A group of us went to try to register, including several schoolteachers. Then trucks came with guns and circled the courthouse. The sheriff came and told us to stay away from the men who had encouraged us to register, that they were just outside agitators and “You all is good people. I been knowing you all these years.” A woman from the group said, “Yes sir, you have, but I have this right.” The sheriff got very red in the face, and it was awful to see the hate in the eyes of the White men who had come with guns. That’s the day I got angry … I thought nothing from nothing leaves nothing and we have nothing, and we’re going to have to stand for something. I was afraid, but that was the day I decided I was going to die for my freedom. I went in and began to convince others to go. We lost our jobs. I never did have a job from that day [working for] White people. So I became an “instant organizer” and got to know others who were working for freedom.
Unita told the listening young people about those who would come to civil rights meetings and then divulge the plans to the White police. She recounted a time when they were planning a demonstration the next day at a school and a woman who had been in their meeting left early. “I thought she was a Tom and suggested we change the plan. We did, and saw the next day that the police and the dogs were lined up at the school waiting for us.” She also told about how she had four telephones in her house. When someone fired shots through the window, first you hit the floor, then you called SNCC in Atlanta, then the FBI, then the local police. She said she called the FBI once and told them there was a cross burning in the front yard. When the FBI asked how tall the cross was, “Obviously, I wasn’t going to get off the floor to look out and see how tall the cross was.” The FBI told her to preserve the cross in a gunny sack because they couldn’t get up there right away. “Mississippi Burning was a lie,” Unita asserted: “I knows every back road in Mississippi because we couldn’t drive on the highways, the Highway Patrol was just as dangerous as the Klan.” She talked of driving a gunshot victim to a hospital on the back roads. Of the dangers, she says, “Your freedom is important. We dying anyway, so you better die for something … it was worth it! It was nothing in vain.”
The bus Unita and others rode on to the Democratic Convention in Atlantic City when they challenged the seating of the Mississippi delegation was paid for by Harry Belafonte and Sidney Poitier. She told me and the young people at the former Alex Haley Farm how one woman held a knife to the bus driver’s neck to make him drive through the Klan roadblocks. She was also told about sitting in a church with Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer deciding whether to take the compromise of two seats offered by the Democratic Credentials Committee in Atlantic City and how they decided to reject it.
Bob Moses told us, “That’s up to y’all. Y’all are the people from Mississippi. You have to make that decision.”
“We didn’t leave there talking about no two seats,” Mrs. Hamer said. “Girl, I wonder where we going to sit. All the rest of us, they going to give us two seats. All of us can’t sit in them seats.”
I said, That’s the truth. I said We said half. “I say we say half,” she said. “Well, you with me?” I said, We left there telling the folks what we was going to do. She looked at me and said, “We will not take the compromise.” I say, That’s it, go tell them.
And she went out and they was waiting on Fannie Lou. Miss Hamer went out and laid her head back and went to singing. She always sung them songs before she’s going to hit you with a powerful message. And when she got through singing, the press had all them little things around sticking in her face. She just said, “We will NOT take the compromise.” I thought some of our dear leaders would faint or fall out.
Without our ranks they told us we was ignorant. That we didn’t know what we were doing. Them old ignorant folks from Mississippi, pick king cotton, but we changed the concept of how this nation do business in politics.
So, Miss Hamer was my mentor, my friend, my buddy. And she helped me spiritually too because she tried to teach me about hate. And so she told me I could not go around hating. Because that was not going to solve the problem. We have to love them.
10
MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR., AND R.F.K.
