Coming of Age in Mississippi

by Anne Moody

  The fairgrounds were everything I had heard they were. The compounds they put us in were two large buildings used to auction off cattle during the annual state fair. They were about a block long, with large openings about twenty feet wide on both ends where the cattle were driven in. The openings had been closed up with wire. It reminded me of a concentration camp. It was hot and sticky and girls were walking around half dressed all the time. We were guarded by four policemen. They had rifles and kept an eye on us through the wired sides of the building. As I looked through the wire at them, I imagined myself in Nazi Germany, the policemen Nazi soldiers. They couldn’t have been any rougher than these cops. Yet this was America, “the land of the free and the home of the brave.”

  About five-thirty we were told that dinner was ready. We were lined up single file and marched out of the compound. They had the cook from the city jail there. He was standing over a large garbage can stirring something in it with a stick. The sight of it nauseated me. No one was eating, girls or boys. In the next few days, many were taken from the fairgrounds sick from hunger.

  When I got out of jail on Saturday, the day before Medgar’s funeral, I had lost about fifteen pounds. They had prepared a special meal on campus for the Tougaloo students, but attempts to eat made me sicker. The food kept coming up. The next morning I pulled myself together enough to make the funeral services at the Masonic Temple. I was glad I had gone in spite of my illness. This was the first time I had ever seen so many Negroes together. There were thousands and thousands of them there. Maybe Medgar’s death had really brought them to the Movement, I thought. Maybe his death would strengthen the ties between Negroes and Negro organizations. If this resulted, then truly his death was not in vain.

  Just before the funeral services were over, I went outside. There was a hill opposite the Masonic Temple. I went up there to watch the procession. I wanted to see every moment of it.

  As the pallbearers brought the body out and placed it in a hearse, the tension in the city was as tight as a violin string. There were two or three thousand outside that could not get inside the temple, and as they watched, their expression was that of anger, bitterness, and dismay. They looked as though any moment they were going to start rioting. When Mrs. Evers and her two older children got into their black limousine, Negro women in the crowd began to cry and say things like “That’s a shame,” … “That’s a young woman,” … “Such well-looking children,” … “It’s a shame, it really is a shame.”

  Negroes formed a seemingly endless line as they began the march to the funeral home. They got angrier and angrier; however, they went on quietly until they reached the downtown section where the boycott was. They tried to break through the barricades on Capitol Street, but the cops forced them back into line. When they reached the funeral home, the body was taken inside, and most of the procession dispersed. But one hard core of angry Negroes decided they didn’t want to go home. With some encouragement from SNCC workers who were singing freedom songs outside the funeral home, these people began walking back toward Capitol Street.

  Policemen had been placed along the route of the march, and they were still there. They allowed the crowd of Negroes to march seven blocks, but they formed a solid blockade just short of Capitol Street. This was where they made everyone stop. They had everything—shotguns, fire trucks, gas masks, dogs, fire hoses, and billy clubs. Along the sidewalks and on the fringes of the crowd, the cops knocked heads, set dogs on some marchers, and made about thirty arrests, but the main body of people in the middle of the street was just stopped.

  They sang and shouted things like “Shoot, shoot” to the police, and then the police started to push them back slowly. After being pushed back about a block, they stopped. They wouldn’t go any farther. So the cops brought the fire trucks up closer and got ready to use the fire hoses on the crowd. That really broke up the demonstration. People moved back faster and started to go home. But it also made them angrier. Bystanders began throwing stones and bottles at the cops and then the crowd started too; other Negroes were pitching stuff from second- and third-story windows. The crowd drew back another block, leaving the space between them and the fire trucks littered with rocks and broken glass. John Doar came out from behind the police barricade and walked toward the crowd of Negroes, with bottles flying all around him. He talked to some of the people at the front, telling them he was from the Justice Department and that this wasn’t “the way.” After he talked for a few minutes, things calmed down considerably, and Dave Dennis and a few others began taking bottles away from people and telling them they should go home. After that it was just a clean-up operation. One of the ministers borrowed Captain Ray’s bull horn and ran up and down the street telling people to disperse, but by that time there were just a few stragglers.

  After Medgar’s death there was a period of confusion. Each Negro leader and organization in Jackson received threats. They were all told they were “next on the list.” Things began to fall apart. The ministers, in particular, didn’t want to be “next”; a number of them took that long-promised vacation to Africa or elsewhere. Meanwhile SNCC and CORE became more militant and began to press for more demonstrations. A lot of the young Negroes wanted to let the whites of Jackson know that even by killing off Medgar they hadn’t touched the real core of the Movement. For the NAACP and the older, more conservative groups, however, voter registration had now become number one on the agenda. After the NAACP exerted its influence at a number of strategy meetings, the militants lost.

  The Jackson Daily News seized the opportunity to cause more fragmentation. One day they ran a headline THERE IS A SPLIT IN THE ORGANIZATIONS, and sure enough, shortly afterward, certain organizations had completely severed their relations with each other. The whites had succeeded again. They had reached us through the papers by letting us know we were not together. “Too bad,” I thought. “One day we’ll learn. It’s pretty tough, though, when you have everything against you, including the money, the newspapers, and the cops.”

