass meetings at the area churches in Itta Bena and Greenwood. And there were lots of young people walking the streets from house to house, canvassing, trying to get people to understand how important it was to vote. They were saying that if we organized and we acted as a group, then maybe we could change some things. I didn't like the way things were. I didn't like living in an inadequate house. I didn't like not having money to buy clothes. So I became a full-time SNCC worker. When I got out of high school that June [1963], I moved to Greenwood and I started working out of the SNCC office. I remember the salary well. After taxes, $9.64 a week.

The main objective was voter registration, so that's what I did. First, I would introduce myself. I would tell them that I was from Itta Bena to let them know that I was not from out-of-state. Nobody could claim that we were “outside agitators,” as they liked to call us. Then I would tell them, “I'm scared too, but I think that this is something that's important enough to risk even going to jail.”

During that summer of 1963 I met Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer. She lived in Ruleville, not that far from Greenwood, and she was very active. She would often come over to the SNCC office and attend mass meetings. We got to be really good friends. She'd always ask me if I'd called my mother lately, or when was the last time I'd been home.

 

When you heard Martin Luther King speak, you had to stop what you were doing and listen. It was the same way with her. She was that powerful. She did not have much formal education, but she was willing to be a spokesperson. It didn't bother her if she spoke to the president, or to the Senate, or whatever. She was a very caring and giving person. I don't know why certain people are chosen to do certain things. She always said that she wasn't anything special, that it was God working through her to do whatever it was to be done.

I went with Mrs. Hamer to South Carolina to a citizenship school. They taught you how to go out into your community and organize. Eight or ten of us went on a bus from Greenwood.

We stayed in South Carolina about a week. On the way back, every time there was a rest stop, we would get off to use the white side of the bus terminal. We knew what we were doing. Nothing had happened on the way down, and on the way back, we did the same thing. At Columbus, Mississippi, we used the white side of the bus station. The next stop was in Winona, and I think they must have been warned because the patrolmen were there waiting for us. They would not let us into the white side of the bus station.

As we were leaving, Annell Ponder, who was in our group, got out a pad and pencil. I was standing there with her, and she took down the license number of the patrol car that was parked out front. That's when they threw seven of us into a car and took us to jail.

They questioned us all night. After they had talked to us as a group, they put us two people per cell. I shared a cell with Mrs. Hamer. Then they took us out one at a time. I looked very young. I was seventeen, but I looked like I was about fourteen or fifteen years old. They really beat Annell Ponder very badly. They were trying to force her to say “Yessir” to them, and she never would. There was another young girl with us, June Johnson, who was about fifteen, but June was very tall for her age, and she was badly beaten. Then they got around to Mrs. Hamer. There were two black trustees. The police gave them whiskey and got them drunk and made them do the beating.

When they got to me, they took me into this cell with the two trustees. They made me lie facedown on a cot, and they were just about to start beating on me when the jailer came in and said, “Don't hit her!” By that time the bus we had been on had made it back to Greenwood. I guess phone calls were coming in from all over, wondering what they were doing with us. So then they were afraid to do any more.

I remember sitting up the rest of the night with Mrs. Hamer. She had put her hands back to try to keep some of the straps from hitting her head. And so her hands were all black-and-blue and swollen. She got really sick during the night and developed a fever. I put cold towels on her forehead, trying to get the fever down. She was really sick, and we were all so upset. Nobody got any sleep. So you know what we did? We sang freedom songs all through the night.

We were in jail about four days.

I remember after that, I really wasn't frightened. I was just more determined than ever that some changes had to be made. I know I never thought once that we were going down in history books, or making history. I just knew that I could do my little bit.

 

I think being involved was probably the most important thing I've ever done in my whole life. It taught me first of all that black people could come together, and we could organize, and we could make some things happen for ourselves and for other people as well. I knew that was where I was supposed to be, and it was just so right. I wouldn't trade it for anything in the world, even though we lost some people along the way. We risked our own lives, but we made it through, and we did make a difference.

There's a lot more that needs to be done, and I would like for my children to get involved. When I tell them about some of the things I went through, they cannot conceive of it. I could not walk into a McDonald‘s, something as simple as that, and order a burger. That's the way things were. And they weren't that way because that's just the way they were. They were deliberately planned that way.

I think I understood very early that one way to make change was by getting people registered to vote. So in 1963, when I was in high school, I spent time canvassing in Holly Springs with a fellow named Michael.

We went to the homes of teachers when we were canvassing. We found they were oftentimes the reluctant ones because they knew that if they took the risk, the local school board would fire them. The teachers were also concerned about my getting involved with these “outside troublemakers” coming in to upset the status quo.

To some extent I was very sensitive to that point. I understood that others shouldn't come in and say, “I have all the answers.” We should work together to do what we have to do. It was about local people themselves doing for themselves.

In my town and a lot of Mississippi towns, black people and white people did not socially interact. Yet we were interacting with the SNCC workers, and of course the SNCC workers were interacting with other local people. While I didn't have any problem going to a café, or riding in a car with a white person, I was conscious of what I was doing. I knew it was not safe, but I knew it was something that had to be done.

I think that I was afraid a lot of times. What's amazing is that when you are afraid, you can deal with your fear if you don't allow it to cripple you. You deal with it by keeping doing things. Once you commit yourself to something, even as a child, and you think it's right, then it's much easier to deal with the fear.

Mississippi was probably one of the toughest states in the South at that point. I think it was different from Alabama and Georgia and Louisiana. There's no question there are some tough spots in southwest Georgia and all over the country, of course. But the bottom line was that Mississippi was toughest, at least from 1955 and the Emmett Till murder on.

We knew about blacks disappearing and being murdered. We heard about the shooting of Medgar Evers in June of ‘63. I knew he was the NAACP field secretary. At that point he was probably the major leader in Mississippi. I was shocked, but again that told us what the potential was for violence, and how you had to be ready for psychopaths when you took the system on.

As the news first came through that three civil rights workers had disappeared, I think everybody who had been a part of the movement knew that when you disappear in Mississippi, you're dead. The thing that shocked me was that they were crazy enough to kill two white people. Now that sounds strange, but even at that age we knew that black people were being killed all the time. And with the national press on the scene, we didn't quite understand why they had taken the risk to kill two whites.

I was seventeen. I had been in Memphis a number of times and to St. Louis, but I had never been north. I was excited about being there. It was an election year, so it was a big period.

I heard Fannie Lou Hamer in Atlantic City, and earlier in Greenwood at a church meeting. One of her favorite expressions was, “I'm sick and tired of being sick and tired!” She was talking about the need for people to stand up and have courage, register to vote. She was a powerful speaker, a woman who came from the soil. She was not trained in terms of education, but just wise and courageous. Oh, a powerful woman! I felt proud particularly because she came out of Mississippi and out of the Delta.