Eyes on the Prize

by Juan Williams

  Nineteen sixty-three is not an end, but a beginning. And those who hope that the Negro needed to blow off steam and will now be content, will have a rude awakening if the nation returns to business as usual. There will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights. The whirlwinds of the revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges …

  There are those who are asking the devotees of Civil Rights, “When will you be satisfied?” We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality: we can never be satisifed as long as our bodies, heavy with the fatigue of travel, cannot gain lodging in the motels of the highways and the hotels of the cities; we cannot be satisfied as long as the Negro’s basic mobility is from a smaller ghetto to a larger one we can never he satisfied as long as our children are stripped of their selfhood and robbed of their dignity by signs stating “For Whites Only”; we cannot be satisfied as long as the Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote. No! No, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until “justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

  I am not unmindful that some of you have come here out of great trials and tribulations. Some of you have come fresh from narrow jail cells. Some of you have come from areas where your quest for freedom left you battered by the storms of persecution and staggered by the winds of police brutality. You have been the veterans of creative suffering. Continue to work with the faith that unearned suffering is redemptive. Go back to Mississippi. Go back to Alabama. Go back to South Carolina. Go back to Georgia. Go back to Louisiana. Go back to the slums and ghettos of our northern cities, knowing that somehow the situation can and will be changed. Let us not wallow in the valley of despair.

  I say to you today, my friends, so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American meaning of its creed, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood. I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice. I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but the content of their character.

  I have a dream today!

  I have a dream that one day down in Alabama—with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification—one day right there in Alabama, little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.

  I have a dream today!

  I have a dream that one day “every valley shall be exalted and every hill and mountain shall be made low. The rough places will be made plain and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.”

  This is our hope. This is the faith that I go back to the South with. With this faith we shall be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day. And this will be the day. This will be the day when all of God’s children will be able to sing with new meaning, “My country ‘tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my fathers died, land of the pilgrim’s pride, from every mountainside, let freedom ring.” And if America is to be a great nation, this must become true …

  So let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire, let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York, let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania; let freedom ring from the snow-capped Rockies of Colorado; let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California. But not only that. Let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia; let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee; let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi. From every mountainside, let freedom ring.

  And when this happens and when we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual: “Free at last. Free at last. Thank God Almighty, we are free at last.”

  Chapter Seven

  Mississippi

  Freedom Has Never Been Free

  Q: What has four eyes and can’t see?

  A: Mississippi.

  —a children’s riddle

  In Mississippi, several civil rights groups joined under the organizational name of COFO (Council of Federated Organizations) to work for voting rights.

  In the 1950s, trying to organize for civil rights in Mississippi was like trying to pick a plantation’s entire cotton crop singlehandedly—one boll at a time, in the middle of the night, with a gun pointed at your head. Forty-five percent of Mississippi’s people were black, a higher percentage than in any other state. Mississippi also led the nation in beatings, lynchings, and mysterious disappearances. Only five percent of black Mississippians were registered to vote, the lowest rate in the United States. With majorities in many counties, blacks might well have controlled local politics through the ballot box. But segregationists were not about to let blacks vote; many would sooner kill them.

  Between 1950 and 1960, more than 315,000 blacks migrated from the Magnolia State, the poorest one in the nation, and seventy-five percent of the state’s college graduates, almost all of them white, also left. Mississippi had fewer doctors, accountants, nurses, and lawyers per capita than any other state in the nation. In 1959, the NAACP counted only one black dentist, five black lawyers, and sixty black doctors in the entire state.

  Blacks in Mississippi had little chance of landing a good job and plenty of chances to get into trouble. They came to grief if they tried to register to vote or if they didn’t ride in the back of the bus. Children could not enter all-white public schools, and eating at a white restaurant or lunch counter was out of the question. The population of Jackson, the state’s capital and its largest community, was approximately 100,000, but Jackson’s only bookstore was a Baptist-run religious shop. Most of Mississippi’s counties had no bookstores at all. One-third of the counties had no public library.

  When Medgar Evers came home from World War II, his brother Charlie talked him into trying to vote in their hometown of Decatur. The Evers brothers and four other blacks registered at the courthouse, but when they tried to vote on election day, they were met by a mob of whites wielding guns and knives. Years later, Medgar Evers described the experience to a reporter. “We had all seen a lot of dead people in the war,” he said. “I had been on Omaha Beach. All we wanted to be was ordinary citizens. We fought during the war for America, Mississippi included. Now, after the Germans and the Japanese hadn’t killed us, it looked as though the white Mississippians would … We knew we weren’t going to get by this mob.” The blacks left without even seeing the voting booth.

