Parting the Waters (86 page)

Shortly after midnight on June 15—the day before their representatives were meeting with Attorney General Kennedy worlds away in Washington—guards herded forty-five of the male prisoners from their cells into closed truck trailers. The trucks lurched out of Jackson with the prisoners sealed in darkness. When finally they tumbled out blinking into the dawn light, they found themselves standing beneath an observation tower just inside the barbed-wire gate of an enormous compound, surrounded by guards with shotguns. The warden welcomed them to Parchman Penitentiary. “We have bad niggers here,” he warned. “Niggers on death row that'll beat you up and cut you as soon as look at you.” He ordered them to follow him in a line of march to a cement-block processing building.

As they moved out, the guards discovered two young white men from Chicago still lying in the back of a truck. “We refuse to cooperate, because we've been unjustly imprisoned,” said Terry Sullivan, in a speech that Lawson and the others had counseled him to shelve. The guards dumped the two Chicagoans out of the truck and dragged them by their feet through mud and grass and across concrete into the receiving room, where the prisoners were ordered to take off their clothes. When the two of them still did not move, guards shocked them with cattle prods until they writhed on the floor, screaming in pain. The guards finally tore off their clothes.

The prisoners were left waiting there for what seemed like an eternity before being marched to shower rooms, where they bathed under the gaze of shotguns. More than one of them felt stabbing rushes of identification with the prisoners of the Nazi concentration camps. Then they went on another naked march along cement corridors to the maximum-security wing, where, locked two to a cell, they endured another long wait before the guards brought their only prison clothes—a T-shirt and a pair of pea-green boxer shorts. Left alone at last, they shouted out their relief in complaints about the skimpy, ill-fitting garments. “What's all this hang-up about clothes?” James Bevel cried out above the noise. “Gandhi wrapped a rag around his balls and brought the whole British Empire to its knees!”

Their hymns, spirituals, and freedom songs once again became the principal issue of contention with the jail authorities, who, to regain control of the prison atmosphere, threatened to remove all the mattresses from the cells if the Freedom Riders did not fall silent. Hank Thomas soon exploded with zeal, rattling the bars as he shouted for the guards. “Come get my mattress!” he cried. “I'll keep my soul!” The outburst inspired the entire cell block to sing “We Shall Overcome,” and one prisoner after another flung his mattress against the cell door for the guards to collect.

Not all the Freedom Riders willingly accepted the sacrifice. One of them had to be pried away from his mattress by the guards. Nor did all share the religious ethos of the cell block. Stokely Carmichael, among others, remained aloof from the religious devotionals, and many of the Freedom Riders envied or resented the advanced Gandhism of the Nashville students. There were abstruse Gandhian arguments about whether the decision to fast in jail should be determined by the inner convictions of the prisoner or by the political effects upon the outside world. There were also less lofty disputes, such as fistfights through the bars when non-fasting prisoners aggressively slurped their food in front of those trying not to eat.

For all the frictions, the Freedom Riders maintained an astonishing
esprit
as their number swelled in Parchman Penitentiary. Only a few asked to have their mattresses back. They lay on the steel springs at night, and they sang steadfastly through all the punishments devised to break them. When normal prison intimidations failed to work, frustrated authorities tried dousing them with fire hoses and then chilling them at night with giant fans. They also tried closing all the windows to bake them in the Mississippi summer heat. None of these sanctions had the desired effect, and many of them backfired. When the original group of Freedom Riders bailed out for appeal on July 7, they nearly floated out of the cells in the knowledge that they had gone into the heart of the beast and survived.

From the Montgomery bus boycott to the confrontations of the sit-ins, then on to the Rock Hill jail-in and now to the mass assault on the Mississippi prisons, there was a “movement” in both senses of the word—a moving spiritual experience, and a steady expansion of scope. The theater was spreading through the entire South. One isolated battle had given way to many scattered ones, and now in the Mississippi jails they were moving from similar experiences to a common experience. Students began to think of the movement as a vocation in itself. From jail, John Lewis notified the Quakers by letter that he was withdrawing from the India program because he wanted to work full time in the South.

