Parting the Waters (127 page)

Greenwood politicians, while accommodating the white vigilantes who kept them in office, also tried to project an image of sovereign control. Their dissimulations toward this impossible goal reached the level of blatant contortion, of a kind that would be seen from afar as the trademark of ignorant Southern racists. When night riders fired a shotgun into a car occupied by Sam Block and Willie Peacock on March 6, Mayor Charles Sampson of Greenwood condemned both the shooting and the Negroes in the only way he could: he suggested that SNCC must have shot at its own workers to stimulate more publicity. He maintained this double-jointed conspiracy theory as the violence escalated through March. Arsonists destroyed the Greenwood SNCC office on March 24.
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Two nights later, attackers fired a shotgun at Dewey Greene, Sr., just as he was entering his home.

A sturdy, middle-aged paperhanger, Greene was a volunteer in the daily registration lines, and his son had applied to succeed James Meredith as the second Negro student at Ole Miss. Feelings for him ran so deep among Greenwood Negroes that a large crowd gathered outside Wesley Chapel early the next morning. “We sang and we sang and we sang,” Moses recalled. Finally, they all gathered in a huge circle to sing “We Shall Overcome,” and then Moses addressed them. “We are not stopping now,” he said. “We had a mass meeting last night and it was packed.” For the quiet-spoken Moses, this was tantamount to a tirade. He told the crowd that since they were all there anyway, they might as well honor Dewey Greene by walking as a group to see the county registrar down at the courthouse. Some 150 people fell in behind him.

Before they could leave, James Forman intervened to suggest that first they march to city hall to protest the absence of basic police protections. The crowd cheered Forman's idea too, which precipitated a brief leadership huddle. Moses saw Forman's protest march as a diversion from the singleminded business of registration, as well as a provocation that Greenwood's white authorities would not fail to meet. Forman replied that the people must be allowed an outlet for their grievances over the violence. Under pressure of the hundreds of moving feet, Moses and Forman engineered a hasty compromise: they would walk by city hall on the way to the county courthouse. Rumor raced ahead of them, so that when the column approached city hall, Mayor Sampson and a dozen policemen came outside to square off against them. One of the policemen held a German shepherd on a taut leash. Mayor Sampson shouted out to the crowd that they must go home at once. “If you don't,” he said, “we are going to turn the dog loose.”

When Moses called out that he wanted to talk with the police chief, there was no reply except an order to move forward in a line. As the policemen surged into the crowd of marchers, the German shepherd snapped and tore at Moses' pants leg, ripping it to the thigh. The dog next seized the leg of a marcher named Matthew Hughes, tearing the flesh badly enough that Hughes had to be hospitalized. By then, the crowd was retreating in bedlam. One woman later remembered that a policeman kept shouting “Kennedy is your God!” The leaders shouted out that they must not run, that they must go about their business at the courthouse.

Moses helped turn the retreat back to Wesley Chapel. Singing broke out again. As mass relief bathed their determination, the SNCC staff leaders began helping people into cars for a less vulnerable trip down to the registrar's line at the courthouse. But the police, who had followed the retreat all the way to the church, countered this move by wading into the crowd to arrest Moses and seven others whom they recognized as workers in the Delta registration project. Soon they were all reunited in cells of the Greenwood city jail, where Forman talked excitedly about having smuggled a roll of film to one of his confederates. The whole world would see that snarling police dog, he said.

Word of the morning police attack flew so fast on the phone wires that Claude Sitton of
The New York Times
rushed into the state in time to file from Greenwood that same day. Other national reporters joined him on the hunch that the story promised something big. Their instincts were rewarded the next day when the police—reinforced by more dogs and by nearly a hundred lawmen from surrounding counties—confronted a line of forty-two Negroes as they marched back to Wesley Chapel from the courthouse. As white bystanders shouted “Sic 'em! Sic 'em!” a dog bounded into the column in full view of a half-dozen photographers and bit the pastor of the Wesley Chapel, drawing blood. Some of the marchers carried him away while others scattered in terror. Officers confiscated the film of a CBS cameraman and otherwise menaced the astonished assembly of reporters, who soon cornered Mayor Sampson to ask why the police had attacked unarmed Negroes who were on their way home. “They had a report up there that them niggers was going to the Alice Café for a sit-in,” the mayor replied. It seemed more likely that the Greenwood police, having called in their colleagues as reserves against an enormous threat of insurrection, simply could not allow the quiet insult of a registration attempt to go unpunished.

