Parting the Waters (112 page)

From the bus boycott through the Freedom Rides and on into Albany, King always had entered popular movements more or less haphazardly. Now, since his public stature made anything he did a referendum on his principles, pragmatism demanded that he design his own test. He needed advance planning, training, and mobilization on a specific rather than a general target area. In short, he needed control of a concentrated effort, maximizing both his risk and his chances for spectacular success. To his staff, King announced his resolve to swear off spontaneous rescue missions. “I don't want to be a fireman anymore.”

New spasms of violence plagued the registration campaign as Moses began his second year in Mississippi, and by uncanny coincidence each periodic incident was echoed by an outburst around Albany, more than three hundred miles to the east. On the Saturday of the false victory in Albany, when the city was closing the tennis courts and swimming pools, Moses and Sam Block took their first large group of would-be registrants to the courthouse in Greenwood, Mississippi—twenty-five of them. This was an unprecedented event in LeFlore County, made all the more shocking by the presence of a CBS film crew and a number of reporters. On the following Monday, three angry white men grabbed Block as he stepped from Moses' car in the downtown business district and beat him severely.

Tension thickened in Greenwood, becoming so dense that when two young volunteer teachers arrived on Wednesday, August 14—the day Shady Grove Baptist Church was burning in Georgia—they found the shades drawn at the SNCC office off Broad Street. Inside, the few Negroes who arrived for classes chose their places carefully, whispering of sniper angles. Moses left for a registration drive in nearby Bolivar County, but the following midnight Sam Block called him there in hushed panic, to report that several carloads of armed men were staking out the office. What coiled the fear most tightly was the stark awareness that it was absurd to hope for police protection—Block had seen police cars pull out just ahead of the posse. Hushed emergency calls followed—to the FBI's local resident agent, to John Doar and Burke Marshall at their homes in Washington. After the next call from Block, who said the men were getting out of their cars, some holding guns and others swinging chains, Moses set off in the night for Greenwood. Arriving before dawn, he found the door broken open and the office ransacked. He had no way of finding out that Block and the two new volunteers had escaped through a window leading across the roofs of adjacent buildings, then had shinnied down a television antenna to a back alley. They crept back the next morning to discover Moses asleep. To Moses it had been a natural choice—he was tired, with nowhere to go and no way to find his missing coworkers—but to others his presence at the site of the terror added to the legend of his nonviolent composure. “I just didn't understand what kind of guy this Bob Moses is, that could walk into a place where a lynch mob had just left and make up a bed and prepare to go to sleep, as if the situation was normal,” wrote one of the new SNCC workers. “So I guess I was learning.” Block and the two volunteers stayed on in Greenwood, but fear cost them their office. It took them five months to find another one.

Since the spring of that year, Moses had labored to implant tiny registration projects in the core counties of the Mississippi Delta, north of Jackson. It was plantation country, where most of the potential Negro voters lived on scattered farms amid unspeakable poverty and illiteracy, in a state of semifeudal dependence on the white planters. In June, he had taken his colleagues to Highlander Folk School for an intensive workshop tailored to the challenge of nonviolent registration work in remote places. Since then the volunteers had struggled to hold classes in six Delta counties, while Moses searched for support money. The SCLC's voter registration director, Jack O'Dell, whom Moses had met in New York through Bayard Rustin, was offering to bring Mississippi recruits by bus all the way across the Black Belt to Septima Clark's citizenship classes at Dorchester, and he was flooding Mississippi with SCLC registration pamphlets—“Crusade for the South: Vote,” “Why Vote?”—and literacy materials. “We are using the Workshop Booklets, and the old people think the world of them,” wrote Sam Block to the SCLC that July. “They tell the others, ‘this is my school book.'” To help with Moses' registration campaign, O'Dell urged James Bevel to return to Mississippi from Albany, with his wife Diane and their new daughter.

Shortly after the raid on the Greenwood SNCC office, a summit meeting was convened on the issue of registration funds for Mississippi. VEP director Wiley Branton came in from Atlanta. James Bevel represented the SCLC. David Dennis represented CORE. Aaron Henry, Amzie Moore, and others represented the Mississippi NAACP. James Forman represented the national office of SNCC, and Moses brought his handful of Mississippi organizers. They all gathered in a church basement at Clarksdale, about an hour's drive northwest of Greenwood, and Branton candidly outlined his political dilemma. As director of the VEP, he was responsible to the foundation donors of the money, who were closely associated with the Kennedy Administration. He was also responsible to the heads of the major civil rights organizations, each of whom owned what amounted to a veto over the operations of the politically delicate, legally vulnerable VEP. Many of those people did not favor spending registration money in Mississippi at all. Aside from that, Roy Wilkins did not want to spend money through SNCC, which he considered irresponsible, and certainly not through SNCC in Mississippi, which he considered an NAACP state.

