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By Root 1853 0

from six days behind bars. The picketers had been sentenced to $100 fines and thirty days in jail. Out on appeal, they broke their hunger strike with chicken and collards, then sat waiting for “de Lawd.” As the crowd swelled in anticipation, not even the worst cynic in SNCC could deny King’s appeal. When his entourage arrived at the Elks Hall, crowds swarmed the stage. Hundreds clapped and chanted, “We Want Free-dom! We Want Free-dom!” Stepping to the podium, King thrilled the audience that spilled out of the seats, lined the walls, peered in windows. If Negroes “mobilize the power of their souls,” he said, they could “turn this nation upside down in order to turn it right side up.” Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney, King noted, had been “murdered by the silence and apathy of good people.” Barry Goldwater, he added, gave aid to segregationists. And the FBI—having seen its quick work in other cases, King found it hard to believe “that these same efficient FBI men cannot locate the missing workers.” King concluded with a rhythmic chant—“Seat the Freedom Democratic Party! Seat the Freedom Democratic Party!”

As King spoke, a small plane with its navigation lights off buzzed the Elks Hall. On its second pass, a white cloud of leaflets fluttered to the ground. This latest issue of The Klansman denounced “the Right Rev. Riot Inciter, Martin Luther King, Jr.” come to “bring riot, strife, and turmoil to . . . Greenwood, Mississippi [and] to milk all available cash from the local niggers.” At dawn the next day, volunteers again rode buses among field hands, finding them more willing to sign their names. That morning’s Jackson Clarion-Ledger headline read “Small Crowd Greets King at Greenwood.” At 8:23 a.m., King’s flight left for Jackson.

With the movement’s leading light touring Mississippi, with volunteers refusing to cower in the face of violence, those determined to derail Freedom Summer made their own midcourse correction. Rank violence and vile hatred were not enough to end the invasion. Across America, Mississippi’s image had sunk so low that residents traveling to the New York World’s Fair were changing their license plates to out-of-state tags. Someone had to stand up for Mississippi.

Lawrence Rainey stood up first. The Neshoba County sheriff filed a $1 million libel suit against NBC, charging that a Huntley-Brinkley News interview had implicated him in the disappearance. (The suit was ultimately dismissed.) Three days later, Mississippi newspapers reprinted a letter to NBC’s Today show, whose host had criticized the state. “It is a known fact,” a Hattiesburg man wrote, “that more violence has occurred in one subway in the city of New York in the last three months than in the whole state of Mississippi in the last year.” Next, with riots raging in Harlem, whites gloated. “It is a sad commentary,” a Mississippi congressman said on Capitol Hill, “that while mobs stalk the streets of New York . . . some 1,500 so-called civil rights workers and troublemakers are in Mississippi—a state with the nation’s lowest crime rate—subjecting innocent, law abiding people to insult, national scorn and creating trouble.” Mississippi newspapers, known for plastering northern crime stories on front pages, delighted in the Harlem riots. “Latest Wave of Invaders Badly Needed in New York Area Today,” the Jackson Clarion-Ledger sneered. Batesville’s weekly Panolian, noting the tension caused by summer volunteers, concluded, “Happily, the inclination toward violence is less in Mississippi than in New York. Otherwise there could have been a holocaust.” But in Mississippi’s propaganda arsenal, the strongest weapon was the oldest.

Accusations of communism in the civil rights movement dated to the Brown decision, handed down in the waning days of McCarthyism. Kneejerk red-baiting did not die with McCarthy, however. It just moved south. Into the 1960s, J. Edgar Hoover fanned Cold War suspicions—“We do know that Communist influence does exist in the Negro movement and it is this influence which is vitally important.” Hoover’s charges, constantly invoked