Parting the Waters (126 page)

Mississippi authorities attacked the registration project more actively by shutting off distribution of federal food surpluses in two Delta counties. COFO workers, confronted with a famine in the heart of their registration area, sent out nationwide appeals for emergency relief. At first only restricted circles responded—Freedom Ride veterans, members of civil rights groups, students who drove South with carloads of donated canned goods—but the project grew over a bitter winter as grim facts reinforced Mississippi's unsavory reputation. The cutoff affected Sunflower County, home of Senator James Eastland, and adjacent LeFlore County, where Emmett Till had been lynched and where the White Citizens Councils of Mississippi had their headquarters. In LeFlore County, the cutoff stopped food relief to some 22,000 people—nearly half the county population, mostly Negroes, fully a third of whom had an annual income of less than $500. At SNCC's first major fund-raiser, on February 1, the relief appeal dominated a Carnegie Hall evening headlined by Harry Belafonte and the Albany Freedom Singers. A few days later, in Chicago, comedian Dick Gregory announced that the stories had moved him to pay for a charter plane that took seven tons of food into Mississippi.

More than six thousand sharecroppers stood in line outside the Wesley Chapel in Greenwood, hoping for some of the supplies. A smattering of American Indians among the Negroes bore witness to the Delta's lingering Indian heritage. (LeFlore County and its principal town, Greenwood, were named for the last high chief of the Choctaw nation, Greenwood LeFlore.) Even after some thirty tons came in by plane and truck, there were enough cheese and blankets only for about a seventh of those in line, more than 90 percent of them illiterate. As the Negroes least likely to take or pass the registration test, these destitute sharecroppers seemed a poor choice of clientele to the COFO registration workers. But the registration campaign was moribund anyway, with only fifty Negroes having taken the test in the preceding eight months, and sharecroppers had begun to trickle into the nighttime registration meetings. By Delta standards it was a great event when seventy-five of them showed up on February 11 to hear James Bevel. He sang freedom songs, then preached on the connection between the voter registration effort and the cutoff of food. “Don't let the white man do your children as he has done you,” he pleaded.

The next day, far away in the White House, the sufferings of the Mississippi sharecroppers intruded upon the ceremonies at the Lincoln's Birthday reception. Members of the Civil Rights Commission took advantage of their private moment with President Kennedy to say that they felt an urgent duty to investigate racial conditions in Mississippi. Chairman John Hannah said he was embarrassed that never in its five-year history had the commission held hearings in the one state that, more than any other, cried out for the commissioners to fulfill their purpose of fact-gathering and public education. Hannah knew he was raising a sensitive topic, as the Justice Department had lobbied to keep the commission
out
of Mississippi. Kennedy told him that he thought hearings in Mississippi would serve no purpose and might ruin what little chance the Justice Department had for success in its county-by-county litigation.

Private contentions over Mississippi reached Wiley Branton by a different route. Having sent some of his Voter Education Project grant money into the COFO registration projects, Branton was shocked when Bob Moses listed in his official reports numerous purchases of food and clothing made with VEP money. Branton demanded to know the meaning of this blatant violation of VEP rules. Any half-intelligent IRS auditor could look at those reports and know that the VEP had gone beyond its stated, tax-exempt purpose, he sternly told Moses.

“I know, Wiley,” Moses replied. “But what can you do when you're faced with all those people standing in line?”

His description of the relief lines first drew the reproach out of Branton, then turned him around. “All right, but don't document it!” he told Moses. “Don't put it in the reports.” Branton had second thoughts as soon as he put down the phone. He knew he was partial to the Mississippi project. The students were a refreshing contrast to projects elsewhere, in which adult leaders often haggled over the portion of grant money they could keep for expenses, and Branton's harrowing experiences at COFO's founding meeting the previous August had given him a firsthand appreciation of the ceaseless threats hanging over the Mississippi registration workers. Still, he was a stickler by nature, and had not come as far as he had in the treacherous field of Negro law by giving in easily to sentiment. The strategic side of his brain told him that Roy Wilkins was correct—that the marginal voter registration dollar was wasted in Mississippi. Branton realized that he must either put a lot more money into Mississippi or none at all. He sent his VEP field director, Randolph Blackwell, to investigate.