These obstacles easily would have eliminated registration funds for Mississippi had not Wiley Branton emerged as a most unusual bureaucrat. He and everyone else in the church basement knew that to mount anything more than a ceremonial registration campaign, the VEP would have to support the students who were daring to recruit and train pioneer voters. Most of them worked for SNCC, through Moses. To circumvent the opposition of the NAACP, Branton agreed to channel funds through a new smokescreen organization, in the tradition of the MIA and the Albany Movement. It would allow those in the church to act on their mutual trust while protecting them from political rivalries among distant national leaders. That night in Clarksdale, they founded COFO—the Council of Federated Organizations. They wrote rules, drew territories, allotted future funds. The NAACP's Aaron Henry was elected president, an honor that was intended to help soften any opposition from Wilkins. Moses became director of voter registration.

It was a sophisticated piece of political work, but then they stepped into the night air of Mississippi. No such number of strange Negroes could come into a Delta town without attracting notice, especially since the registration projects had raised tension to the threshold of violence. A sheriff's deputy stopped Forman's car outside of town, but let him off with an order to leave the county. One police patrol arrested David Dennis for a traffic violation. Another arrested Sam Block and five others for loitering. Wiley Branton, who had made it out of town unmolested, was obliged to return to Clarksdale the next day to convince the authorities that it was frivolous to charge anyone with loitering in a moving automobile, whereupon he was presented a grossly inflated bill for towing the car from the scene of the arrest. Resigned, Branton paid the bill out of VEP funds. That same day, on his way to the Jackson airport, Branton learned that Block had been rearrested in Sunflower County with Moses and three other SNCC workers. They went to jail on a criminal charge of distributing literature (a leaflet announcing a voter registration meeting) without a permit. This arrest, while legally indefensible, was not quite flimsy enough for a lawyer like Branton to beat down with words. James Bevel showed up at the jail to bail them out.

Moses resolved to avoid Sunflower County for a while, but he felt an overriding obligation to the Ruleville Negroes. The first eighteen people from the registration classes around Ruleville, a plantation town in northern Sunflower County, were scheduled to register in Indianola the next day. Most of them were semiliterate sharecroppers, and Moses had thought their courage so important that SNCC had rented a bus from an out-of-county driver. Rather than disappoint them, Moses went along on the bus ride from Ruleville to the county seat at Indianola. All eighteen endured the registration tests without crisis, though none was accepted as a new voter, but on the way back to Ruleville a highway patrolman stopped the bus. Moses was arrested once again. The unsuccessful registrants went on back to Ruleville behind the news of their attempt, which swept through the county. That night, the owner of the Marlowe plantation drove to the house of sharecropper Fannie Lou Hamer, a stout woman of forty-four from a family of twenty children, and told her that the Klan and the White Citizens Council were sure to harass him because his field hands had been messing in politics. Sounding as beleaguered as he was angry, the owner told Hamer that she must renounce her registration application or leave his plantation, where she had lived for eighteen years. Hamer fled immediately to the home of a couple who had sheltered teachers for the SNCC registration classes.

This was the last day of August. That same night, vigilantes poured gunshots into four homes in Lee County, Georgia, outside Albany. All four belonged to supporters of the SNCC voter registration drive. State investigators counted twenty-four bullet holes in the frame house where the chairman of the Lee County Movement lived with his extended family of twenty. No one was hit. Claude Sitton of
The New York Times
made sure to point out that the chairman was the same man he and Pat Watters had heard sheriff's deputies threaten at the Shady Grove church in July. Four nights later, vigilantes fired three shotgun blasts into the home of a Terrell County woman who boarded summer volunteers in the registration drive. The shots missed Charles Sherrod, who was asleep in a bunk, but wounded a white student in the arm and grazed two others.

