Many of these brave souls have stayed the course through today, seeing some of the fruits of their labors in their children and grandchildren. Unita Blackwell, a former sharecropper and Head Start worker described later, is now serving her second stint as the mayor of Mayersville, Mississippi. One of Mrs. Mae Bertha Carter’s children, so mercilessly harassed when she and her siblings entered the “White” schools in Drew, later served on the Drew school board. Jack, Jess, and Carsie would be so proud that there are now over three hundred Black lawyers practicing in the state and that two of our young law clerks from the 1960s, Reuben Anderson and Fred Banks, became Mississippi Supreme Court Justices. Medgar would cheer the justice that Myrlie Evers and the Dahmer families finally squeezed from Mississippi juries in his and Vernon Dahmer’s murder cases. These long overdue downpayments on justice for two among many extraordinary leaders remind us that the arc of the universe does still bend toward justice however slowly.
Mississippi has many ugly patches still and much racism has resurged in the state. But progress is evident if far from complete. Many Blacks have been elected to the legislature since Bob Clark and I walked around the virulent segregationist Theodore Bilbo’s statue as Bob took his seat as the first Black legislator since Reconstruction on January 3, 1968. Today Mississippi has the highest number of Black elected officials in the nation.
But that political representation has not translated into real economic power for a critical mass of Black citizens. Over 43 percent of Black children nationwide were poor when I left in 1968; today 36.8 percent still are. The rates are even higher in Mississippi. Welfare “reform” is turning back the clock for many with low wages, jobs without benefits, inadequate child care, health care, training, and transportation. Life for too many Mississippi children is a nightmare rather than the dream they deserve.
The Children’s Defense Fund’s current Mississippi office which also serves the southern region is battling these more intractable economic and social problems and working to rekindle the spirit of movement and to forge the collective will to carry forth the valiant struggle begun by those described in this book. Too many Mississippi children do not know about the sacrifices of these heroes and heroines. We must teach them and take them by the hands and train them to stand up for their own futures as young people did in the 1960s.
Sadly, children like those standing by the road in Marks, Mississippi in Roland L. Freeman’s photograph in this book, as the mule train left for Washington to participate in Dr. King’s campaign seeking to end poverty, are still standing there waiting for us to come again to see and help them.
9
MISSISSIPPI MENTORS
Bob Moses, Fannie Lou Hamer, Mae Bertha Carter, and Unita Blackwell
BOB MOSES
FOR ME AND MY GENERATION of young civil rights workers, Bob Moses was, after Dr. King, the most influential person in our movement lives. I and all of us would do anything for Bob and follow anywhere he led because we knew he would do anything for us and sacrifice all to win justice for the poor disenfranchised people of Mississippi.
A Harlem-born graduate of Hamilton College who had studied philosophy at Harvard, Bob Moses left a job teaching mathematics at the Horace Mann School in New York City to work for SNCC. He had set up a voter registration project in 1961 in Mississippi which had the lowest Black voter registration of any southern state.
His unshakable calm, quiet leadership style, unquestionable integrity, and incredible courage and perseverance in the face of grave dangers inspired us again and again. He encouraged us to tap wellsprings of inner strength and possibility we did not know we had and helped us be so much better and braver than we realized we could be. He led by example and was prepared to give absolutely everything he had to the freedom struggle including his life.
I was not afraid when I was with Bob even when crouched on the floorboard of the car’s backseat as we passed through McComb on the way to then notorious Amite County to visit E. W. “Pops” Steptoe’s family. Louis Allen had been killed in broad daylight in Amite County because he had witnessed the murder of Herbert Lee who had tried to register to vote. Allen told federal officials he was willing to name the White killer if given protection. He wasn’t. In January 1963 he was killed the day before he was planning to leave Amite County.
Bob did not let a split-open head wound keep him from walking into the registrar’s office in McComb with his scared fellow citizens, determined to show local officials and his White assailants that violence would not turn him or the movement around. He knew he had to break the paralysis of fear among would-be voters and let Mississippi know he would not turn back until Black citizens could vote.
