Freedom Summer - Bruce W. Watson [10]
As a high school senior in Amherst, Massachusetts, Chris Williams would have understood the surfing metaphor, but he preferred rhythm and blues to the Beach Boys. Lean and wisecracking, with a rebellious streak and a lust for adventure, Chris welcomed any challenge to the status quo, especially the racial status quo. He had seen racism’s ugly face at an early age. While living in Washington, D.C., Chris had befriended the children of the maid who helped his mother care for his four younger siblings. Neighbors began throwing stones, shouting, “Nigger lover!” The Williams family soon moved north, but Chris never forgot. From the first headlines out of Montgomery, he was drawn to the civil rights movement. “You didn’t run into many situations where there was a clear right and wrong,” he remembered. “In this case, ‘right’ seemed very obvious.”
In the spring of 1964, Chris was of medium height, with a Boy Scout face but brown hair long enough—over his ears, even—to get him suspended from school. During his spring break, he had followed local ministers to Williamston, North Carolina, to picket a courthouse. A melee on Easter Sunday saw one man hit with a baseball bat; Chris was merely arrested. Finding jail more exhilarating than depressing, he whiled away three days listening to Top 40 radio and joking with fellow protesters, black teenagers who, amused by his hair, called him “Ringo.” Bailed out, Chris headed home, vowing to return. The opportunity was not long in coming. At nearby Smith College, he sat in on a civil rights rally that ended with two Yale students describing the Mississippi Summer Project.
Parental permission came readily. Chris’s father understood restlessness. Schafer Williams had dropped out of Harvard in 1928 to bum around America, working in sawmills and pipe gangs. When the adventure wore thin, he had returned to college, earning a Ph.D. in medieval history. Now, having grown skeptical of the generation he taught at the University of Massachusetts, he saw the summer project as a way for his son “to actually do something worthwhile.” Chris’s mother was more apprehensive. “The Birmingham church bombing had occurred the previous fall,” Chris remembered. “Medgar Evers had been assassinated—in Mississippi. She knew the danger.” Still, Jean Williams told local papers that too many Americans considered teenagers “do-nothings.” “American students have finally come around to support something that must be done.”
On fire with his summer plans, Chris did not wait to graduate. In early June, he got a crew cut, handed in his schoolbooks, and hitchhiked back to North Carolina. In Williamston, he passed out leaflets, sat in on boisterous church meetings, and ate collard greens with his host family. Then, as the training in Ohio approached, he stuck out his thumb and hitched west. Picked up by cops, he was questioned “like I was the nation’s most wanted criminal.” Forced to call home to prove he was not a runaway, he cited Thoreau in his journal—“That government which governs best is the government which governs least.” He crossed the Blue Ridge Mountains, riding with farmers and soldiers,