  Within a week everything had changed. Even the rallies were not the same. The few ministers and leaders who did come were so scared—they thought assassins were going to follow them home. Soon there were rallies only twice a week instead of every night.

  The Sunday following Medgar’s funeral, Reverend Ed King organized an integrated church-visiting team of six of us from the college. Another team was organized by a group in Jackson. Five or six churches were hit that day, including Governor Ross Barnett’s. At each one they had prepared for our visit with armed policemen, paddy wagons, and dogs—which would be used in case we refused to leave after “ushers” had read us the prepared resolutions. There were about eight of these ushers at each church, and they were never exactly the usherly type. They were more on the order of Al Capone. I think this must have been the first time any of these men had worn a flower in his lapel. When we were asked to leave, we did. We were never even allowed to get past the first step.

  A group of us decided that we would go to church again the next Sunday. This time we were quite successful. These visits had not been publicized as the first ones were, and they were not really expecting us. We went first to a Church of Christ, where we were greeted by the regular ushers. After reading us the same resolution we had heard last week, they offered to give us cab fare to the Negro extension of the church. Just as we had refused and were walking away, an old lady stopped us. “We’ll sit with you,” she said.

  We walked back to the ushers with her and her family. “Please let them in, Mr. Calloway. We’ll sit with them,” the old lady said.

  “Mrs. Dixon, the church has decided what is to be done. A resolution has been passed, and we are to abide by it.”

  “Who are we to decide such a thing? This is a house of God, and God is to make all of the decisions. He is the judge of us all,” the lady said.

  The ushers got angrier then and threatened to call the police if we didn’t leave. We decided to go.

  “We appre
ciate very much what you’ve done,” I said to the old lady.

  As we walked away from the church, we noticed the family leaving by a side entrance. The old lady was waving to us.

  Two blocks from the church, we were picked up by Ed King’s wife, Jeanette. She drove us to an Episcopal church. She had previously left the other two girls from our team there. She circled the block a couple of times, but we didn’t see them anywhere. I suggested that we try the church. “Maybe they got in,” I said. Mrs. King waited in the car for us. We walked up to the front of the church. There were no ushers to be seen. Apparently, services had already started. When we walked inside, we were greeted by two ushers who stood at the rear.

  “May we help you?” one said.

  “Yes,” I said. “We would like to worship with you today.”

  “Will you sign the guest list, please, and we will show you to your seats,” said the other.

  I stood there for a good five minutes before I was able to compose myself. I had never prayed with white people in a white church before. We signed the guest list and were then escorted to two seats behind the other two girls in our team. We had all gotten in. The church service was completed without one incident. It was as normal as any church service. However, it was by no means normal to me. I was sitting there thinking any moment God would strike the life out of me. I recognized some of the whites, sitting around me in that church. If they were praying to the same God I was, then even God, I thought, was against me.

  When the services were over the minister invited us to visit again. He said it as if he meant it, and I began to have a little hope.

  Chapter

  TWENTY-THREE

  In July, CORE opened up an office in Canton, Mississippi, to start a voter registration campaign in Madison County. By this time, I was so fed up with the fighting and bickering among the organizations in Jackson, I was ready to go almost anywhere, even Madison County, where Negroes frequently turned up dead. Shortly before Christmas a man’s headless corpse had been found on the road between Canton and Tougaloo with the genitals cut off and with K’s cut into the flesh all over his body. Around the time the body was found, Tougaloo College had received a lot of threats, so an inventory was made of all the males on campus to see if any were missing.

  When Reverend King discovered that I had agreed to work with CORE in the area, he was very much concerned. He discussed Canton with me, telling me he thought the place was too rough for girls. Some of my girlfriends also begged me not to go. But I just had to. I don’t know why I felt that way, but I did.

  Because I had come from Wilkinson County, I just didn’t think Madison could be any worse. Things might even be a little better, I thought, since in Madison there were three Negroes to every white. I remembered that in Jackson there had been one point when I could see the white folks actually tremble with fear. At times when we were having mass demonstrations we had them so confused they didn’t know what to do. Whenever I could detect the least amount of fear in any white Mississippian, I felt good. I also felt there was a chance of winning the battle regardless of how costly it turned out to be.

  Disregarding all acts of violence, Madison County was considered a place with a possible future for Negroes. In addition to the fact that our records showed that there was a population of twenty-nine thousand Negroes as against nine thousand whites, Negroes owned over 40 percent of the land in the county. However, there were only about one hundred and fifty to two hundred registered to vote, and these had registered as a result of a campaign conducted by a few local citizens a couple of years earlier. Of this number, less than half were actually voting.

  I arrived in Canton with Dave Dennis one Friday evening, and was taken straight to the CORE office, a small room adjoining a Negro café. The café was owned by C. O. Chinn and his wife, a well-established Negro family. It was located on Franklin Street in the center of one of Canton’s Negro sections. Dave and I were just in time to have supper there with George Raymond, the project director, and Bettye Poole, my old Tougaloo buddy.