As patient as Job and determined to keep hope alive among his fractious and often unpaid band of SNCC workers, his quiet but steely will kept them and me carrying on and pushing on the heavy door to open Mississippi’s closed society. He knew how hard and how important it was and how much time it would take to build the trust of local citizens who too seldom had seen leaders who stuck by them when times got really rough.
He devised the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer and with Al Lowenstein’s assistance recruited hundreds of idealistic White college students to come into the state to bring visibility to the constant denial of human and civil rights of Mississippi Black citizens. Sadly, only when middle-class and privileged Whites feel threatened does a movement reach critical mass and attract enough media attention to mobilize public opinion.
I saw and shared his wrenching soul-searching at Western College for Women in Oxford, Ohio when the horrible news of James Chaney’s, Andrew Goodman’s, and Mickey Schwerner’s disappearance swept through training sessions designed to prepare the White college students for Mississippi’s realities. I saw this leader shoulder the burden of life and death consequences not just for himself but at that moment for so many others. I felt him struggle to determine what price others could be asked to pay to uphold one’s ideals.
I bristle when I hear careless know-nothing media and political pundits and self-righteous ideologues excoriate the Sixties as a time of undisciplined behavior. Not my Sixties. Not Bob Moses’ Sixties. Not Mrs. Hamer’s or Mrs. Viola Liuzzo’s or James Reeb’s Sixties. Not the Sixties of little Ruby Bridges, or the Jackson, Mississippi children loaded into cattle trailers and detained in the Jackson stockyards, or the Birmingham children knocked off their feet by powerful police fire hoses who went off to jail singing for their freedom. Not the Sixties of the four small girls blown asunder by a hater’s bomb while attending Sunday school at the 16th Avenue Baptist Church in Birmingham.
Bob Moses led us through the very difficult Mississippi Freedom Summer and through a mock election in which 80,000 Black citizens showed they wanted the right to vote denied them by Mississippi’s Jim Crow Democratic Party. He led us to Atlantic City where the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) with Joe Rauh as counsel unsuccessfully sought to persuade the Credentials Committee at the Democratic National Convention to unseat the racist Mississippi Party regulars. Being right was not enough to overcome the might of the Johnson-Humphrey and establishment forces who expected MFDP to be happy with a symbolic compromise offering two seats rather than fair representation.
Bob Moses, human and not saint after all, was worn out from the cumulative struggles to register Black voters and the White violence it provoked, by the MFDP defeat in Atlantic City, and by the willingness of civil rights allies to compromise on what he, Mrs. Hamer, and the majority of the “unsophisticated” MFDP delegation thought was a matter of principle and right.
I watched with profound sadness and understanding this wonderful man leave Mississippi burnt out and temporarily disillusioned about interracial coalition building. I saw him for the last time for many years in Steven’s Kitchen, our civil rights gathering place for breakfast, lunch, and dinner next door to my shabby Farish Street law office in Jackson above the pool hall. I was sitting at a table with our mutual White friend John Mudd who later headed
the Child Development Group of Mississippi (CDGM), one of the largest Head Start programs in the nation. Bob would not sit down with us but beckoned me to join him at a different table. He had become convinced for the time being that Whites were a destructive force in the movement and that we Blacks had to rely only on our own strengths and efforts. While White students and others brought much needed political and media attention to the struggles of Mississippi Blacks, some Whites, so used to unquestioned leadership and control, found it hard to share power or to defer to Blacks even on their home turf. Bob had come to feel that the costs of White participation overrode the benefits. He did not like the Child Development Group of Mississippi (for which I served as a board member and counsel) taking federal Head Start dollars because he believed this would undermine the independence and self-reliance of local people. But children had to learn and hope had to stay alive.