  Upon his graduation from Alcorn Agricultural and Mechanical College, Evers became an insurance agent, though he dreamed of being a lawyer. In 1954 he applied to the law school at the University of Mississippi in Oxford. While he waited for a response from the all-white institution, the United States Supreme Court ruled that racially segregated schools were unconstitutional. White southerners responded angrily, some of them forming white Citizens’ Councils to resist integration. Mississippi attorney general James P. Coleman, who later bec
ame governor of the state, invited Evers to Jackson to discuss his desire to enroll at “Ole Miss.”

  “They asked me was I sincere,” Evers wrote later. “I told them yes. They asked me was I prompted by the NAACP, and I told them no. They asked me where I would stay, and I answered, ‘On the campus, sir. I’m very hygienic, I bathe every day, and I assure you this brown won’t rub off.’” Evers was rejected, ostensibly because he supplied no recommendations from Mississippi whites.

  Unable to attend law school, Evers went to work that December for the NAACP. He was the association’s first field director in Mississippi. Many white Mississippians equated the NAACP with the Communist party. At play, white children chanted that its initials stood for “Niggers, Apes, Alligators, Coons, and Possums.”

  In preparation for his new job, the thirty-year-old Evers bought an Oldsmobile with a powerful V-8 engine. The car was big enough to resist being forced off the road, roomy enough for sleeping in when Evers could find no motel that allowed blacks, and powerful enough to ensure fast escape from threatening situations. Over the next eight years, Evers logged thousands of miles on that Oldsmobile.

  In rural Mississippi, the NAACP’s activities extended beyond the pursuit of integration through the courts. Often the organization investigated the murders of blacks because local police generally dismissed such killings as “accidents.” During his first year with the NAACP, Evers traveled to the town of Money in search of evidence and witnesses for the trial of the two men accused of the kidnapping and murder of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till. That same year, Evers also visited the town of Belzoni, along with Ruby Hurley, the NAACP’s regional director based in Birmingham, Alabama. In Belzoni the two searched for people who might have witnessed the murder of the Reverend George Lee, a local black minister who had helped organize a branch of the NAACP and had also dared to register to vote.

  As an NAACP organizer, Evers was an obvious target for white terrorism. Friends who rang his doorbell might hear the sounds of someone barricading the door with furniture. The window blinds were always drawn, and Evers kept several guns in the house and one in the Oldsmobile. He coached his children on what to do if shooting ever broke out: they were to lie flat on the floor or, if possible, hide in the bathtub.

  The Evers family received daily death threats over the telephone. Evers always listened, sometimes trying to persuade the callers that they had no reason to be so angry. His wife Myrlie once answered the phone and heard a woman’s voice say, “What are you trying to do? That nigger husband of yours is going to get himself killed if he doesn’t watch his step!” Mrs. Evers retorted, “You must be a fool … Hate like that will build up inside you until it poisons you.” The caller began to curse.

  “Then I heard Medgar’s voice on the [extension] telephone,” Myrlie Evers recalls. He asked his wife to hang up.

  Evers waited as the caller attacked him and blacks in general. Then the woman’s husband got on the line and continued the tirade. Eventually, the conversation cooled off, and Evers said goodbye in a friendly voice. He then turned to his wife.

  Medgar Evers (left), the first full-time field secretary for the NAACP in Mississippi, sits next to NAACP officials Ruby Hurley and Gloster Current.

  “Myrlie,” he said, “don’t ever do what you did. If you can’t take it, just put the phone down … You can sometimes win them over if you are just patient enough.”

  “Through the telephone calls and threats, as well as editorials in the newspapers,” Mrs. Evers said years later, whites “were saying that this was simply not a time for this kind of organization—that it was going to do more harm to blacks than good. Blacks, on the other hand, were afraid for the most part—afraid of losing jobs, afraid of being hurt, afraid of being killed. So for [Medgar or] any one person trying to organize it was a very difficult task, because you were dealing with almost insurmountable odds against eliminating the fear from black people’s hearts and getting them to become actively involved. I think of how even some of our classmates would see Medgar coming and cross the street … We would go door to door to some of the teachers’ homes, and talk to them about joining the NAACP, and they’d say, ‘No way, I’ll lose my job.’ The only black newspaper [in Jackson] was very negative about Medgar. He was called a young upstart, wet behind the ears, and someone who would never be able to pull together black people because they had better sense than being involved with an organization like the NAACP.”

  After the Supreme Court’s Brown decision in 1954, white segregationists in Mississippi hardened their stance. Not only did they refuse to integrate the schools, they also altered the state constitution to permit Mississippi officials to close schools to avoid desegregation. The state legislature also outlawed common-law marriage. That meant that many black children were suddenly considered illegitimate in the eyes of the state and therefore, under another Mississippi law, ineligible to attend public school. To avoid the NAACP lawsuit on school integration, the legislature banned “barratry,” which is the offense of frequently stirring up lawsuits and legal quarrels.

