Pillar of Fire

by Taylor Branch

  Relief trucks pressed heavily against the logistical freeze in Greenwood, as young workers who lacked safe beds and an office suddenly needed storage space for shipments of food. In crisis, COFO secured one room of a dry cleaning plant called the Camel Pressing Shop on McLaurin Street, which held the workers but not much cargo. To break the lockout by the local churches, Hollis Watkins, up from Hattiesburg, shared the lesson of his success with Methodists, and James Bevel finally gained entry through Rev. D. L. Tucker to Turner Chapel AME. Freedom songs spilled from the first tentative church meetings in Greenwood, but the tiny, two-story structure quickly proved too small. Aiming for Wesley Chapel—with its ample basement and central location—Bevel obtained from presiding bishop Charles F. Golden a stiffening order that the pastor and congregation must admit the starving to sanctuary.

  Acute hunger transformed the paralyzed COFO project into a refuge of desperate hope. Recipients in the food lines met registration workers hand to hand, eye to eye, and registration workers seized every chance to tell them they were hungry in large part because they were second-class citizens, and that they would remain so until they laid claim to the right to vote. Of the few sharecroppers who began following the COFO staff down to the registrar’s office, nearly all were illiterate—better than 80 percent by the estimate of Bob Moses. As such, they were just the opposite of the exemplary, educated registrants that Justice Department lawyers and COFO’s own projects normally recruited. The sharecroppers came instead from the great masses being pushed for decades into big cities without education or prospects. (“This is why you have your big problems in Washington and Chicago,” Moses soon testified before Congress, “and I don’t know whose responsibility it is.”)

  In the fresh mayhem of the Greenwood COFO office, Moses spent hours discussing a trap within the circular powerlessness of racial subjugation itself: how to gain the vote without literacy, and literacy without the vote. One theoretical remedy was somehow to remove the literacy requirements in favor of universal suffrage, but such ideas touched the rawest nerve of the conflict between race and democracy. “We killed two-month-old Indian babies to take this country,” one white voter explained succinctly to the press, “and now they want us to give it away to the niggers.” On the literacy side of the trap, against generations of ignorance and segregated, dilapidated Negro schools, COFO workers grasped for small-scale relief from Martin Luther King’s new Citizenship Education Program, which offered intensive, one-week adult literacy courses near Savannah and Charleston. James Bevel and Diane Nash petitioned King to open a third citizenship school in the Delta. Nash urgently lobbied for the schools at the Carnegie Hall fund-raiser, but King’s administrator, Andrew Young, rejected the plan as unrealistic. “The chances are that you would be closed and the property confiscated in short order,” he wrote, “that is, if it wasn’t bombed first.” Young’s worry was hardly far-fetched; he had inherited his program after the Highlander Folk School suffered such a fate in Tennessee. He teased Nash in a postscript over her edgy, possessed mood, which was common among those who left and reentered Mississippi’s reality warp. “Diane, you really should have stayed over a day or so in New York so we could have ‘done the town,’” Young advised. “Then you’d have had to go back to Mississippi and work hard to get rid of your guilt.”

  AMONG THOSE who ogled Bob Moses from a distance was June Johnson, who had turned fifteen in December. One of twelve children being raised by a laborer and a maid, young Johnson had heard grown-ups whispering about the mysterious stranger in a tone very similar to the life-and-death gravity with which they had trained the children never to say a word about Emmett Till, even at home. One morning on the way to school, she led a fearful, half-giggling group of her friends up to Moses, walking a street with hands in his pockets, as always. “Are you from Greenwood?” she asked. When he said no, she asked boldly about the rumors that he was a Freedom Rider. Moses only smiled, asked about her family, and offered to carry her books.

  After that, Johnson found excuses to sneak near the COFO office on McLaurin Street. “Honey,” she told her sister, “I heard that they got some good-looking men up at that place.” One afternoon a mischievous friend pushed her headlong into Moses. “What you-all do here?” asked Johnson, recovering from embarrassment. “We hear you-all are troublemakers.”

