Freedom Summer - Bruce W. Watson [102]
Moses’ midcourse correction shifted Freedom Summer into high gear. Freedom School teachers began canvassing on weekends. Rollicking mass meetings were now held night after night. Sunday-morning church became obligatory as volunteers—men in shirts and ties, women in stockings and heels—waited until deacons gathered collection plates, then stood to explain the Freedom Democratic Party. They would be outside after the service to sign up everyone. Everyone! The goal of 200,000 signatures—35,000 new names per week—also sent volunteers to the far reaches of each plantation and each day.
Even in late July, morning comes early to the Mississippi Delta. Above the pancake land, the spreading sky turns salmon pink by 5:00 a.m. Here in the summer of 1964, as they had for decades at that hour, buses roam the plantations surrounding Greenwood, stopping to pick up “hands” to chop cotton. Yet for the first time ever, white hands are among the black. Standing beside shacks glowing with kerosene lamps, volunteers make their pitch to tired men in overalls, to weary women in housedresses and bandannas.
No, there’s no danger in signing this paper.
Your name will not be listed in any newspaper.
The boss man will never know. Most whites don’t even know what the MFDP is. What is it? Here’s a brochure (and a flashlight): “The Democratic National Convention is a very big meeting in August. It is a very important meeting because people in the Democratic Party choose the person they want to run for President of the United States. . . . Mississippi sends a group of people to this national meeting. This summer we are going to send a Freedom group to the national meeting.”
The brochure goes on to explain democracy from the ground up. There will be precinct meetings all over the state, then county conventions, and finally a state convention in Jackson to choose delegates who will travel to Atlantic City. But as sharecroppers and canvassers board the bus, as it rumbles through the cotton fields, there is no time to go into all that. The pitch continues. With MFDP registration, there is no poll tax to pay. And no impossible tangle from the state constitution to interpret. Just fill in your name, address, and how long you’ve lived in Leflore County. The forms will be kept secret. No one will know. Sign here.
The pitch is as simple as the brochure, yet resistance remains.
“I got to think about it.”
“I’m too old to fool with it.”
“Not me. I’m the only one my children’s got. I’m all they have.”
Volunteers have not surrendered their summer just to take “I got to think about it” for an answer. Again and again they return to shacks, show up at church, ride the dawn buses, and wear down resistance. If it takes 35,000 new signatures each week, they will give their August as they have given their July. But the obstacles run far deeper than the fear.
No one doubts the convention in Atlantic City will be a show of party unity, nominating an incumbent president with a 70 percent approval rating. Yet the Freedom Democrat challenge threatens to splinter the Democratic Party. Lyndon Johnson has already enraged the South with his Civil Rights Act. If Democrats seat a black delegation from Mississippi and send whites home, can he win any states south of the Mason-Dixon line? Won’t a convention floor fight based on race make the GOP tussles in San Francisco look like playground spats? And won’t Barry Goldwater be the next president of the United States? News of the upcoming challenge is already salting old wounds, recalling 1948 when “Dixiecrats” stormed out of the Democratic convention in protest of the civil rights platform. The Washington Post warns of a “battle royal.” The Los Angeles Times predicts a “potentially explosive dilemma.” SNCC and the MFDP, however, are ready for a fight, a fair fight.
For the next five weeks, Freedom Democrats will carefully follow all the rules. They will sign every party form, obey every party bylaw, file every necessary paper. Armed with signatures, fired by the horror stories