The convergence of older activists—many of them veterans, like Moore—with the generation of Afro-Americans who came of age following World War II would spark a critical new phase in the Freedom Movement struggle. In Moore’s case, a significant connection occurred during the late summer of 1960, when a Harlem-born, Harvard-educated teacher named Bob Moses was traveling the South recruiting students to participate in a SNCC conference being planned for October. Ella Baker—SCLC’s acting executive director and a highly respected adult adviser to SNCC—sent Moses to Moore. Although Moore admired the sit-ins that had become SNCC’s main mode of action, he was not interested in having them in Cleveland; instead, he encouraged Moses to consider a voter-registration campaign. “Amzie was the only one I met on that trip giving the student sit-in movement careful attention, aware of all that student energy and trying to figure out how to use it,” remembers Bob Moses. “He opened up his home to me, had conversations with me and that was really an education for me.” Mississippi and the Black-Belt South in general had been largely invisible to Moses, and although news like that of Emmett Till’s lynching and of school desegregation issues reached him in New York City, he had no idea that southern blacks were still being denied the right to vote. During the previous decade, says Moses, “I was taught about the denial of the right to vote behind the Iron Curtain in Europe; I never knew that there was denial of the right to vote behind a Cotton Curtain here in the United States.”
Amzie Moore attended the October SNCC conference that Moses had been promoting, although it cannot be said that Moore’s voter-registration proposal was met with great enthusiasm. A larger, more intense discussion about filling up the jails with nonviolent protesters dominated participants’ thinking—“jail without bail.” The invitation to the October conference had stated, “Only mass action is strong enough to force all of America to assume responsibility and … nonviolent direct action alone [emphasis added] is strong enough to enable all of America to understand the responsibility she must assume.”
By the summer of 1961, the Kennedy administration was watching sit-ins, and especially Freedom Rides, nervously—and with no small degree of hostility. President John F. Kennedy and his brother Attorney General Robert Kennedy felt that they threatened their administration’s domestic and foreign policy agenda by embarrassing the United States and angering powerful Dixiecrats, and so—in what must be one of the great political miscalculations of the 1960s—they pressed student activists to abandon direct-action protests and work instead on voter registration. They thought that such work would be much more acceptable to southern white power than sit-ins seeking desegregation. Therefore, the Kennedys and other high-ranking administration officials concluded, a voter-registration campaign would be met with less white violence than desegregation efforts. In turn, because voter-registration efforts would be far less dramatic—not likely to be seen on television or on the front pages of newspapers—civil rights struggle would be less embarrassing to the United States as it competed with the Soviet Union for influence with newly independent nations in the Third World—nations that, crucially, were mostly Asian, African, and Latin American. Robert Kennedy offered assurance that money from tax-exempt foundations his family controlled or influenced could be made available for voter-registration campaigns.
Many Freedom Movement activists viewed the Kennedy administration’s gesture with suspicion. Some of SNCC’s key leaders felt strongly that they would be selling out by devoting time and energy to voter registration when more immediate and everyday forms of discrimination persisted all across the South. They also felt that the moral dimension of the movement would be lost to political opportunism. The Kennedys’ willingness to help pay for voter-registration campaigns only added to their suspicion, for it seemed like a cynical political ploy, an attempt to use money to divert the movement from the sort of militant, direct-action protest they knew the Kennedy brothers hated. The Kennedys’ indifference to enforcing existing civil rights law and their hostility to protests challenging segregationist violations of those laws had already led many in the movement to come to disturbing conclusions: that the administration’s own political needs took priority over the enforcement of civil rights law, and that the Kennedys were more than willing to compromise with southern bigots in order to achieve their political goals. Furthermore, some of these student leaders believed that electoral politics was inherently immoral because, more often than not, it required that principle be sacrificed for political advantage, a belief that only added to their resistance to turning to voter-registration drives.
There was, however, interest in voter registration by some within the newly formed SNCC, not because of the persuasiveness of the Kennedys but because of Moore, Baker, and other older movement stalwarts who had been fighting for civil rights much longer than the youthful activists of SNCC. They were moving toward organizing for voter registration along a different political track than the one laid out by the Kennedys: real power for real change. So, lukewarm interest by SNCC activists notwithstanding, the following summer Bob Moses returned to Mississippi, as he had promised Amzie Moore, to begin SNCC’s first voter-registration project in the state. In so doing, he foreshadowed an important shift in SNCC’s strategy, a shift that brought it into line with the broad black consensus in the South, which held that voter registration was the primary need and should be the primary struggle. Indeed, despite the ambivalence of many young activists toward voter registration, SNCC’s October 1960 conference—converging as it did with Moses’s “discovery” of Moore and Mississippi—marks the beginning of SNCC’s slow movement away from the kind of religiously rooted ideals of love and redemptive suffering expressed in its founding statement, and toward an appreciation of the more secular practicalities of grassroots political organizing in the violent, rural Black Belt.