By morning Greenwood was a crossover news flash, playing that Friday on the front pages of both white and Negro newspapers. The Chicago
Defender
rolled out a Pearl Harbor typeface for a two-tier proclamation:
DOGS AGAIN ROUT VOTERS IN MISS. CITY, BITE PASTOR
. Somewhat more restrained, the front-page headline in
The New York Times
read “Police Loose a Dog on Negroes' Group, Minister Is Bitten,” but the
Times
also published a photograph of the Greenwood policemen charging behind their dog. Worse, from the standpoint of the Kennedy Administration, the picture of the dog ran just below a shot of the entire Republican leadership in Congress, assembled to promote their own new package of strong civil rights legislation. Senator Jacob Javits of New York said the Republicans no longer could wait for leadership from President Kennedy.

For Burke Marshall at the Justice Department, March 29 was a miserable Friday. President Kennedy already had asked what could be done about the dogs in Mississippi. Marshall bargained ceaselessly for a truce. He threatened to bring suit for a federal injunction ordering Greenwood officials to respect the basic constitutional protections due the would-be voters, but his leverage was reduced because he was running a bluff. Marshall knew the suit would not succeed, at least initially, because it would go before a federal judge in Mississippi whom Marshall already had described to Robert Kennedy as an unscrupulous segregationist. And even if the suit could be won, Marshall and Kennedy did not want responsibility for effecting a revolution in race relations with military or police power. This was their political lesson from the Freedom Rides and Ole Miss. It was one reason they had reacted so icily to the Moses lawsuit asking them to do just that.

Marshall was hit by a simultaneous rearguard action from the Civil Rights Commission, whose members sent word that they must issue an immediate statement on Mississippi. The six commissioners were incensed that their silent submission to the Administration had stretched into a shameful record of complicity. It was all Marshall could do to extract a promise that the commissioners would do nothing publicly without giving the President another chance to meet with them in the White House. “At least four members are very doubtful, however, for the long pull,” he wrote Robert Kennedy that night, “and we may at some point have to face resignations from [John] Hannah, [Theodore] Hesburgh, [Erwin] Griswold, and [Robert] Storey.”

Civil rights leaders poured into Greenwood all weekend—Medgar Evers of the NAACP, James Farmer and David Dennis of CORE, Charles McDew of SNCC. Wiley Branton flew in from Atlanta to represent Moses, Forman, and six other SNCC registration workers at their trial that Friday. When all eight were quickly convicted of disorderly conduct and given the maximum sentence of four months, Branton announced to the court that his clients elected to serve the time rather than appeal. By their continued presence in jail, the eight prisoners maintained a focal point for pressure on the federal government to bring elemental justice to Greenwood. Moses felt the buzz reaching into his jail cell, and the potential of all this clashing power moved him begrudgingly toward the view that the federal government responded more readily to discomfort than to cooperation, law, or logic.

On Tuesday, April 2, comedian Dick Gregory joined the fifth consecutive business day of registration marches in Greenwood. “I can't tell you how heartbroken I was last week as I sat in New York City and read the reports coming out of Greenwood,” he told a pre-march mass meeting in Wesley Chapel. “If Russia aggravated West Berlin half as much as you was aggravated last week,” he joked, “we would be there.” Three times that day he walked to the courthouse, only to be forcibly driven away by police. As the first nationally known celebrity to march in Greenwood, he turned each confrontation into a performance with commentaries so daring as to be touched by madness or sublime inspiration. “There's your story!” he shouted to the national reporters. “Guns and sticks for old women who want to register!” He waved his hands toward the motley squad of police who were pushing the Negroes away from the courthouse. “Look at them,” he said loudly. “A bunch of illiterate whites who couldn't even pass the test themselves.” Later, when Mayor Sampson was holding forth gravely on the character deficiencies that made the Negroes unqualified to vote, Gregory pushed through the reporters on the sidewalk. “Well, now, Mr. Mayor,” he interrupted with a beaming smile. “You really took your nigger pills last night, didn't you?” His utter lack of inhibition amazed the LeFlore County Negroes, as did the passive response of the white officials. Such effrontery was unheard of—no local Negro could get away with it—but Gregory's star quality seemed to make him untouchable. He drew thunderous applause that night for a short speech of earnest passion laced with humor. “We will march through your dogs!” he cried. “And if you get some elephants, we'll march through them. And bring on your tigers and we'll march through them!”