  Dave introduced me to Mrs. Chinn. She was a stout lady with a warm and friendly smile. I liked her right away. I spent the entire evening sitting around the office talking to her and George Raymond about Madison County.

  The office had been open only a few weeks, and in that time, Mrs. Chinn had already had her liquor license taken away. The place had been broken into twice, and many Negroes had been physically threatened. George reported that so far mostly teen-agers were involved in the Movement. He said that about fifty dedicated teen-age canvassers showed up each day. They were sent out daily, but had little success. Most of the Negroes just didn’t want to be bothered, Mrs. Chinn told me. “That’s the way it is all over,” I thought. “Most Negroes have been thoroughly brainwashed. If they aren’t brainwashed, they are too insecure—either they work for Miss Ann or they live on Mr. Charlie’s place.”

  I just didn’t see how the Negroes in Madison County could be so badly off. They should have had everything going for them—out-numbering the whites three to one and owning just about as much land as they did. When I discussed this point with Mrs. Chinn, I discovered that, although they did own the land, they were allowed to farm only so much of it. Cotton is the main crop in Mississippi, and, as Mrs. Chinn explained that night, the federal government controls cotton by giving each state a certain allotment. Each state decides how much each county gets and each county distributes the allotments to the farmers. “It always ends up with the white people getting most of the allotments,” Mrs. Chinn said. “The Negroes aren’t able to get more, regardless of how much land they have.” Most of the farmers in Madison County were barely living off what they made from their land. Besides, they were never clear from debt. The independent farmers were practically like sharecroppers, because they always had their crop pledged in advance. The more I thought about it, the more it seemed that the federal government was directly or indirectly responsible for most of the segregation, discrimination, and poverty in the South.

  Later, I was taken to the Freedom House, which had been provided by Mrs. Chinn’s brother, Sonny. The house was newly built and very nice. There were three bedrooms, a living room, dining room, and kitchen. Sonny was a young man who had recently separated from his wife. Since his brother Robert lived with him now, we kind of crowded them, forcing them to share a bed. But they didn’t seem to mind. The more I saw of the Chinns, the more I began to like and respect them. They were the one Negro family in Canton who had put their necks on the chopping block. “If a couple of other families made similar commitments,” I thought, “we might just get this place moving.”

  There was a rally that night at the CORE office. Mrs. Chinn was the only adult there among about twenty teenagers. We sang freedom songs for about two hours. After that, George gave a brief talk, and introduced me, saying, “I want you people to meet one of my co-workers. She is going to spend some time with us here in and around Madison County. She is a real soul sister. Why don’t you stand, Anne?”

  As I rose, one of the boys in the back gave a wolf whistle. “I don’t mean that kind of soul sister, Esco,” George said. “What I mean is, she is dedicated, man. She has been beaten and kicked all over Jackson. Remember that bloody sit-in, and the other demonstrations? She was in all of them. She has been in jail four or five times, and as a result, she can’t even go home again. She is all right and don’t you guys go getting any notions. Anne, why don’t you say a few words?”

  I felt I had to say something real serious after those remarks. “Anyway,” I thought, “I better take advantage of such an introduction to put those teen-age boys in their place from the get-go. If not, I might have a little trouble on my hands later.” Therefore, I decided to pull the religious bit. Now that I was facing the street, I saw that outside the cops were on the ball. There they were, two carloads of them. They were taking it all in. “The watchdogs of the Klan. They wouldn’t miss a meeting for anything.” I was beginning to hate them with a pass
ion. “I just might try and give them something to think about, too,” I thought.

  “It seems as though a few of us have the spirit tonight,” I started.

  “Yes, we got it all right,” one of the boys said, somewhat freshly.

  “A few is not enough,” I continued. “If a change is gonna take place in Canton, as we just said in one of the songs, then it’s gonna take more than a few believers. Where are the rest of the adults besides Mrs. Chinn? Where are your parents, sisters and brothers and your other friends? We sit back and say that we want Freedom. We believe that all men are created equal. Some of us even believe we are free just because our constitution guarantees us certain ‘inalienable’ rights. There are the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth amendments that make us citizens and give us the right to vote. If you are depending on the writing on the wall to free you, you better forget it, it’s been there a long time. We’ve gotta be the ones to give it meaning. Some of us believe that once we get enough nerve, all we gotta do is walk up to Mr. Charlie and say, ‘Man, I want my freedom.’ Do you think that Mr. Charlie is going to dish it out to you on a silver platter?”

  “No, he’ll tell me that I am already free,” one of the boys said.

  “If he is that bold and thinks you are that crazy, then you should be bold and crazy enough to ask him a few more questions,” I said.

  “Questions like what?” he said.

  “Like ‘what am I free to do?’ ” I said. “Then name a few things you can’t do if he continues. In fact, if you ever get enough nerve to do it, let me know what happens.”