Nonviolent direct actions would bring other young people—southerners for the most part—into the older tradition of community organizing, and they would become deeply involved with both SNCC and CORE, rapidly moving those organizations into grassroots efforts to expand black voter registration. The SNCC-driven voter-registration effort in Mississippi initiated by Moses first got off the ground in the southwestern corner of the state and then a year later moved into the Delta. There, in the northwestern corner of Mississippi, SNCC dug in. Amzie Moore’s Cleveland home served as an early command center, a stopping-off point for a breakfast of scrambled eggs or a dinner of spaghetti and meatballs (often with canned peaches in thick syrup for dessert). Moore’s house had a telephone and an extra bed or floor space if needed, and it was always churning with ideas, conversation, and planning.
The local people in Moore’s network guided these young organizers as they worked to get potential black voters registered in the rural communities of the Delta. Moore’s network included members not only of the NAACP but also of the small churches on the plantations. Moore sometimes sang in them with a traveling gospel group before making a political pitch for voter registration. He was also a well-known Prince Hall Mason, and the connections the fraternal network gave him helped spread the word about voter registration. These were networks organic to the community. Some, like the Freemasons or the black churches, had roots going back to slavery. Others, such as the almost underground NAACP branches, were newer. There were even a few remnants of Marcus Garvey’s UNIA. In any case, they kept communities and the people within them connected. As was true during the days of slavery, word of mouth was a key component of communication.
One of the subjects of wide comment within these Mississippi Delta networks was that Moore did not segregate his gas station and café. There were no “white only” or “colored only” signs on his restroom doors, and anyone could sit at any table. Given that his service station was located on State Highway 61, then a highly trafficked route south to New Orleans, Moore’s refusal to toe the segregationist line also attracted angry attention from local white supremacists. They tried to mount a boycott against him, a
nd he was certain that night riders would eventually attack his home. They never did, but Moore did not take any chances. Floodlights washed across his backyard every night, and movement organizers who stayed with him can recall falling asleep secure in the knowledge that Moore was sitting in the bay window of his home, keeping careful watch, his rifle and pistol within easy reach.
Although Amzie Moore, Medgar Evers, and other World War II veterans did become civil rights leaders in the decades after the war, most veterans did not. It was however, not uncommon for them to personally (as distinct from politically) defy the rules of white supremacy, as James Stephenson did in Columbia, Tennessee, in 1946. On July 6, 1944, Army Second Lieutenant Jackie Robinson—who would become a baseball legend when he played with the Brooklyn Dodgers following the war—refused to move to the back of an army bus at a training camp at Fort Hood, Texas, when the white driver ordered him to. Although buses on military bases had officially been ordered to desegregate, Robinson was arrested by the military police and court-martialed for insubordination. He was acquitted, transferred to another military base, and honorably discharged four months later.
Such acts of defiance, though obviously having political implications, were usually not planned in advance and did not benefit from organized public political support. When the Evers brothers and a handful of fellow veterans attempted to vote, for instance, there was no corresponding effort to register or vote by any of Decatur or Newton County’s nonveteran blacks. Nor did black veterans themselves tend to band together in any sustained effort to claim the rights promised under the law. They did not attempt to vote en masse; most often, like James Stephenson and Jackie Robinson, they demonstrated their defiance—and sometimes their willingness to defend themselves—in personal ways rather than in organized political actions.
Moreover, it is unclear what the subgroup of black veterans who did become politically visible activists had in common (aside from the obvious, their experience of military training and, for many, of using guns in combat). Within the Evers family, for instance, there was a strong tradition of defying the rules of white supremacy. Yet before Medgar became involved in 1951 with a newly formed organization in the Delta, the Regional Council of Negro Leadership (RCNL), and then in 1954 became the NAACP’s first Mississippi field secretary, there seems to have been no tradition of membership in civil rights organizations or of civil rights leadership. Age, geography, education, work, income, family, social status, and class all contributed to these leaders’ decisions to join the movement, but the relative importance of these factors is hard to measure. Generally black veterans took greater political risks than nonveterans; their military experience gave them a confidence most nonveterans lacked, but pinning down exactly what caused them to emerge as Freedom Movement leaders is difficult. “The only thing you can say is that probabilistically, on average, these guys [veterans] are more likely than guys who never served to be [leaders],” thinks Christopher Parker, who has studied their attitudes and experiences. “After all, they had survived serving in a racist military in which they were often forced to wage two wars: one in the battlefield, the other on base.”
To be sure, many of these veterans-turned-leaders had personalities that suited them to leadership. Shortly after Medgar Evers married his wife Myrlie, they visited his parents. During the visit, Medgar would sometimes wander off—to where, Myrlie did not know. Once, after Myrlie exclaimed, “He’s disappeared again!” Medgar’s mother took her aside and told her, “Don’t worry about him daughter, he’s my strange child.” As a boy, “Mama Jessie” told Myrlie, “Medgar would play with his friends, tell them what to do, and then sometimes he would disappear. But I always knew I could find him under the house. I would ask him, ‘What are you doing?’ And he would always say, ‘I’m just thinking mama, just thinking.’”