A Season of Hope for the Hungry
THE COMBINED EXHILARATION and horror of Freedom Summer which opened to full view Mississippi’s violent and oppressive society, obscured the snail’s pace of change in the economic and political life in the state only for a short while. Eventually the lack of concrete progress was resented by impatient young Black people eager to loosen the noose of bondage. This and the cumulative stress and fatigue from chronic harassment and battle after battle, the disillusionment with the Democratic Party’s politically pragmatic disregard for truth and justice in Atlantic City at the end of the summer of 1964, and the continuing White violence opened the door for the charismatic Stokely Carmichael and his Black Power allies to gain greater public voice and to push aside SNCC’s courageous leader John Lewis in a de facto coup d’état. Some in SNCC began to replace Dr. King’s nonviolent philosophy and “Freedom Now” cry with the Black Power fist and Malcolm X’s cry, “By any means necessary.” Differing expectations about goals and strategies to accelerate the pace of change, simmering for several years, burst into the open in 1966 after Ole Miss pioneer James Meredith was shot while attempting to walk from Memphis to Jackson.
Dr. King, Stokely Carmichael, and many other civil rights leaders and citizens converged on Mississippi to finish Meredith’s march. I walked with them and listened in debriefings every evening after the march ended as Stokely and other SNCC members vented their frustrations at and to a saddened Dr. King who would shake his head at the embittered young turk and ask repeatedly, “Is it really that bad, Stokely?” Dr. King’s stricken face in Greenwood, a SNCC stronghold, and on the platform in Jackson at the rally after the Meredith march was completed as SNCC leaders chanted “Black Power” is forever engraved in my mind’s eye.
But Dr. King kept leading and preaching nonviolence and inspiring others to follow his way. I had joined him and thousands of fellow citizens walking from Selma and arriving in Montgomery on March 21, 1965 and was thrilled as Dr. King, “like Jonah in the belly of the whale,” as James Washington wrote in his book Testament of Hope, “spoke triumphantly before the State Capitol building in Montgomery, often called the Cradle of Confederacy.” As usual Dr. King captured our spirits by sharing the now immortalized words of a seventy-year-old Black woman, Sister Pollard, who when asked while walking during the Montgomery bus boycott if she wanted a ride answered, “No.” When the person persisted, “Well, aren’t you tired?” she responded, “My feets is tired, but my soul is rested.”
The savage beatings and arrests of John Lewis, Hosea Williams, and others on Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge days earlier provoked and galvanized over 25,000 marchers to answer Dr. King’s call to complete the march in Montgomery and to ensure the voting rights of Black citizens. The sacrifices of James Reeb and Mrs. Viola Liuzzo, felled by racists’ bullets, were rewarded in the witness of those undeterred by White violence. In Montgomery Dr. King cried, “My people, my people, listen! The battle is in our hands. The battle is in our hands in Mississippi and Alabama, and all over the United States.” Warning of more suffering and jail cells ahead, he urged us to “go away more than ever before committed to the struggle and to nonviolence.”
Later in 1965 Dr. King answered my call for help as Black Mississippi leaders and Head Start supporters struggled to convince Sargent Shriver and the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) he headed to renew funding for the Child Development Group of Mississippi (CDGM). CDGM had come into being when the state turned down Head Start money, uninterested in helping poor Black or White children. Arthur Thomas, head of the Delta Ministry of the National Council of Churches, Dr. Tom Levin, a psychiatrist from New York City interested in early childhood development, Dr. Daniel Biettel, the kind White president of all-Black Tougaloo College, and a group of local Black citizens from across the stat
e worked together to help form the Child Development Group of Mississippi. It served about 13,000 children and created about 3,000 jobs free of the plantation system. I served as CDGM’s counsel.
Helping poor children in Mississippi proved to be politically charged and complicated. Powerful Mississippi Senators Stennis and Eastland made their displeasure clear to Sargent Shriver and the Johnson White House and demanded they cut off CDGM funding. The senators alleged weak management and misuse of funds, the usual first course of attack when politicians want to inflict damage (the latter charge was not verified and the former was greatly overstated). CDGM’s experience taught me a lesson I try never to forget: Be a good steward of every dime so that you’re less vulnerable to political attack. Besides, the poor need to get their checks on time and good management is important to providing sound programs for children and families. As OEO began capitulating to political pressures from these powerful segregationist senators who threatened to hold up the appropriation for all OEO programs, we sought and found a counter political force in Walter Reuther and the United Auto Workers who supported the Citizens Crusade Against Poverty (CCAP) headed by Dick Boone. They became our Washington ally but still months dragged on without renewed funding.
