Freedom Summer - Bruce W. Watson [113]
With Wilmer Jones’s help, the FBI finally stumbled on “the place.” Beyond the barbed-wire gate, a dozen deep wells might have hidden bodies, but they contained only water. Another dead end. Meanwhile, burly Joe Sullivan, directing the investigation, continued to meet his lone source—the Meridian highway patrolman. Though eager to talk about the Klan, the man still refused to discuss murder. As August approached, Sullivan was fed up with Mississippi and its “fair-minded, Christian people.” It was time for the payoff. Three weeks earlier, meeting J. Edgar Hoover in Jackson, Sullivan said his Meridian contact might talk—for $25,000. Hoover had told his assistant to “have the money ready at FBI headquarters.” By the last day of July, the money had been ready for more than a week.
All summer, the rotting shacks of Shaw, Mississippi, had seemed to drown in despair. Fred Winn had given up expecting any reaction from anyone. If paying a kid to plant a bomb did not awaken the black community, what would? Each afternoon was slower, more depressing, than the one before. Each evening the Delta sun set over burned-out ground. Shaw’s planters and their hired thugs remained in tight control over hordes of blacks worn down by work and hunger and humiliation. Then suddenly Shaw awoke. The catalyst was a single comment. “I realize it may sound foolish,” Sheriff Charlie Capps had told the New York Times, “but 95 percent of our blacks are happy.” An alert volunteer posted the Times article in the Freedom House and read it aloud during a mass meeting. Word soon spread, and furious letters were fired off to the newspaper:
Only a fool would be happy in Mississippi down here chopping cotton for 30 cents an hour.
If Capps thinks that we are happy why don’t he try living like the Negroes. After he has done that, ask him if he is happy.
I ain’t going to say that we’re happy because we ain’t. We don’t get justice anywhere. . . . Our boys don’t want no white girls. We just want our justice. Half of us done worked our lives away.
Shaw’s black high school was also awakening. When three volunteers were ejected from the cafeteria, students walked out of classes. The principal closed the school, parents joined the protest, and cops came to keep order. But Fred would not be there to see Shaw begin to stand up. Freedom Summer was finally coming to the Delta’s hub, and its project director needed a carpenter.
In late July, Fred packed his bag, his tools, and his father’s Bible that he now carried everywhere and moved a dozen miles across the cotton fields to the larger town of Indianola (pop. 6,714). He immediately sensed the town as edgier, more incendiary. The main road crossing town was a drag strip for the kind of people he wanted to avoid. Muscle cars roared down Highway 82 day and night. Unlike Sheriff Charlie Capps, Sunflower County’s sheriff was not trying to “keep a lid on things.” As in Greenwood, whites were the minority in Indianola but controlled everything and were determined to keep it that way. Blacks were quick to remind Fred that Indianola was the birthplace of the White Citizens’ Council. All summer, white Indianola had watched as the invaders had stirred up blacks in other Mississippi enclaves. They had thought their town would be spared. Now, with a project office opening and a Freedom School planned, they began marshaling a violent resistance that would strengthen throughout the coming year, culminating in fires blazing in the night.
For the first