Witnessing antiblack violence at an early age, while growing up on a small farm just outside of Decatur, had greatly affected Medgar Evers, his brother Charles, and others in the core group of Mississippians who would be critical to the survival of young civil rights organizers in the 1960s. The murder by white men of Willie Tingle, a close family friend, for allegedly looking at a white woman in the “wrong” way—what whites sometimes called “reckless eyeballing”—greatly affected the two brothers. Tingle was dragged through the streets of Decatur by a wagon and then hanged from a tree, where whites used him for target practice. For days the two Evers brothers passed the bullet-riddled body on their way to school.
Despite such horrific violence, or maybe because of it, even as boys Medgar and Charles organized “little rebellions.” For example, they let the air out of the tires of the white salesmen who would burst into Decatur’s black homes without invitation; or they hid behind bushes and threw rocks at the buses that carried white students to their school, which was far better equipped than the one-room school that black children walked to.
Medgar Evers was also shaped by his father, James Evers. Many in Decatur saw James’s refusal to step off the sidewalk in deference to approaching whites as a sure sign that he was crazy. But his sons understood that his behavior was much more principled than most of Decatur’s townsfolk could acknowledge. He taught his children that blacks should not be unnecessarily apologetic, and that whites should treat blacks with dignity. He even predicted that black people would regain the voting rights that they had won after the Civil War but that had been taken away by the violence of Reconstruction and the resulting Redemption of the Southern white-supremacist order.
“Crazy” blacks like James Evers were sometimes killed, sometimes driven off, and sometimes left alone—but whatever became of them, their spirit and example most certainly influenced many of the key adult figures in the southern civil rights movement who took young organizers under their wings in the early 1960s. Faith S. Holsaert, a New Yorker who in the summer of 1962 joined SNCC’s work in Southwest Georgia, remembers project director Charles Sherrod explaining to her that “southern white folks didn’t mess with a few intransigent black people who would rather die than lose their dignity. It would be more trouble to control such souls than to leave them alone.”
Some of these “crazy” black people were women. It was common knowledge in Sunflower County, Mississippi, that Lou Ella Townsend, the mother of famed civil rights leader Fannie Lou Hamer, could be dangerous if pushed too hard. Walking out into the cotton fields to work, Mrs. Townsend would put a pan on her head and carry a bucket in each hand. One of them was always covered by a cloth and in that bucket there was always a 9 mm Luger pistol. Once, when a plantation overseer hit her youngest son in the face, she warned him not to do it again. Laughing, perhaps as much in disbelief that she could or would do anything to stop him, the overseer grabbed Townsend, spun her around, and raised his arm to strike her. She caught his arm and forced him to the ground. When she let him up, he fled; he never bothered her children again.
On another occasion, a white man on horseback rode into the fields where Townsend was working. The man spied her young niece Pauline and told Mrs. Townsend that he intended to take the girl back home with him, and also that he was going to beat her niece so she would know her place. Mrs. Townsend responded, “You don’t have no black children and you’re not going to beat no black children. If you step down off that horse, I’ll go to Hell and back with you before Hell can scorch a feather.” He too left, unwilling to tangle with this “crazy” black woman. This plantation predator could not have known that his attempt to lay claim to Mrs. Townsend’s niece would trigger a particular anger in her. Of twenty-two brothers and sisters in her family, she and two others were the only children who were not the product of rape by white men.
Stories of black resistance like those passed on orally within the families of Medgar Evers, Fannie Lou Hamer, and others helped form a black consciousness that was very much alive throughout the first half of the twentieth century, and they also underlay a deep and powerful collective memory that was invisible to whites but greatly aff
ected the shape and course of the modern Freedom Movement. Mrs. Hamer, for instance, could talk vividly about the oppressiveness of the Mississippi she grew up in, and through her mother and grandmother she knew much about the oppression black people had endured before her birth. But she could also recall with pride not simply that her family and others had survived their enslavement, but also that they had retained some measure of their human dignity and, on occasion at least, were able to draw some lines that whites dared not cross.
The powerful influence of men and women like James Evers and Lou Ella Townsend on the generations of younger southern blacks who joined or observed the civil rights movement of the 1960s cannot be underestimated. Without a doubt Mrs. Hamer was deeply inspired not only by her mother’s sad past but by the efforts her mother made to ensure that the Townsend family could survive physically and spiritually. She was “the quintessential ‘outraged mother,’ moved by anger and determined to ‘make a way out of no way,’ if only for her children’s sake.” James Evers had the same determination and outrage.
Charles Evers remembers that he and his brother Medgar once accompanied their father to the commissary of Decatur’s sawmill to settle a bill. Although he could hardly read and write, James Evers could work out sums in his head. He saw that he had been overcharged and said so.
“You callin’ me a liar, Nigger!” yelled the commissary manager.
“I don’t owe you that much and I won’t pay it,” replied Evers softly—and, to those who knew him well, dangerously.
This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed Page 12