When James Farmer flew home to New York, he was met at the airport by television cameras and crowds of admiring CORE supporters chanting “Farmer is our leader!” This reception was not so surprising, inasmuch as Farmer's role in the Freedom Rides had placed him instantly on the covers of Negro magazines as a national leader. More surprising by far were the similar greetings for those who went home to Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, and small towns scattered in between. The usual small gatherings of the faithful were overrun by strangers who came out in huge numbers to pay tribute to a Freedom Rider—any Freedom Rider.

 

The emotional wave of the Freedom Rides collided with the Kennedy registration plan. At a SNCC meeting exactly one week after their release from Parchman, student Freedom Riders were shocked to hear some of their colleagues propose that SNCC adopt as its “top priority” the voter registration drive being discussed with Harry Belafonte. They were talking of a mammoth operation of some 200,000 student workers—a force a thousand times larger than the Freedom Riders. Passionate arguments erupted. Those just out of prison objected that there was nothing Gandhian about voter registration, which they saw as conventional, political, and very probably a tool of the Kennedy Administration for getting “direct action” demonstrators off the streets. Voter registration advocates replied that they were ready to undertake the drudgery of registration work, intimating that the Freedom Riders had been seduced by the allure of martyrdom. In the end, the factions could agree only to postpone the fateful decision until a showdown conference at Highlander Folk School a month later. “In a very real sense, this is an emergency call and we are expecting representatives from each state,” field secretary Charles Sherrod wrote in his convening circular. “The outcome of this meeting may determine the direction of the civil rights fight for years to come!”

As it happened, Bob Moses was on his way to Mississippi that month to begin a new life. As the Harvard-trained philosopher who had undertaken SNCC's first recruiting trip into the Deep South and then volunteered to spend “two or three years” working for SNCC in the forbidding state of Mississippi, Moses had become a minor celebrity in SNCC circles before the Freedom Rides. Because the work he planned was known to center on voter registration, SNCC chairman Charles McDew, Charles Jones, Tim Jenkins, and other leaders of the registration faction sought his endorsement for their side in the internal struggle. Baffled by the intrigue, Moses said his own voter registration plans had nothing to do with grand schemes or philosophy. They were simply a response to Amzie Moore's analysis of what would work best in Mississippi. Moses declined to attend the Highlander meeting or otherwise take part in the dispute, but he did ask the SNCC leaders to include his Mississippi registration project in any recruitment programs they developed. McDew and the others were happy to provide him with John Doar's private telephone number at the Justice Department. After Moses had gone, Jenkins remarked that he seemed far too meekly intellectual to have the slightest chance against Mississippi segregationists.

Arriving at last at Amzie Moore's house in Cleveland, Mississippi, Moses found his host in an unusually distracted state. All Mississippi was agitated by the Freedom Rider arrests going on down in Jackson, Moore said, and this was not the best time to begin registration work. His reasons for delay stretched out daily before giving way to avoidance, and Moses, while not wishing to question the judgment of his mentor as to the local chemistry of race, did not wish to sit indefinitely in Moore's spare room. Moore finally suggested a way out of the awkwardness growing up between them. An NAACP leader from McComb, a small town near the southern border of the state, had written him after seeing a report in the Negro press, wanting to know if Moore would send a few of his “teams of students” to register voters in McComb. Moore suggested to Moses that things were not as tight—not as touchy—in McComb as they were in the Delta towns nearby. Perhaps he should get started down there. Moses painfully took his leave. A bus ride of nearly two hundred miles due south put him in McComb, where he explained to NAACP leader C. C. Bryant that he alone was the first team.

At Highlander, three days of rancorous debate produced nothing more than a deadlock among the state delegations within SNCC. Charles McDew announced dramatically that he was going to break the tie by casting the chairman's vote in favor of the voter registration plan. Several direct-action advocates stalked out in anger. Ella Baker, trying desperately to keep her prized students from surrendering to the leadership preoccupations that had so vexed her at the NAACP and the SCLC, proposed that SNCC operate for a time as two cooperating wings—direct action under Diane Nash and voter registration under Charles Jones. Her compromise won grudging acceptance from everyone except a few direct-action diehards. Bernard Lee left SNCC permanently, as did the former leader of the Atlanta sit-in movement, Lonnie King. By the end of the conference, a grim joke went around that SNCC should have two doors for its dingy office, so that the rivals would not cross each other's path.