Three days of Gregory publicity pushed the Justice Department forward. John Doar visited Moses and the other prisoners the next morning, on their eighth day in the Greenwood jail. He announced that they must look their best the next day for a hearing in the courtroom of federal judge Claude Clayton. Doar was about to ask for an injunction ordering Greenwood officials to do three things: (1) vacate the convictions of the eight SNCC leaders as illegal interferences with the right to vote; (2) cease harassing or intimidating Negro citizens wishing to register; and (3) provide fair and adequate police protection at the courthouse registration office. Failure to obey such an order inevitably would bring in the U.S. marshals, and Doar expressed confidence that he could win in a higher court, though not from Judge Clayton.

This was Wednesday, April 3, when nervous volunteers were moving off for the first sit-ins at Birmingham's lunch counters. In Greenwood, the fire department tried to help the police quell that day's registration march by putting a fire truck across the route to the courthouse. Fear of being injured by high-powered fire hoses paralyzed the march line until James Bevel walked boldly to the fire chief and said, “There's a fire going on inside of us, baby, but you can't put it out.” In New York, a large photograph of Dick Gregory appeared on the front page of the morning
Times
, his arms twisted behind his back by Greenwood policemen. In Washington, the Greenwood story surfaced at President Kennedy's press conference. Asked whether the Justice Department could do more for the voter registration drive, Kennedy replied that the department already had filed a new voting rights suit in Greenwood “that's due for a hearing very shortly—perhaps this week.” He said he hoped Doar's action would show that “there has been a denial of rights, which seems to me evident, but which the court must decide.”

There was euphoria among the new U.S. clients inside the Greenwood jail. Having been briefed by Doar in the morning, they learned that President Kennedy himself specifically endorsed their case on national television later that day. That evening, U.S. marshals came to take them away from state authorities, which seemed another step toward victory until the marshals proceeded to manacle and chain them together at the waist. Although they were merely being transferred to federal custody for the next day's hearing, this treatment seemed excessively harsh for the government's allies. Several of the manacled students made sarcastic comments about how their protectors were playing to the sympathies of the Greenwood segregationists. As always, Forman's reaction was at once less subtle and more subtle than the others. While furiously demanding to speak with the sheriff or the senior marshal, he also conspired to get a publicity photograph taken of the SNCC prisoners in the “federal chains.” Moses and several of the other students could only shake their heads in amusement at Forman as the irrepressibly scheming, imperious victim. Forman also demanded to see the sheriff about their many legitimate grievances—medical treatment, the lack of towels, and the quality of prison food. “There is no justification for not feeding prisoners a balanced diet,” he said.

The ironic twists of jailhouse politics were trivial to Moses, who, after nearly two solid years under the heel of Mississippi, finally glimpsed an opening in the larger paradox: how Negroes could obtain freedom without power and power without freedom. By the next morning, before the hearing, Moses had shed his usual reticence to rejoice out loud in his cell. He was “in rare form, standing behind the bars, singing alone,” said Forman. Urged on by the regular prisoners, Moses began a chant: “Do you want your freedom? Are you ready to go to jail?” and even the thieves and vagrants around him understood the chant to be a revelation of hope. Then, suddenly, the jailers opened their cells, and they received the miraculous news that Greenwood had caved in during the pre-trial negotiations, so that their sentences were suspended and the papers signed—they were free! Singing “This Little Light of Mine,” the eight SNCC workers walked outside the jail to a triumphant press conference. “We stood eyeball to eyeball and the other side just blinked,” one of them told reporters, echoing Secretary of State Rusk's famous boast after the Cuban missile crisis.