Soon afterwards my deeply loved and admired friend went off to Tanzania via Canada to regroup, renew, and wait out the Vietnam War. He eventually returned home, resumed his philosophy studies at Harvard, and founded the important Algebra Project to help Black and poor children get onto the college track. His oldest daughter Maisha, a teacher in the Algebra Project, and my oldest son Josh, also a teacher, graduated from Harvard together.
MRS. FANNIE LOU HAMER
In 1977, on a flight to Hanoi with President Carter’s delegation on the Missing in Action (the Woodcock Commission), I received a wire that Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer had died. I mourned at the American ambassador’s home in Vietiane, Laos by singing and playing some of the songs she had sung to keep the light of freedom alive during the dog days of civil rights struggle in Mississippi. A mighty lantern’s flame had been snuffed out.
Mrs. Hamer’s extraordinary life and courageous witness and words have been shared by many co-workers who were with her during countless tumultuous days of struggle. Kay Mills’ fine book This Little Light of Mine chronicles her life and Charles Marsh’s book God’s Long Summer: Stories of Faith and Civil Rights devotes a chapter to her living theology. Stories by her friends Unita Blackwell, Mrs. Mae Bertha Carter, and other co-workers and my own moving encounters with her keep her spirit alive for me.
Mills tells the story of Mrs. Hamer, the twentieth child born of poor Mississippi sharecroppers, once asking her mother why they weren’t White. She internalized and lived her mother’s answer: “You must respect yourself as a little child, a little Black child. And as you grow older, respect yourself as a Black woman. Then one day, other people will respect you.” And we did respect Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer as a Black woman. And we loved her. I loved her.
I respected and loved her for her courage right after a cruel beating in the Winona, Mississippi jail. In Charles Marsh’s moving account she describes being beaten “with a thick leather thing that was wide. And it had sumpin’ in it heavy. I don’t know what that was, rocks or lead. But everywhere they hit me, I got just as hard, and I put my hands behind my back, and they beat me in my hands ’til my hands … was as navy blue as anything you ever seen.” The blackjack was passed to the second inmate who would be forced to beat a fellow prisoner. “That’s when I started screaming and working my feet ’cause I couldn’t help it.” This enraged her White jailers who “just started hittin’ on the back of my head.” Although the beating left her flesh injured, one of her kidneys permanently damaged, and a blood clot over her left eye that threatened her vision, back in her “death cell” in that Winona jail hurting all over she found her voice which broke free as she sang:
Paul and Silas was bound in jail, let my people go.
Had no money for to go their bail, let my people go.
Paul and Silas began to shout, let my people go.
Jail door open and they walked out, let my people go.
Fifteen-year-old June Johnson from Greenwood, Mississippi and other SNCC workers including Annelle Ponder, Euvester Simpson, and Lawrence Guyot, some beaten and all scared nearly to death in their jail cells, heard Mrs. Hamer singing and began to sing too.
I respected and loved her for her wit that used to make us double over with laughter as she used it to teach us serious lessons about tolerance and decency towards the very Whites who oppressed her when she sought the vote for Blacks and the poor.
I respected and loved her for faithful practice of the hard message of Christianity which kept us from hating when we wanted to hate: “Baby you have to love ’em [White people] because they are weak.” Or “It wouldn’t solve any problem for me to hate Whites just because they hate me. Oh, there’s so much hate, only God has kept the Negro sane.”
I respected and loved her for scolding and seeking to redeem her White oppressors. Mrs. Hamer reached out to the wife of the Winona jailer whose husband had mistreated her and gently suggested she read several Bible passages including “[God] made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth.” In court Mrs. Hamer asked the jailer who’d unjustly detained and ordered her beaten, “Do you people ever think or wonder how you’ll feel when the time comes you’ll have to meet God?” Mrs. Hamer said: “I hit them with the truth and it hurt them.”
She hit timid Black leaders, especially preachers, with her truth when they were afraid to put their faith in action. Marsh quotes her saying: “It’s all too easy to say sure, I’m a Christian, and to talk a big game. But if you are not putting that claim to the test, where the rubber meets the road, then it’s high time to stop talking about being a Christian. You can pray until you faint … but if you’re not gonna get up and do something, God is not gonna put it in your lap.” She excoriated “chicken-eatin’” Black preachers who sold out to the White power structure and who would not support the movement.