  Moses replied that they were having a registration meeting that night, and asked if she might like to see one of the canvassing notebooks that explained why voting was so important. The girls took the notebook and ran, passing it back and forth like contraband. Before June Johnson could hide the notebook under her mattress, one of her sisters obediently informed their mother, Belle Johnson, whose wrath turned the whole house silent. She ordered her daughter to “trot right back down there” with the confiscated book and “don’t bring that stuff here no more.”

  THE DELTA FAMINE worsened until more than six hundred sharecroppers lined up outside Wesley Chapel on February 20, 1963. Cleveland Jordan, an old cotton-row preacher recruited to supervise the food distribution, kept up a running speech about the connection between poverty and voting. “We just mean to register and vote, and we don’t mean to fight and we don’t mean to run,” he said, calling to recipients by name. “We just mean to go to the polls and get our freedom.” Kerosene arson struck the Negro section of Greenwood that night, destroying four stores next to the Camel Pressing Shop. When Sam Block told sharecroppers in the relief line that the fire targeted the registration project, Greenwood police arrested him for incendiary public remarks.

  Block’s quick conviction and six-month sentence galvanized many sharecroppers who had heard him sing freedom songs as they received packets of Spam and cheese. More than 150 Negroes, nearly all from the relief lines, presented themselves at the courthouse on February 25 and 26. They still averted their eyes from white faces out of conditioned inferiority, and only a handful of them managed even to apply for the vote, but these limits only underscored their newfound tenacity. In spite of taunts and shouted threats from bystanders, including their plantation bosses, sharecroppers held their ground on the public sidewalk for two days and vowed to come back. Never before had Mississippi’s common Negroes stood in such numbers for the ballot.

  Two nights later, a sudden zipper-line of automatic gunfire from a Buick without license plates left thirteen bullets in a COFO car, wounding volunteer driver James Travis in the shoulder and neck as Moses managed to swerve to a halt in a roadside ditch. This attack made Greenwood a small national news item. In the immediate aftershock, COFO leaders decided to reinforce nonviolence against vigilantes by concentrating Mississippi volunteers from outlying projects into Greenwood. They arrived along with important people looking for information. Police at the bus station arrested and manhandled one well-dressed Negro before learning that he was a federal staff investigator for the Civil Rights Commission. From Washington, Attorney General Robert Kennedy himself pushed negotiations to make Leflore County resume the federal food relief, and Medgar Evers reported to his NAACP superiors in New York that he “noticed” a surprising surge of registration activity led by members of Greenwood’s defunct NAACP chapter—a portrayal that was almost entirely cosmetic salve for bureaucratic vanities at NAACP headquarters. Pretending to be alarmed, Evers pushed New York for permission to stay ahead of the competition.

  Andrew Young reached Greenwood the same day Evers did, bringing a concession to James Bevel and Diane Nash: they could have a walking, substitute literacy school in the person of Annell Ponder, one of three experienced teachers from SCLC’s Citizenship Education Program. On March 4, her first night in Greenwood, Ponder heard Bevel and Reverend Tucker urge the board members of Turner Chapel AME to open the church now to her literacy classes, and Ponder herself explained methods that her mentor, Septima Clark, had been developing nearly fifty years since World War I—teaching words from newspapers and the Bible, arithmetic mostly from simple, practical farm measures. With drills from basic civics—how to spell �
�freedom,” the basic duties of a sheriff—Clark needed only an intensive week’s retreat to have most former illiterates proudly signing their names, writing letters, and lining up at the courthouse, able and inspired to register. Moreover, she taught the early signs of gifted illiterates, who might be trained quickly to teach other illiterates, plus leaders at the next level who might teach other teachers, and so on through a small-scale miracle of compressed evolution. With permission from the skittish Turner Chapel board, her disciple Ponder started the first church-based literacy classes in the Mississippi Delta, two nights a week. Within a month, she enrolled more than 150 sharecroppers in primary classes.

  On the other side of Greenwood, white officials ended months of rancorous negotiations with federal representatives who argued that news stories on the willful starvation of disfranchised Negroes were embarrassing to U.S. leadership in the Free World. Leflore County supervisors defended their March 19 settlement as a strategic maneuver to spare Mississippi from an “invasion” of federal bureaucrats, but skeptical voters criticized them for spineless surrender. “Who is going to believe that Leflore County runs its own affairs now?” demanded the Greenwood Commonwealth. “This tends to prove that a naked political sword from the Kennedy arsenal in Washington has flashed into Leflore County to encourage the groups of racial agitators now operating here…. The power move by the Federal Government should have been resisted.”

