Freedom Summer - Bruce W. Watson [104]
In contrast to Donaldson and Carmichael, Hollis Watkins was modest and unassuming, with a sweet Mississippi drawl that melted into a beautiful tenor when Freedom Songs broke out. The twelfth child of Pike County sharecroppers, Watkins had left Mississippi for California before coming home hoping to join the Freedom Rides. He arrived too late—“the Riders,” including Carmichael, had been arrested in Jackson and sent to Parchman Farm. Instead of becoming a Freedom Rider, Watkins had joined Bob Moses in McComb. A SNCC staffer ever since, Watkins was known as a soulful presence, as smooth as molasses. Yet when put in charge of two dozen volunteers in Holmes County, he imposed Freedom Summer’s most ironclad rules. No going out at night unless to a mass meeting. No drinking—not even a beer. No one should even visit the little country store across Highway 49 in Mileston. Who knew what redneck might show up? “I felt personally responsible for the lives of everyone who worked on my project,” Watkins remembered. “These young people had come down here, and if they were serious and dedicated to the cause, they should be willing to make sacrifices.” Watkins’s final rule was the harshest—no dating. Period. The Holmes County project was just two days old when a female volunteer went out with a local white man. The next day, Watkins took her to Jackson and had her reassigned. Watkins’s friend and peer, the equally congenial Charlie Cobb, faced the same problem in Greenville. The Mississippi river town may have been moderate, but interracial dating remained taboo. When cops arrested a black man spotted hand in hand with a white volunteer, Cobb gave the couple a choice: dating or the summer project. “They both left together,” Cobb remembered. “I never saw them again.”
Dedicated, brilliant, determined, such was the staff Muriel Tillinghast joined in mid-July when she became SNCC’s only female project director in Mississippi. Three weeks earlier, Muriel had been afraid to leave the Greenville office. Now she was expected to run it. In turning over his command, Charlie Cobb had few reservations. “Muriel was tough, you could see that,” Cobb remembered. “And I knew her reputation at Howard. She was smart, and she had experience in the sit-in movement, which doesn’t tell you how she’s going to be as an organizer in rural Mississippi but it’s a good bet.” Before leaving to tour Freedom Schools, Cobb tested Muriel in Issaquena County. The snake-shaped, bayou-infested region ran along the Mississippi River just south of Greenville. Like some remote feudal fiefdom, Issaquena was desperately poor, patrolled by the shotgun and the pickup, and as brutal as any county in Mississippi. Blacks made up more than half the population, yet none were registered to vote. In early July, two white volunteers had risked their lives to “crack” this plantation stronghold. They were instantly spotted by their pace. “We had never seen anybody walk that fast in the summer in the Mississippi Delta,” sharecropper Unita Blackwell remembered.
The twentieth century came to Issaquena County the night the volunteers called a meeting at the Moon Lake Baptist Church in the county seat of Mayersville (pop. 700). Standing before rows of black faces, a pale man from Brooklyn spoke until it became clear that no one could understand a word he said. His counterpart from Virginia took over, telling locals of the movement, the summer project, their right to vote. At the back of the church, a terrified deacon sat moaning—“Oh Lord, Lord . . .” but Unita Blackwell felt “like a big drenching rain had finally come after a long dry spell.” Blackwell, a sturdy, towering woman who had worked her entire life