Greenwood erupted before Blackwell could get there. Early on February 20, an anonymous caller told a SNCC volunteer that she would not be working in Greenwood anymore, because the office “has been taken care of.” She rushed downtown to find four Negro businesses near the SNCC office being destroyed by fire. Although the SNCC office escaped damage, many local Negroes believed that the fire was a bungled arson attempt against the registration campaign or the relief project, and when Sam Block said as much to a small public gathering two days later, Greenwood police arrested him for “statements calculated to breach the peace.”

As the one SNCC student who had lived continuously in Greenwood during the nine months of the registration project, Block had acquired a local reputation as a stubborn, lonely figure among the strange new breed of devout daredevils. He had handed out food to six hundred people on the day of the fire. For months he had accompanied the few would-be registrants to the courthouse, and for that he bore the brunt of official retaliations. His seventh arrest in Greenwood was a compelling topic of conversation while he stayed in jail over the weekend. Some people had been won over by his sheer persistence, others by his performances in the tiny mass meetings, where he led call-and-response spirituals in a distinctively jaunty tenor, marked by a hint of calypso syncopation. Something about his latest arrest caused an unprecedented phenomenon on Monday: more than a hundred Greenwood Negroes crowded into the police court for Sam Block's trial.

After finding him guilty, the judge offered to suspend sentence if the defendant agreed to stop working for the SNCC office, give up the voter registration project, and leave town. “Judge,” Block replied, “I ain't gonna do none of that.” A murmur of awe passed through the crowd as Block accepted a sentence of six months plus a $500 fine, and that night a record 250 people jammed into the Greenwood mass meeting. Bob Moses held up both Block's cheerful suffering and the relief food campaign as inspirations for those who wanted to be free. And the minimum requirement for being free, he added, was to be able to vote.

Events and emotions had rolled over each other and swelled, with the result that Moses counted more than fifty of Greenwood's poorest Negroes lined up outside the registrar's office early in the morning. Another 150 joined them before the close of business. By delay and avoidance, the registrar managed to test only a handful, and most of these eventually would learn that they had been rejected, but nearly all of them held their ground even when the police told them to go home. Such assertiveness by Mississippi Negroes had been extinguished from reality, and largely from the imagination, for nearly a hundred years. The wonder of it moved Moses to write a letter to Chicago supporters the next day, February 27. “We don't know this plateau at all…” he confided. “We were relieved at the absence of immediate violence at the courthouse, but who knows what's to come next.”

It was then that the VEP's Randolph Blackwell arrived to investigate registration prospects in the Delta. On the night of February 28, he held a council in the Greenwood SNCC office. Although Blackwell was something of a dandy—a sociology professor in his mid-thirties, an author of textbooks on economics and business whom Branton had hired on the strength of his commanding personality and his spare degree in law—his formalities failed to deter the excited, grant-hungry registration workers, and their passion flushed out the daring conspirator in him. County by county, they discussed the needs of the associated projects deep into the night, until Jimmy Travis interrupted to warn that three white men were staking out the office from a Buick with no license plates.

The response had become almost a drill. Moses announced that they had best break up the meeting so as not to be too concentrated a target. Then they scattered toward their home counties, with Blackwell accompanying Moses to his lodgings some forty miles away across Sunflower County. Travis, a twenty-year-old SNCC volunteer who was serving as a driver for Blackwell, had learned a great deal about traveling the Mississippi roads at night. With Blackwell and Moses beside him, he followed James Bevel's car slowly out of town, watching closely for ambushes or police. Seeing the suspicious Buick in his rearview mirror, Travis first stopped at a gasoline station in hopes that it would pass by. When instead the car simply waited across the street for him to fill up, Travis turned off his headlights and pulled out a rear exit from the station into dark, unlit side streets. A few minutes' evasive driving lost both the Buick and Bevel, who turned off toward his temporary quarters in Shaw.