  Four nights later, arsonists set fire to the COFO office at the Camel Pressing Shop. Curtis Hayes noticed smoke when he drove by about midnight, but he was helpless against the flames. Word of the fire boosted attendance for Annell Ponder’s first awards ceremony at the next night’s mass meeting. Announcing that eight of twelve students had persisted through rigors of second-level training, she called forward all eight women, including Fannie Lou Hamer, to receive graduation certificates proclaiming them qualified to teach literacy and citizenship. The next evening, March 26, a shotgun blast ripped through the front of the much-admired Greene family—a son had applied to succeed James Meredith as the second Negro at Ole Miss—and nearly two hundred supporters gathered spontaneously outside Wesley Chapel the next morning to sing freedom songs. Bob Moses made occasional remarks from the sidewalk. SNCC’s executive director, James Forman—who had rushed from Atlanta to investigate the office fire—suggested a march downtown, but squad cars soon converged on Wesley Chapel and officers with guns drawn waded in to arrest SNCC leaders they could recognize, including Forman, Moses, Willie Peacock, and Lawrence Guyot.

  Sudden spasms opened and shut the Greenwood registration movement to the world like a fluttering lens. Dozens of reporters, including a CBS News camera crew, reached Greenwood before the next day, March 28, to observe one hundred Negroes who stood all morning in the registration line outside the courthouse, then marched two abreast toward Wesley Chapel once the registrar closed his office for an extended lunch hour. The orderly spectacle offended crowds of white citizens along the route, many of whom cheered “Sic ’em! Sic ’em!” when officers piled into the line behind police dogs. Negroes scattered in bedlam. Cleveland Jordan half dragged an injured Reverend Tucker in desperate retreat behind a young COFO staff member, Charlie Cobb. President Kennedy saw a photograph of a German shepherd biting Tucker in the next morning’s New York Times, and sent word that Burke Marshall should do something about it. Medgar Evers earned thunderous ovation with a resettlement donation for an elderly minister evicted because he refused to withdraw his registration application. With Dick Gregory, James Bevel led audacious courthouse marches through barricades of fire trucks. When a week’s national attention generated a question about Greenwood at the next White House press conference, President Kennedy said there did appear to be violations of federally protected rights, including the right to vote, but deflected judgment with an announcement that his Justice Department had just filed suit on the issue and “the court must decide.”

  Later that same day, April 3, John Doar visited Bob Moses and his fellow COFO leaders in the Leflore County jail. The prisoners were overjoyed to be the Justice Department’s new clients in a legal action just announced on national television by the President of the United States himself. They had refused bail for eight days to maintain public leverage toward precisely this result, and Moses understood Doar’s statutory jargon well enough to know this was a long-awaited “(b) suit.” Instead of undertaking to prove by tedious accumulation a “pattern” of voting preference that could be explained only by race, as in the long-standing “(a) suit” against Theron Lynd in Hattiesburg, a (b) suit alleged specific acts of unlawful “intimidation” by local officials against would-be voters. The government’s burden of proof was higher in a (b) suit, but the enforcement sanctions were correspondingly greater: criminal injunctions, federal arrest, and in extreme cases court-ordered replacement of offending registrars with federal substitutes.

  Guards unexpectedly threw open the jail doors the next morning for the blinking COFO prisoners, who were slow to accept the good news of freedom. All charges dropped. No bail. Free to go. When they observed no tricks, high spirits spilled over into dancing and tears. At long last they felt the decisive intervention of the federal government behind the voting movement, but Moses intuited something amiss. He hung back apprehensively from the celebrations in Negro Greenwood until a wordless exchange of looks with John Doar killed any trace of euphoria that same day.

