Freedom Summer - Bruce W. Watson [119]
One of the teens, Gary Brooks, had recently acquired a dangerous habit—asking questions. After reading Black Like Me, the startling best seller by a white journalist who darkened his skin to roam the South, Brooks began daring himself to cross the tracks. He told no one about his walks through the black side of McComb. He merely wondered. Why were there so few businesses, so few decent homes, such poverty? Why had students at his high school cheered when the principal announced that President Kennedy had been killed? And who were these “invaders” coming to Mississippi? When summer began, Brooks watched McComb explode. Each bomb entrenched the town’s spreading siege mentality. Friends became strangers. Suspicion spread like afternoon heat. No one could be certain who might be in the Klan, what casual remark might be turned against him. Anyone who showed the slightest sympathy for “the COFOs” might be the next Red Heffner hounded out of town.
When Pete Seeger closed his concert, Gary and Jack agreed to continue their conversation with Ira Landess. Gary soon phoned the Freedom House, telling Landess he had several friends who wanted to meet him. They agreed to meet at the Holiday Inn. Some suspected a trap, but Landess trusted the teens. After reviewing security measures, he went alone to the Holiday Inn on the edge of town near Interstate 55. Taking a room, he waited. After an hour, just Gary and Jack showed up. Their friends had “chickened out.” The Manhattan teacher and the Mississippi teens talked for a few hours. Throughout August, Gary and Jack would continue to drop by the Freedom House. Ira Landess welcomed them as heralds of a new Mississippi. The rest of the state would still need shock treatment.
One hundred miles per hour was not an uncommon speed in Mississippi that summer. Battered sedans and pickups flew past fields and barns, chasing SNCC cars. The chases usually ended with the lead car dodging down a back road, or the pursuers, having had their fun, peeling off. The miracle was that no one had been hurt. But until the first day of August, no one had passed on a hill.
The cars collided at the top of the rise. Head on, they slammed into each other, lifting front ends, shattering glass, crumpling chrome and steel. One car was driven by a local man, the other by a Holly Springs SNCC worker driving with Wayne Yancey, a black volunteer from Chicago. Yancey was known for his jovial attitude, his ham-handed pickup lines, and his cowboy hat. At 3:30 p.m. on August 1, the call came to the Holly Springs project office. “You folks better get down to the hospital. Two of your boys had a head-on wreck out on the highway and one of ’em is dead!” Arriving at the hospital, the COFO contingent found a hearse with one dark foot sticking out the back. The ankle was broken, dangling, and through the rear window everyone could see the face. In a monstrous flashback, it reminded some of Emmett Till in his casket. “His head went through the windshield,” someone said.
High speeds were common in Mississippi that summer, but when the state wanted to slow down, nothing happened in a hurry. For the rest of the afternoon, volunteers and SNCCs argued with cops and pleaded with doctors. Hearing that the car’s driver was in the hospital, a volunteer who was also a nurse rushed inside. She saw the man on a gurney, his jaw broken, his face maroon and purple. Doctors had given him a shot and an X-ray, but when the nurse-volunteer insisted