Pillar of Fire

by Taylor Branch

  A COLD MORNING rain was pelting Main Street on Tuesday, January 22, when a phalanx of riot-trained auxiliary police marched into sight three abreast—some in yellow slickers, all with helmets, truncheons, and conspicuously holstered guns—and halted on military command in front of the newly formed picket line at the Forrest County courthouse. Some eighty pickets stoically refused a series of bullhorn orders to disperse. Intermingled, the visiting clergy and movement stalwarts braced to absorb a charge, while a hundred white spectators across the street waited expectantly to ogle, cringe, or cheer. After some minutes of standoff, one of the bystanders asked what was going on, and a troubled voice replied from the police formation, “Well, we got to protect the niggers that want to vote.”

  Few people heard this comment, and even those who did notice the police line turn sullenly from the pickets toward the bystanders were confused at first, figuring a ploy. Guyot stared as though the police unit had levitated. When it dawned on Jack Pratt that an assured mass arrest was turning into the first state-protected civil rights demonstration in the history of Mississippi, his reflex reaction was terror that he and other jubilant sympathizers on the far side of the street would become targets of the vengeful betrayal that swept through the segregationist crowd all around them. Some Negro observers who had held back, fearing arrest, suddenly decided they would be safer among the pickets, and a darting few became a stream of crossovers to augment the lines. Others were inspired to go beyond the pickets to take their first voting tests in the courthouse, where Registrar Lynd was accepting applications one at a time in a calculated stall. Daisy Harris asked James Forman to escort her past the police and the pickets, but her legs went limp as Forman half carried her to the courthouse side. Forman pressed Sheriff Bud Gray about why he permitted only four Negro registrants at a time inside the courthouse, where whites roamed freely, making others like Daisy Harris line up outside in the rain.

  With city prosecutors and other Hattiesburg officials who had jurisdiction over the sidewalks, Sheriff Gray had reached a difficult decision not to arrest the pickets. The prevailing thought was to spare the “Hub City”—home of the University of Southern Mississippi and Camp Shelby, the second largest Army camp in the nation, as well as the new governor—a “black eye” of publicity for arresting prominent white preachers, especially now, with Theron Lynd so exposed in defiance of the Supreme Court. The surprise stance of the city fathers frustrated the efforts of SNCC’s communications office in Atlanta, headed by Julian Bond, which by diligent promotion of impending drama had drawn to Hattiesburg a large contingent of reporters and network camera crews. For them, even an unprecedented picket line was a dull story. “In such situations, blood and guts are news,” candidly observed the New York Times correspondent on the scene, “and there is no blood and guts.”

  Having won the press battle, the city fathers had to endure the rest of the day when hopes proved unfounded that the demonstrators would retire rather than stand in the soaking rain. Officers harassed the swelling lines of pickets and would-be voters. By late morning, annoyance focused on Bob Moses, the young New Yorker widely recognized among Mississippi officials as responsible for much of the Negro voting agitation over the past three years. Moses, ordered to vacate the area, withdrew for consultations but quickly reappeared with a small sign—“Register to Vote”—which made him the “lone picket” among the observers across Main Street. As Moses prepared to escort an aspiring registrant to the courthouse, police officer John Quincy Adams moved to place him under arrest for breach of the peace, whereupon Moses publicly announced that he was making a citizen’s arrest of Officer Adams instead, for violation of Section 242, Title 18 of the U.S. Code. By prearrangement, SNCC chairman John Lewis urgently summoned nearby FBI agents to assist Moses in his declared enforcement of the federal criminal statute forbidding state interference with the lawful exercise of voting rights. When the Bureau agents stood passive, merely adding the request to their written notes on the day’s events, Adams and two reinforcements hustled Moses off to jail.

  By their theater of dueling arrests, Moses and Lewis acted out the enforcement of elementary voting rights that the movement so desperately wanted from Washington, and at times had been promised. Their point was too technical for news and was lost on most of the Northern clergy, who did their best to keep marching. Like the movement itself, they experienced epiphanies and wild mood swings. The whole world seemed to have changed, then nothing at all. To rise above hostility and fatigue, a chorus of pickets formed on the courthouse steps behind the sidewalk lines and sang movement songs through the afternoon rush hour. Swaying along on her gimpy hip, Fannie Lou Hamer belted out the solo lines of “Which Side Are You On?” In memoirs written nearly twenty years later, John Coventry Smith would remember the patriotic lyric “My Country ’Tis of Thee” as anything but corny: “Try to sing ‘America’ under these circumstances and you begin to understand what a revolutionary song it is.”

  Freedom Day turned into the siege of Hattiesburg. Having gained an unexpected toehold on the right of public petition, the movement participants vowed to maintain the picket line indefinitely. They marched again all the next day, then gathered for the evening trial of Bob Moses in municipal court, where presiding judge Mildred Norris smoked from a long cigarette holder and fanned herself with one of the picket signs seized as evidence: a photograph of small dark children above the caption “Give Them a Future in Mississippi.” Observing the Northern clergy and Mississippi Negroes scattered without regard to racial custom, Judge Norris ordered marshals to segregate the courtroom, but she relented to general astonishment after defense counsel Pratt asked for a recess. Allowing Hattiesburg’s first judicial integration, “provided you do not create a disturbance,” the judge promptly imposed a guilty verdict and sent Moses back to jail under a sentence of sixty days.