CDGM parents and communities struggled to keep their centers open without federal funds as CDGM’s board, staff, and I fought tirelessly to defend this lifeline of hope for thousands of Mississippi children. Shriver was furious when Dr. King walked into the room in Atlanta where he, I, and others were negotiating CDGM’s fate and upbraided me and CDGM leaders for injecting “outsiders” into the process. But Dr. King’s presence and announced support sent a message that we were prepared to fight with all our might and to mobilize as much support as we could to keep our community-based Head Start program alive. We won that 1965 refunding battle but faced a constant war of attrition during every refunding cycle. This included OEO encouraging the establishment of a rival more “controllable” group called MAP: Mississippi Action for Progress. This continuing attack on Mississippi Head Start programs was one impetus for my moving to Washington in 1968. I wanted to establish an ongoing voice and early alert system to protect the poor and vulnerable against the ruthless voices of powerful politicians seeking to maintain prevailing inequalities for the rich at the expense of the poor and for Whites at the expense of Blacks with government’s help.
As Dr. King’s struggle headed north, it ran into stiff resistance in Chicago and Cicero. And as the country became preoccupied with the Vietnam War, he spoke out against it in an eloquent speech on April 4, 1967 at Riverside Church in New York City. He eventually became discouraged both by stiff northern resistance to his civil rights campaigns and by stinging criticism from many Black and White leaders who thought Vietnam was none of his business and that he should express views only about “Black” issues. He rightly perceived the war’s devastating effects on the hopes and needs of the poor at home. He correctly decried “taking the Black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them 8,000 miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in Southwest Georgia and East Harlem.”
Robert Kennedy came to Mississippi in that same April of 1967 with the Senate Subcommittee on Employment, Manpower, and Poverty chaired by Senator Joseph Clark of Pennsylvania and accompanied by Republican Senators Jacob Javits of New York and George Murphy of California. I had testified in Washington earlier about how the anti-poverty program in Mississippi was working before Chairman Joe Clark’s committee at Senator Javits’ request. Although I had intended to focus my Mississippi testimony on how well CDGM’s Head Start program was helping poor children in the state’s poorest counties, I had become increasingly concerned about the growing hunger in the Mississippi Delta.
The convergence of efforts to register Black citizens to vote, Black parents’ challenges to segregated schools, the development of chemical weed killers and farm mechanization, and recent passage of a minimum wage law covering agriculture workers on large farms had resulted in many Black sharecroppers being pushed off their near feudal plantations which no longer needed their cheap labor. Indeed I believed and told the senators and anyone who would listen that Mississippi’s power structure wanted Blacks not only to leave their plantations but to leave the state and go north. It didn’t want the trouble of civil rights agitation. Many displaced sharecroppers were illiterate and had no skills. Free federal food commodities like cheese, powdered milk, flour, and peanut butter were all that stood between them and starvation. Their meager wages from the back-breaking work of chopping and picking cotton that often rewarded them only with more debt at the plantation owner’s store had disappeared. Some had no income. Senators Eastland and Stennis and Congressman Jamie Whitten, who chaired the House Agriculture Committee, had supported the federal food commodity program for years when it subsidized Mississippi’s political and economic bondage system. But as White Mississippi farmers and employers evicted Blacks who tried to register to vote, the economic vise was tightened in some counties by converting the free food commodity program into a newly created food stamp program. Like the swell-sounding “freedom of choice” school desegregation plans, food stamps carried some positive appeal: You could choose your own food in the grocery store rather than taking whatever was given out from federal surplus commodities resulting from federal subsidies (welfare) to farmers. But since food stamps required a minimum purchase price of $2.00 for a family of four, people with no income in Mississippi had no choice besides hunger which had escalated in Mississippi’s Delta.