Travis made his way back to Highway 82, toward Sunflower County, and felt somewhat relieved until the Buick suddenly reappeared, headed in the opposite direction, and executed a sharp U-turn to fall in behind them again. Then Travis faced a breathless choice: he could try to outrun the Buick, slow down in the slim hope it would pass, or stop to confront the three men. He chose the middle course. The two cars moved in tandem until, some seven miles outside Greenwood, the Buick finally made a move to pass. Stabs of hope and fear were battling inside Travis and his two passengers when their car windows exploded.

“I'm hit!” cried Travis. Letting go of the steering wheel, he slumped over into Moses' lap. The car swerved off the highway.

“Hit the brakes!” yelled Blackwell. “Hit the brakes!” Moses grabbed the steering wheel with one hand, held Travis with the other, and groped with his foot for the brake.

The Buick was gone by the time Moses brought the car to a stop. The terrifying din of gunfire and squealing tires gave way to the crunch of broken glass as they squirmed to check themselves for wounds. The windshield and all the windows lay shattered in thousands of pieces. Travis had been shot twice, once in the shoulder and once in the back of his neck. When they had laid him gingerly across the backseat, Moses drove the open-air car in search of a hospital that would treat an injured pariah Negro. Two days later, in Jackson, doctors removed a .45-caliber bullet from Travis' neck.

 

The shooting of Jimmy Travis touched off a chain reaction. The SNCC staff voted to converge on Greenwood so as to prove that terror could not dislodge the registration project. They also decided that the miraculous new courage of illiterate Negroes cried out for citizenship classes. An appeal to Bernice Robinson, Septima Clark's original teaching partner at Highlander, brought her into Mississippi. Although Andrew Young rejected as suicidal a proposal to establish another SCLC citizenship training center in Mississippi,
*
he did agree to allow Annell Ponder, a newly trained assistant to Septima Clark at Dorchester, to take up residence in Greenwood. She arrived within a week of the shooting, just as Negro churches in the Delta first opened their doors to registration classes, and James Bevel soon went to Dorchester with the first busload of Greenwood citizens who, having learned basic reading in a week, signed up for a week of “advanced” teacher training.

Greenwood burst upon the front pages of Negro newspapers across the country, and
The New York Times
published excerpts from Wiley Branton's telegram to President Kennedy. “This can no longer be tolerated,” Branton declared. “We are accordingly today announcing a concentrated, saturation campaign to register every qualified Negro in LeFlore County.” Branton also sent appeals to Attorney General Kennedy and to John Hannah of the Civil Rights Commission, touching sore points within the government. Hannah risked an open feud with Robert Kennedy by hastening preparation of a Mississippi report. Kennedy sent lawyers into Greenwood to investigate the local suspension of food relief, which he considered the immediate cause of the flare-up.

News from Greenwood echoed not only through the Kennedy Administration but also through the growing civil rights subculture. From the New York coffeehouses, folk singer Pete Seeger soon took Bob Dylan on his first pilgrimage to the South. By then, Birmingham and a hundred other cities would have erupted in demonstrations, but Dylan appeared only before a small Negro crowd in Greenwood, singing his “Blowin' in the Wind.” This song, as recorded by Peter, Paul and Mary, had just displaced puppy love atop the pop charts.

From the beginning, the white authorities of LeFlore County denounced the outside attention. Under pressure from the FBI, they arrested three well-known whites for shooting Travis, but they postponed trial indefinitely in the face of vociferous local support for the vigilantes. Officials remained steadfastly hostile to the registration project. With Negroes outnumbering whites three to two, anything approaching fair registration raised at least the threat of a Negro “swing” vote, and possibly even the Reconstruction specter of Negro political control. A white voter explained his gut appraisal to reporters: “We killed two-month-old Indian babies to take this country, and now they want us to give it away to the niggers.”