 

By then the pilgrimage of rabbis and ministers had come and gone in the Albany jail. King stayed out of Albany. At first he did so on the slim chance that negotiations might be more productive and less rancorous in his absence, as critics ranging from Governor Vandiver to Attorney General Kennedy and C. A. Scott maintained. When the talks collapsed, however, he continued to stay away for lack of a constructive alternative. He did not have the support “to turn the city upside down and right side up,” as he had promised to do. He knew the movement's striking power was in decline. Besides, King felt besieged by pressures from other quarters. His two-month diversion in Albany had cost him not only his vacation but also the revenues from SCLC fund-raisers that were essential to expand the voter registration campaign across the South.

He was giving a fund-raising speech in New York when the phones brought news of two fresh burnings of country churches: Mount Mary Baptist and Mount Olive Baptist in Terrell County, both of them sites for registration meetings and both completely destroyed. Judge Elliott already had denied the Justice Department's request for an injunction based on Sheriff Mathews' highly publicized raid at Mount Olive in July, and Mathews now said there was no evidence of arson at the two churches. FBI agents found plenty of evidence. Poking around in the ruins, wearing their standard FBI business suits, they enraged white bystanders who had gathered to view the destruction. Virgil Puckett went berserk, taking a wild drunken swing at one of the agents and knocking off his glasses. He was arrested for assault.

The next night, in Ruleville, Mississippi, night riders fired shots into two of the three homes providing shelter for volunteers in the SNCC registration campaign. Herman and Hattie Sisson were talking with their granddaughter and a friend, who were spending the night there on their way back to college, when a series of popping noises startled them. “That sounded like a rifle to me,” Sisson observed calmly, but in the next instant both college girls tumbled from the couch to the floor, writhing. As Mrs. Sisson described it later, everyone in the house fell to the floor and began hollering, as other shots came spitting though the walls. By the time the two girls went to the hospital—one wounded critically in the neck and head, the other in the leg and arm—there were large pools of blood on the floor and Mayor Dorrough of Ruleville had arrived and was pacing about, clearly upset, talking incessantly. He ordered his men to take Mrs. Sisson to the hospital for treatment of glass cuts, then looked at the bullet holes. “I'm so glad Hattie didn't get shot,” he said. Then, calling the sheriff of Sunflower County, the mayor said, “Bob Moses is the cause of all of it. I knowed something like this was going to happen. That's how come I been riding day and night.” One of SNCC's summer volunteers rushed in, made a hysterical phone call to Moses in Jackson, and then composed himself enough to make notes and talk to people, as Moses had instructed. His presence so annoyed Mayor Dorrough at the hospital that he ordered him arrested on the charge of doing the shooting himself as a publicity stunt to raise money for SNCC. He was in jail the next morning when Moses arrived, his car having broken down on the way.

Moses compiled his usual detailed report, running to nine single-spaced pages, and sent copies to SNCC, the FBI, the Justice Department, the news media, and Martin Luther King, anticipating correctly that white officials would move to consolidate the advantages gained by terror. The local newspaper in Ruleville published the names of all the Negroes who had tried to register. Mayor Dorrough ordered city water service cut off at Ruleville's Williams Chapel, the only church in the area that dared to host registration meetings. When U.S. Fidelity and Guaranty canceled the church's casualty insurance from faraway Baltimore, Moses tried vainly to persuade the company to reinstate the coverage. Driven finally from the church, the SNCC volunteers tried to hold classes in homes or in tents, but no one would come. They chopped wood and helped run errands, holding on. “Because it's very important that the Negroes in the community feel that you're…going to ride through whatever trouble arrives,” Moses explained. “And in general, the deeper the fear, the deeper the problems in the community, the longer you have to stay to convince them.”

President Kennedy held a news conference shortly after the shootings in Ruleville. In an opening statement, he denounced Soviet military shipments to Cuba and dismissed Fidel Castro's public claims that Cuba was only trying to protect itself against “imminent invasion” by the United States.
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Later, in response to a question about King's telegrams protesting violence against voter registration workers, the President turned just as forcefully on the terrorists in the South: “I don't know any more outrageous action which I've seen occur in this country for a good many months or years than the burning of a church—two churches—because of the effort, made by Negroes, to be registered to vote.” He went on to mention the Ruleville shootings as well, and to brand the attacks “cowardly as well as outrageous.” “I commend those who are making the effort to register every citizen,” he added. “They deserve the protection of the United States Government, the protection of the states…And if it requires extra legislation, and extra force, we shall do that.”