  Other judges quickly restored segregated courtrooms, and the siege retained a touch of surrealism. Something boyish and perplexed about his boast, “My dog’s so mean he’d bite another police officer,” produced howling laughter rather than terror for Officer J. Q. Adams along the picket lines. The county attorney snappishly interpreted a fruit basket meant for prisoner Moses as a slur on the quality of Southern jail food. Sheriff Gray shared convivial meals with white opponents during truce hours, and more than once honored Jack Pratt and companions with a “little taste” of vintage bootleg whiskey from the confiscated stocks that had supplied Governor Johnson’s inauguration. On Saturday, January 26, a deranged Negro prophetess leaped around the perimeter of the picket line, shouting, “Preachers gone astray! Preachers gone astray!” Neither side claimed her. By then, after five days on the sidewalks, John Coventry Smith had cut slits in his shoes to relieve swollen feet, and regular hecklers were calling him “grandpa nigger” with a trace of comforting familiarity.

  ON SUNDAY, the first batch of replacement clergy arrived in Hattiesburg, summoned by emergency phone barrage from new territories in Colorado, Illinois, and Missouri. Nine of them were arrested the following week, but they handed an unbroken line to twenty-one third-week successors. Home reports of the forerunner clergy spread enough inspiration to keep up the logistical miracle of a perpetual picket line, supplied from distant pulpits. In response, local officials soon arrested Guyot on charges that his speeches corrupted minors, fired Victoria Gray’s husband from his job at the city waterworks, along with several others recognized on the picket lines, then aimed new discouragements at the visiting clergy. The city obtained a restraining order against Moses and the religious groups, and in April the state legislature would seek to relieve Hattiesburg with a law against picketing near public buildings, under which sixty pickets went to jail. Still, the defendants bailed out to maintain a continuous presence at the courthouse, while the federal appellate courts disposed of the laws, and pickets marched on through spring into summer, the pilgrim clergy in week-long shifts.

  Their tenacity gained little public notice, in part because Hattiesbu
rg never became a major news story in 1964, but the waves swept quietly through the church world into politics. Beyond their contributions in Hattiesburg itself, the new veterans brought home powerful tales. “You asked what the point of it is,” a Presbyterian from rural Illinois wrote his two sons. “I think the point is that this is much like Germany at the beginning of Hitler’s rise—fear, police intimidation, and summary arrests. I don’t want you, or any other kids, to grow up in America in those circumstances.” By strategic coincidence, the Northern Protestants were strongest precisely where the fate of the national civil rights bill would be decided—in the Midwest and Mountain States—where civil rights groups and labor unions were scarce and the race issue least familiar. There was no better catalyst for dormant church influence than the astonished personal accounts of Mississippi, delivered by respected ministers to congregations, colleagues, and members of Congress back home in Iowa or Minnesota.

  Robert Spike saw these possibilities. Only six months into his new job at the National Council, he pitched them both to the White House and to Bob Moses. For Moses, it was Spike’s shrewd vision on the potential combinations of movement experience and conventional politics that made him trust Spike’s reservations about Hattiesburg. Spike had thought a one-day jailing was too great a risk for too little gain, that the Presbyterians alone might jeopardize his work to mobilize all the ecumenical churches. Once Hattiesburg became a conveyor belt of transformed and transforming church lobbyists, Spike modified his approach to religious administration. “Never ask in advance” became his motto to the staff for moving any church bureaucracy into racial controversy.

  One such step for Spike was the proposed Freedom Summer in Mississippi. In Hattiesburg, the gathered movement leaders resumed debate on this larger issue after picket hours on January 24, with Moses still in jail. Speaking for SNCC headquarters in Atlanta, James Forman complained that the number of students sought for the Mississippi summer project had fluctuated crazily with every meeting: from five thousand in November down to a mere one hundred in December, now back up to one thousand. Ella Baker said plans were galloping in opposite directions. The National Council of Churches already hoped to establish a permanent civil rights ministry in the Delta, for instance, but movement workers there had just informed Baker that they opposed having any Northern whites at all. Some told her it would be impossible to house integrationist whites safely anywhere in the Delta, let alone associate with them in public. Others objected that articulate whites would dominate their projects, still others that white students would approach backward Mississippi as a piece of “sociological research.”