Neither side's project began smoothly. The direct-action wing adopted a proposal called “Move on Mississippi,” authored by the Nashville student-preacher Paul Brooks. It envisioned a protracted nonviolent assault beginning in the capital city of Jackson, which, like Montgomery, had a Negro college and a large portion of the state's middle-class Negro citizens. James Bevel and Bernard Lafayette did manage to find some local students willing to demonstrate, but city police countered them shrewdly. Instead of arresting the demonstrators, they arrested the SNCC leaders for “contributing to the delinquency of a minor” by urging students under eighteen to break the segregation laws of Mississippi. Tried, convicted, and sentenced to up to three years, they bailed out on appeal and visited Amzie Moore in Cleveland to regroup. These sentences, by far the harshest yet meted out to students in the movement, were among the signs of rising white anger that were making Amzie Moore jittery.

As for voter registration, SNCC leaders went directly to the Justice Department for discussions on targeting, demographics, law, and strategy. From a map on the wall in John Doar's office, they noted pins stuck into the Southern counties judged most ripe for registration lawsuits. By Doar's reckoning, two of the most promising areas were Dallas County, Alabama (Selma), and Terrell County, Georgia, where the Eisenhower Administration had won the first voting rights suit under the 1957 Civil Rights Act. Charles Sherrod migrated to Georgia to begin a pilot project in Terrell County, but he soon discovered that most of the Negroes there were fearfully mistrustful of anyone who discussed civil rights. When he dared to propose demonstrations and registration drives, even his few hard-won acquaintances refused to talk with him. Sherrod was obliged to retreat to the nearby city of Albany and start over.

These troubled beginnings went almost unnoticed even within the magnified vision of the civil rights network. There were too many layers of activity. Sherrod was talking with Doar and a hundred others; Moses and Bevel were at work in Mississippi; the Freedom Rides were still going on. Students were hearing about beatings administered to friends and relatives in Parchman Penitentiary. Millions of dollars were being discussed in foundations even as tears of grief and inspiration were flowing. In miniature, the Freedom Riders were compressing into one summer the psychology of the first three centuries of Christianity under the Roman Empire. Perpetually on the brink of schism, apostles of nonviolent love were fanning out into the provinces to fill jails, while their confederates were negotiating with the emperors themselves for full citizenship rights, hoping to establish their outlandish new faith as the official doctrine of the state.

 

King contained these divergent strains within himself. Drawn to both the martyrs and the rulers, he was exposed during the Freedom Rides to extremes of scorn and admiration that were unprecedented even for him. His relations with the SNCC students suddenly became intimate but touchy and complex, as did those with Robert Kennedy. So sensitive was King's name in public debate that the white Southern Baptist Convention—which was trying to make peace with President Kennedy after its shrill warnings against putting a Catholic in the White House—forced its seminary to apologize publicly for allowing King to discuss religion on the Louisville campus. Within the church, this simple invitation was a racial and theological heresy, such that churches across the South rescinded their regular donations to the seminary. “Steps have been taken to help prevent the recurrence of this kind of error,” announced Rev. J. R. White of the Southern Baptist Seminary's board of trustees. White, pastor of First Baptist of Montgomery, had been at loggerheads with King since the bus boycott negotiations.

Governor Rockefeller, on the other hand, went out of his way to associate with King as a political celebrity. On a single day in June, he took King aboard his private plane to Albany, brought him to his private quarters for dinner, introduced him at a Freedom Ride rally in the capitol, ordered his staff to use the Rockefeller fortune to disseminate the passion of King's oratory, and sent King to his next New York speech in the company of a Rockefeller-hired film crew. Rockefeller later produced a film and a long-playing phonograph record (King's first) of the address. He sent copies to Ebenezer, and, just in case the church was not equipped to view the film, he included a sound projector in the gift package. The governor wrote King that he was using the film “to interest the television networks in doing a thoughtful study of your work.” Rockefeller's motivation for this sudden shower of attention was at least partly political: his strategy for the 1964 election was to attack President Kennedy on both flanks by taking more liberal stands on civil rights and more aggressive ones on military policy. Still, there was much common ground between Rockefeller and King. One of the governor's sons-in-law had been arrested as a Freedom Rider. Rockefeller was a frequent speaker at Negro colleges and a Sunday school teacher at Harry Emerson Fosdick's Riverside Church. His unique heritage put him far closer to King's world than any other national politician, and it was remarkable in a sense that the affinity between them was not more pronounced.