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much more by doing nothing. It’s not unnatural to be afraid but you’re cheating your children if your being afraid stops them from having something.” Fear, however, had met its match in Mississippi. Another weekend of violence saw a volunteer’s car burned in Mileston and another bomb thrown in McComb. In Batesville, tear gas engulfed the Mileses’ home. Coughing and choking, Robert and Mona Miles grabbed their sons and, with volunteers right behind them, staggered out into the night. But with all eyes on a new prize—the Democratic National Convention—fear had become like summer thunder, startling at first but no longer sending anyone for cover.

For every bomb and beating, there was now a symbol of hope—thousands of Freedom Democrat brochures sent out across the state, hundreds of signatures gathered. Precinct meetings drew two hundred in Clarksdale, three hundred in Canton, still more in Holly Springs, where a crowd surrounded police cars and sang Freedom Songs. In the tiny hamlet of Starkville, two volunteers were dropped off alone. Confronted by the sheriff, they were soon surrounded and protected by blacks. “We’ve been waiting for you,” several said. Nearly five hundred signed Freedom Democrat forms.

Whites in Mississippi might bloody and bruise Freedom Summer, but they could not douse its revived spirit. When Mississippi’s secretary of state declared Freedom Democratic Party meetings illegal, Barney Frank fired off a mocking memo—“RE: Arguing with the Red Queen About Precinct Meetings.” “We have a perfect right to hold meetings and call them precinct meetings, nominating conventions, coronations, séances, or whatever we damn well please,” Frank wrote, signing the memo—Alice. And in Ruleville: “Mrs. Hamer is back. Things moving. . . .”

Even the reticent Fran O’Brien was emboldened by the collective courage. Five nights after meeting Martin Luther King, she found herself alone upstairs in the Freedom House. Everyone else had gone to Vicksburg’s Freedom Democrat precinct meeting. The office was silent, dimly lit, slightly eerie. Then the phone rang. The drawl on the other end of the line asked Fran where she was from. Whittier, California. How did she like Mississippi? Oh, just fine. Then the caller casually said everyone in the Freedom House had three days to get out. Three days before the house was bombed. Fran thanked the man for calling. There was a brief silence.

“Listen,” the man said. “I said I’m gonna bomb y’all. And there ain’t gonna be no Freedom School and no freedom there or anyplace else, and no nothin’!”

“Yes sir,” Fran replied. “I understood you the first time. Was there anything else? ”

“No. . . . No, I don’t believe so. But I’ll call again.”

“Oh, feel free,” Fran said. “We’d love to hear from you. Thank you for calling. Good night.”

The line fell silent. Then, “G’ night.”

Let a new earth rise. Let another world be born.

Let a bloody peace be written in the sky.

—Margaret Walker Alexander, “For My People”

CHAPTER EIGHT

“The Summer of Our Discontent”

Since the first headline of Freedom Summer, three faces had stared down America. Across Mississippi and the rest of the South, the faces stared out from general stores and post offices, police stations and banks, federal buildings and courthouses. Across America, the faces appeared in magazines strewn on coffee tables and beach blankets. Occasionally, the faces surfaced again in a TV news update. And as July edged toward August, the faces acquired new meanings. They meant that in rural, “redneck” Mississippi, someone had outsmarted the FBI. They meant that in the world’s most modern nation, proud of its passenger jets, its Mercury astronauts, its Telstar transatlantic phone calls, men could still “disappear.” And for Freedom Summer volunteers, the faces became the very meaning of summer. “How the ghosts of those three shadow all our work,” a volunteer wrote. “ ‘Did you know them?’ I am constantly asked. Did I need to? ”

Many—perhaps most—whites in Mississippi still considered the disappearance a hoax, but after five weeks, their indignation