  Many of the state’s prominent bankers, lawyers, doctors, and politicians joined the white Citizens’ Council. “There was concern about inter-racial dating, to be perfectly frank,” said William Simmons, then editor of the organization’s newspaper. “The Citizens’ Councils were formed in the summer of 1954 following the Brown v. Board of Education decision, for the reason that it dealt directly with education and parents were very concerned about their children, about the effect it would have on them … The strategy of the Citizens’ Council during the year following the U.S. Supreme Court decision was to delay, to delay, to delay …”

  In support of the white Citizens’ Council, the state legislature created the Sovereignty Commission, whose sole purpose was to preserve Mississippi’s “sovereign right” to maintain a segregated society. It was later revealed that, each month, the commission funneled $5,000 in taxpayers’ money into the aggressively racist Citizens’ Council.

  Medgar Evers worked with local leaders of the NAACP, including Amzie Moore, Rev. George Lee, Gus Courts, C. C. Bryant, and Aaron Henry. But violence stymied their progress. Lee was killed in 1955, and Courts was shot shortly thereafter and later driven out of the state.

  In July 1960, Robert Parris Moses, a twenty-six-year-old teacher from New York, was traveling through Mississippi for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, recruiting people for a SNCC conference that October. During the trip, Moses met Amzie Moore, a respected black businessman and local NAACP leader who was frustrated by the association’s lack of success. The student sit-ins in the South had begun just a few months earlier, and both men were intrigued by SNCC’s direct-action techniques. Moore encouraged Moses to bring more SNCC workers to Mississippi.

  The following summer, Moses returned to the Magnolia State with a team of SNCC workers. C. C. Bryant, head of the NAACP in the town of McComb, invited SNCC to begin a month-long campaign to register blacks there. Bryant’s overture to the student-run group was in keeping with the attitude of several local NAACP chapters, which often welcomed help from others. But the association’s national office in New York was less enthusiastic. The various civil rights organizations often found themselves competing for the limited funds available from supporters. They also vied frequently for the attention of the national media. The NAACP sought to make Mississippi its project, and the organization did not welcome the participation of other groups. Medgar Evers was pleased to accept assistance with the NAACP’s voter registration efforts, but he had to do so quietly.

  Thus the NAACP, an organization dedicated to ending discrimination through the legal and political systems, hoped to become the leading civil rights group in a state that recognized neither the authority of the law nor the sanctity of the courts. A further irony was that the association, whose members were mainly middle-class blacks, would find few such people to work with in Mississippi, the nation’s poorest state.

  SNCC’s Bob Moses, t
ogether with C. C. Bryant and NAACP member Webb Owens, planned a voter registration education program in McComb. They offered a weekly class teaching black people how to register. To ensure that the project was financially self-supporting, they accepted no money from SNCC. Instead they solicited small donations—often just five or ten dollars each—from local supporters. To save money, SNCC workers from out of state stayed with local NAACP members, and people volunteered their cars and their time.

  By early August, other SNCC workers had arrived in McComb. Reginald Robinson and John Hardy walked door to door, trying to convince black residents to take the registration test. Many of the region’s black people, eager to participate in the movement, asked the McComb activists to help them set up voter registration schools. As enthusiasm for the project grew, still more SNCC workers arrived, sent by the organization’s headquarters in Atlanta.

  But as the voter registration project burgeoned, so did white resistance. Bob Moses was arrested as he tried to accompany three people to the registrar’s office in Liberty, the county seat. A week later he was beaten up by Billy Jack Caston, a cousin of the local sheriff.

  In nearby Amite County, Moses met with NAACP leader E. W. Steptoe, whose tarpaper shack served as the movement’s base of operations there. Steptoe’s neighbor, farmer Herbert Lee, was a father of nine but prosperous enough to own a car. Lee agreed to drive Moses and Steptoe around the county during their door-to-door campaign.

  On August 18, SNCC worker Marion Barry arrived in McComb. A strong proponent of direct action, Barry set up a workshop for black teenagers to teach them nonviolent protest methods. Some of the youngsters had been helping Moses with the voter registration drive and felt frustrated that they themselves were too young to vote. Through Barry’s workshop, they now saw another way to participate. Two of the teenagers, Curtis Hayes and Hollis Watkins, staged a sit-in at the town’s whites-only Woolworth’s lunch counter—an unprecedented act in that rural county. The boys were arrested and sentenced to thirty days in jail.