She hit the SNCC workers with her truth when they resisted White involvement in the Mississippi summer Freedom Schools: “If we’re trying to break down this barrier of segregation, we can’t segregate ourselves.”
And she hit Hubert Humphrey, ordered by President Lyndon Johnson to stop “that illiterate woman” and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party’s 1964 challenge to the discriminatory Mississippi Democratic Party, with her truth after he urged her to accept an unjust compromise: “Do you mean to tell me that your position is more important to you than 400,000 Black people’s lives?”
A bitter split developed in Atlantic City between Dr. King, Andy Young, the NAACP’s Aaron Henry, and other of the more pragmatic leaders and Bob Moses, Mrs. Hamer, and the majority of MFDP delegates. The former were more open to accepting the largely symbolic offer made by President Lyndon Johnson’s point persons including Senator Humphrey and his lieutenant Walter Mondale, who were eager to ensure Humphrey’s place on the Democratic ticket as vice president and to keep powerful southern delegates from abandoning the party. Bob Moses and Mrs. Hamer, the majority of the MFDP delegates, and I opposed the compromise. Mrs. Hamer was not a practical politician accustomed to engaging in political dynamics where righteous public posturing and less righteous back-door negotiations went hand in hand. SNCC workers and unlettered but not unwise Black Mississippi citizens were relative novices at this brand of politics from which they had been largely excluded by Mississippi’s closed politics.
Mrs. Hamer and her MFDP followers were less interested in being politically correct than in being morally correct as her dialogue with Unita Blackwell below shows. She wanted to sit at the Democratic Party table and not be thrown a few Democratic Party crumbs over the side. Her disbelieving question to Hubert Humphrey showed her unwillingness to play the politicians’ game. I sometimes wonder whether the bedrock values, mother wit, and faith-driven courage of Mrs. Hamer and women like her might have prevented some American White males’ catastrophic decisions that cost tens of thousands of lives. I love to imagine Mrs. Hamer sitting at the table with Robert McNamara and Henry Kissinger during discussions about the Vietnam War asking loudly and insistently, “Is this right? Would God like it?”
Mrs. Hamer came by her early political educ
ation the long and hard way. She was forty-four and working on a plantation when civil rights workers arrived in Sunflower County. From time to time, Mrs. Hamer came to hear them when they spoke about voter registration and raised her hand when they asked who would try to register to vote. Soon afterwards she led a group of volunteers from a bus into the circuit clerk’s office. The clerk told all but two to leave and only Mrs. Hamer was allowed to stay for the voter test. When she failed to interpret a section of the state constitution she was unable to register (“When I heard this story, it was the first time I realized Mississippi had a constitution!” she said). The police arrested and fined the bus driver (allegedly because the bus was “too yellow”). When the people who had come with Mrs. Hamer became frightened, she started singing and they scrambled together enough money to pay the fine so the bus driver could take them home. When Mrs. Hamer arrived home her plantation owner told her that if she wanted to stay she shouldn’t try to register to vote. She answered him with her truth: “I didn’t go down there to register for you. I went down to register for myself.” He told her to pack her things and the children’s things and he’d take them into town because she couldn’t live there any more. When he relented the next day she refused his offer to allow her to return. Fearing for her safety, her husband “Pap” took her to live with relatives in another county. But she didn’t stay there. Returning to town she said, “Well, killing or no killing, I’m going to stick with civil rights,” and continued to attend voter registration classes and to speak everywhere. She was a wonderful speaker who let nothing turn her back although as she once said, “I’m never sure anymore when I leave home whether I’ll get back or not. Sometimes it seem like to tell the truth is to run the risk of being killed. But if I fall, I’ll fall five feet four inches forward in the fight for freedom. I’m not backing off.”
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