  The moment was no better for Doar. He had made his arguments for the (b) suit inside the Justice Department, but Burke Marshall and Robert Kennedy went against him in a close decision governed less by risk of losing than by fear of winning. A (b) suit victory against Mississippi officials raised for them a “Meredith problem” of contempt on a potentially open-ended scale, causing a vacuum of public order that the U.S. government might be obliged to fill with soldiers and bureaucrats in numbers not seen since Reconstruction. This prospect was so grim that Kennedy and Marshall bargained instead to drop the (b) suit in exchange for release of the COFO leaders. For good measure, the federal government agreed to pay local distribution costs for the surplus food, which allowed county officials to say honestly that not a dime of local tax money supported protesting sharecroppers.

  The overnight truce removed the two most inflammatory public conflicts between the federal and Mississippi governments, but Doar faced vigorous dissent from his own staff lawyers. Several of them had pushed to the point of rebellion once before, when the Kennedy Justice Department declined to file (b) suits in response to the forceful repressions that drove Moses from his original McComb project in 1961. This was politics again, the dissenting lawyers argued—a Democratic administration did not want to punish Democratic officeholders—to which Doar replied that in barely two years the administration had turned the South from a bastion of Democratic support into a region where the Kennedy name was heard most often as an epithet, largely because of Robert Kennedy’s positions on civil rights. This was hardly a record of pure expediency, said Doar, who argued stoically for loyal duty in the chain of command.

  First sight of Moses—only hours out of jail—made Doar swallow his planned explanations, knowing how conscientiously Moses had followed advice to build his work around voting rather than sit-ins, how steadfastly he had relied upon assurances that voting was the firmest ground of national authority in race relations. What the governments saw as a trade-off, the forlorn Moses saw as a catastrophe. Having sacrificed willingly and purposefully toward the goal of federally protected voting rights, he realized that the government surrendered that leverage to reduce public pressure. Worse, the deal punctured a Greenwood movement that had taken a year to build from nothing. It receded swiftly from that April 4, the same day Esther James won her libel judgment against Adam Clayton Powell far away in New York. Reporters evacuated Greenwood within a week, and previous conditions were restored in many respects. Local officials prudently supplied a courtesy bus between Wesley Chapel and the courthouse, so voting applicants could obtain reje
ctions with less public friction.

  BEFORE THE LEADERS made their way out of Greenwood by bus and carpool over the weekend of April 12, young June Johnson boldly told Moses that she would run away from home unless he found a way for her to attend SNCC’s annual conference. Mesmerized through the upheaval, she fixed upon the notion that in Atlanta she might learn where these movement Negroes came from, and pestered Moses until he agreed to visit her mother. When she tried to sidestep the undertow by insisting that her daughter must have a suitable female chaperone, Johnson soon returned unfazed with Moses and the impeccable Annell Ponder, who offered to keep June in an apartment she retained from her college teaching days. Distress pulled Belle Johnson between the ominous comments she picked up as a maid in the homes of white families and the novel pleas of upstanding strangers on behalf of her headstrong daughter. When she finally relented, an ecstatic June Johnson made her first trip out of Mississippi.

  Greenwood supplied sixty of some 350 students who gathered at Gammon Theological Seminary on the campus of Atlanta University. Some veterans from scattered outposts already displayed symptoms of nonviolent combat fatigue. These were heroes made suddenly fragile and young. Intensity spilled in all directions—between self-hatred and messianic pride, utopianism and fresh disillusionment, cynicism and psalms, race as a tissue of irrational fiction or a huge chamber of primary stuff. Remarkably, students wrestled openly with issues that for many generations baffled elders into avoidance. “It’s still not clear to my mind, even on the voting issue, that Negroes will gain the vote rapidly enough,” Moses told the conference. “The squeeze is always the automation of the cotton crops, the inability of the Negro with his poor education to adapt to new technology, the unwillingness of the white people to train them, and the programs of the Citizens Council to move them out.” Against this tide of misery and oppression, there was little solace in the movement’s distant goal of voting rights for the tiny minority of educated Negroes. Only a suffrage without slippery qualifications offered hope, said Moses, taking up the slogan of the African anticolonial movements: “one man, one vote.” Thinking out loud, he urged the students not to minimize the political cost of this demand to white Southerners, who would face a new electorate in which the controlling, marginal voter would be a Negro unable to read or write. No other Americans faced such a prospect, including those most attached to the image of potbellied, ignorant Southerners.