Freedom Summer - Bruce W. Watson [105]
Seated in Blackwell’s shack, surrounded by fields of waist-high cotton, Muriel found the voice of her ancestors. She began holding forth on voting rights, citizenship, and black history. “For someone so young and petite, she had a serene strength about her,” Blackwell remembered. When Muriel called herself a teacher, Blackwell assumed she taught school, yet “Muriel taught things more rare and precious.” Blackwell was soon gathering a dozen or more in her home or in church to hear Muriel talk about Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, and W. E. B. DuBois. Muriel read from black poetry and literature. She told them about her own family, the grandmother who had walked from Texas to D.C. and the proud generations since. “What Muriel Tillinghast really taught us was to have pride in ourselves,” Blackwell remembered. Though impressed by her knowledge and spark, locals were startled by Muriel’s hair. None had ever seen what would soon be called an “Afro.” Some women giggled behind Muriel’s back, and Blackwell constantly urged her to straighten her “nappy-headed” hair. “Okay, I’ll do that sometime,” Muriel would reply. Or “I’ve got to wash it.” But Muriel let her hair grow, and within a year, Blackwell and countless other African-American women were wearing theirs the same way.
Not long after Muriel arrived in Issaquena County, calls from Greenville to Jackson reported: “Things getting pretty tight in Issaquena—whites circling certain key houses, churches.” Yet Blackwell and others continued to take Muriel and her volunteers into their homes, feeding them, sheltering them, talking, learning, sharing strength. “They recognized we were in their hands,” Muriel remembered. “We couldn’t have lasted a single day without them.” On July 20, whites fired nine shots into a car parked outside a mass meeting. Neighboring Sharkey County, where Muriel was also working, was equally feudal, equally hotheaded. When a black volunteer’s car broke down there, a cop arrested the man and smashed his skull with a blackjack. “Go back to Greenville,” the cop said, “and tell all the niggers in Greenville that they beat a nigger’s ass in Sharkey County.” But by then, locals were talking about opening a Freedom School. And more and more blacks were signing Freedom Democrat forms, singing in church, and coming out to meet Muriel and her staff. A Freedom Democratic Party precinct meeting was scheduled at the Moon Lake Baptist Church for July 26, the day after Martin Luther King’s Mississippi tour would end. Unita Blackwell would be there, and so would her teacher, her friend, who now knew she could handle Mississippi.
Shortly after noon on Tuesday, July 21, Robert Kennedy phoned the White House. Another crisis in a summer of crises was pending. Martin Luther King was on a plane to Mississippi. “If he gets killed,” Kennedy told LBJ, “it creates all kinds of problems. Not just being dead, but also a lot of other kind of problems.” The president instantly phoned J. Edgar Hoover. Though the FBI director loathed King and was already bugging his hotel rooms, he recognized the danger. “There are threats that they’re going to kill him,” Hoover said. Johnson shuddered at the thought. “Talk to your man in Jackson,” the president said, “and tell him that we think that it would be the better part of wisdom, in the national interest, that they work out some arrangement where somebody’s in front of him and behind him when he goes over there. . . . So that we won’t find another burning car. It’s a hell of a lot easier to watch a situation like that before it happens than it is to call out the Navy after it happens.”
King had not been to Mississippi since Medgar Evers’s funeral in June 1963. There he had kept a low profile, but when the procession