The state’s stingy welfare program did not help two-parent families. Single mothers with two children were provided $56.00 a month as late as 1970; in 1998, they were provided $120 a month, a 48 percent reduction if you account for inflation. The rampant hypocrisy of segregationist politicians who railed against “lazy Blacks” did not deter them from collecting hefty federal welfare checks called price supports not to grow food hungry people needed to live. Often federal and state “subsidies” and tax incentives were and are simply words for government welfare for non-needy corporations, farmers, and citizens. Federal corporate welfare today exceeds $300 billion a year allegedly to make the rich more productive and work harder while the federal welfare safety net for poor mothers and children was shred during the 1996 election year allegedly to make poor mothers work harder. But adequate funds have not been invested in jobs with decent wages, job training, health care, child care, and transportation required to help them escape poverty. My historian friend Howard Zinn says all of modern history “shows a consistent record of laissez-faire for the poor, but enormous government intervention for the rich.”
I shared the desperate plight of these hungry people with the senators in Jackson, Mississippi and urged them to go with me to the Delta to see for themselves the hungry poor in our very rich nation, to visit their shacks, open their empty cupboards, and look into the deadened eyes of children with bloated bellies. “They are starving and someone has to help them,” I testified.
Robert Kennedy responded. In a precursor of the Children’s Defense Fund’s Child Watch visitation program which attempts to personalize child suffering by taking political, media, and community leaders to see the need and solutions to those needs firsthand, Robert F. Kennedy, Peter Edelman, his legislative assistant who was later to become my husband, and the national media who followed Kennedy, including Daniel Schorr, the distinguished CBS correspondent, traveled with me to the Mississippi Delta to visit poor families and children. Amzie Moore, always ready to help, immediately identified families for us to visit. We flew first to visit a small job-training program at the closed Greenville Air Base which I and others had been urging the federal government without success to let us use to house the evicted and homeless poor. We then drove to Cleveland, Mississippi where Amzie was waiting.
I was not prepared to like Robert Kennedy. I’d formed an image of him as a tough, arrogant, politically driven man from the Joseph McCarthy e
ra. This view was reinforced later by the appointment while he was attorney general of a number of segregationist judges to southern federal courts, by his discouraging planned freedom rides and other civil rights demonstrations, and by his approval of wiretapping of Dr. King. I also had envisaged Peter Edelman, Kennedy’s legislative assistant, as a cigar-chomping, arrogant young know-it-all as I then assumed most Kennedy staffers to be. These feelings dissolved as I saw Kennedy profoundly moved by Mississippi’s hungry children. I liked Peter too!
Robert Kennedy went into houses asking respectfully of each dweller what they had had for breakfast, lunch, or dinner the night before. He opened their empty ice boxes and cupboards after asking permission. He hovered, visibly moved, on a dirt floor in a dirty shack out of television-camera range over a listless baby with bloated belly from whom he tried in vain to get a response. He lightly touched the cheeks, shoulders, and hands of the children clad in dirty ragged clothes and tried to offer words of encouragement to their hopeless mothers. From this trip and throughout the fifteen months I knew him until his assassination, I came to associate Robert Kennedy with nonverbal communications that conveyed far more than words: a light touch on the face, a pat on the shoulder, an affectionate gentle hit on the arm or back. He looked straight at you and he saw you. His capacity for genuine outrage and compassion was palpable. Later that day after our loud motorcade ran over a dog in Cleveland, Mississippi, he got out of the car to comfort a small boy to whom the dog belonged and angrily ordered the police escort to cut out the siren and to slow down.
Robert Kennedy was a teaser who was insatiably curious about everything including my personal life. As we drove from Greenville to Cleveland he asked about my dating life (I told him it was none of his business), about what I was reading (it happened to be Bill Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner), what led me to come to Mississippi, and how I felt about numerous other topics.
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