  McArthur Cotton, who had hung by his handcuffs from Parchman cell bars the previous August, expressed a note of pragmatism. Although he agreed with critics who saw the summer project as haphazard, manipulative, and poorly defined, Cotton said he would wind up doing “all I can” for an influx of Northern volunteers. The movement was messy anyway, said Cotton, and everybody knew that recruitment was going on in the North while they argued. This was true. Not only was Al Lowenstein barnstorming college campuses in search of summer volunteers, but more whites were headed south to join the permanent movement staff. That very week in January, young New Yorkers Michael and Rita Schwerner were opening a CORE community center in Meridian.*

  Against impassioned, protective argument that the Mississippi movement should remain local, and should avoid schemes aimed toward publicity or national politics, leaders already were looking beyond the summer project to the national political conventions. Rev. Edwin King had submitted a week earlier the first draft of “Plans for Action at Democratic National Convention.” Toward the strategic, educational goal of challenging Mississippi’s regular delegates as segregationist, and therefore illegitimate, King recommended forming alliances with supportive civil rights groups nationwide. “They could also advise us on the possibilities for civil disobedience,” the report concluded, “not against the convention itself (which would probably not win us any friends) but against the Mississippi delegation—lying in front of their hotel rooms, etc. Bob Moses is trying to get such a group together, we understand.”

  Moses himself bailed out of the Hattiesburg jail the following week. On Friday, January 31, Guyot swapped places with him to begin a six-month sentence on his conviction for influencing children with movement speeches, and that night Moses kept silent through another marathon argument about the summer project for 1964. Against pleas of emergency and exhaustion, he refused to use his influence to end the bickering. Once, in a mass meeting, Moses had risen to point out that the congregation had just applauded with equal enthusiasm two rousing speeches advocating opposite courses. They must think about consistency as they claimed the rights of free citizens, he had said before sitting down. In the Hattiesburg strategy sessions, Moses withheld his recommendations even from those who knew of his farsighted contingency plans. By withdrawal, he dramatized his conviction that the movement should draw leadership from the people rather than impose it from above. He waited steadfastly for consensus. Paradoxically, his self-effacing reluctance enlarged his mystique and the hunger of people to follow him.

  THE STALEMATE carried over to the morning of February 1, when COFO state chairman Aaron Henry called from Clarksdale with news that yanked Moses out of Hattiesburg. He drove alone west across southern Mississippi through McComb into Amite County, reproaching himself for losing track of Louis Allen since his warning letter to John Doar (“They are after him in Amite…”) more than a year earlier, after Deputy Sheriff Daniel Jones had broken Allen’s jaw with a flashlight. A struggling, independent logger of forty-four, Allen had witnessed the event that snuffed out the first SNCC Mississippi project in 1961. Bravely, or naively, Allen had told the FBI and other federal investigators that he saw state representative E. H. Hurst execute by point-blank gunfire on a public street a farmer named Herbert Lee, one of the few Amite County Negroes to express support for Moses’ voting classes, and that he had been pressured to say otherwise. Now, after this fatal shooting, white reporters from McComb carefully reported local legend that the victim Allen had been the “‘tip-off man’ for the integration-minded Justice Department.”

  Moses had anticipated what grieving relatives told him. The great swell of the national movement that lifted and obsessed Moses all through 1963 had touched even neglected Amite County, where white fears of Negro domination flared around Louis Allen. Although there was no realistic chance then or later for the Lee murder case to be reopened, Allen heard that he was marked for worse than a broken jaw. He had tried more than once to leave Mississippi, which fed the rumor of a plot to secure his testimony from a safe remove. A matching panic took hold of Negroes, to the point that one of Moses’ old contacts admitted he had jumped into a roadside ditch when a white man’s car approached, just to avoid being seen with Allen. Finally, on a promise of free lodging with one of his brothers, Allen bought a railroad ticket to Milwaukee for the morning of February 1. To overcome the handicap of his second-grade education in a new city without jobs for loggers, he took the risk of asking former white employers for work recommendations, knowing the requests would spread word of his renewed plans to migrate. A mill owner for whom Allen worked seven years said he could not take the chance of helping a suspected Communist.

  Elizabeth Allen told Moses her husband had cried through the day before his departure, doubting that he could survive in Milwaukee or hope to send for his family. He had made one last appeal—for a local employer to write a letter vouching that he could drive a bulldozer—then drove home after supper and saw the ambush coming just when he started to open his farm gate at the highway. Allen dived headlong back under his pickup, whose motor was still running, and scrambled toward the rear. His feet were beneath the front bumper when the killer crouched low enough to aim a shotgun under the chassis. The first shot tore off Allen’s forehead from his left hairline; the second ripped through his neck and blew out the left front tire. The truck ran out of gas and the
battery died before young Henry Allen discovered his father’s body.

  Moses arrived just after the former deputy Daniel Jones, recently elected high sheriff, stood at the murder site to tell reporters that while there were no suspects he had ruled out voting agitation as a motive. Ordered to investigate a suspected political murder, FBI Director Hoover issued his hold-our-nose instruction reserved for unpleasant civil rights cases: “Advise All Persons Interviewed [That] Investigation Is At Specific Request [of] AAG [Assistant Attorney General] Burke Marshall.” By adopting the rationale of Sheriff Jones, if not his word, the Bureau concluded within hours that there was no basis for investigation of a federal crime, inasmuch as “the victim is not a registered voter, has never been active in voter registration activities, and there has been no voter registration activity in Amite County in the past two or three years.” No charge would be brought in the Allen murder case.