Freedom Summer - Bruce W. Watson [125]
“Yes, God help us! ”
“I am, too! I’m sick of it! ”
Dennis spoke for “the young kids . . . for little Ben Chaney here and the other ones like him.” When some applauded, Dennis lashed out. “Don’t get your frustration out by clapping your hands!” Tilting his head, biting one lip, he fought back tears, fought for words.
“This is our country, too!” he shouted. “We didn’t ask to come here when they brought us over here. . . .”
“AMEN, RIGHT! ”
“The best thing that we can do for Mr. Chaney, for Mickey Schwerner, for Andrew Goodman is stand up and DEMAND our rights!”
“All right! ”
“Don’t just look at me and the people here and go back and say that you’ve been to a nice service . . .”
“Amen! ”
“If you do go back home and sit down and take it, God damn your souls!”
“That’s the truth! ”
“Stand up!” Dennis shouted. Then, his voice falling to a desperate whisper, he pleaded—“Don’t bow down anymore. Hold your heads up.” His eyes watering, Dennis concluded. “We want our freedom now, (now!) I don’t want to go to another memorial. I’m tired of funerals.” He banged his fist on the podium, then pointed to the sky. “Tired of it! We’ve got to stand up.” His voice shattering, he walked off the stage.
Two days later, separate memorials were held for Goodman and Schwerner in Manhattan. Crowds of nearly two thousand attended each. Goodman’s service, at the Ethical Culture Institute on the Upper West Side, was interrupted by a bomb threat, but police removed two large flowerpots and the ceremony continued. Rabbi Joseph Lelyveld, still scarred from his severe beating in Hattiesburg a month earlier, gave one of many eulogies: “The tragedy of Andy Goodman cannot be separated from the tragedy of mankind. Along with James Chaney and Michael Schwerner, he has become the eternal evocation of all the host of beautiful young men and women who are carrying forward the struggle for which they gave their lives.” When the service ended, someone took the yellow rose atop the coffin and handed it to Carolyn Goodman. She came to the center aisle, turned back, and took first the arm of Fannie Lee Chaney, just flown in from Mississippi, then the arm of Anne Schwerner. Three mothers, heads bowed, dressed in black, weeping as one, walked slowly from the chapel.
So you see, fighting is an everyday thing—don’t never rest.
—Winson Hudson, Mississippi Harmony
CHAPTER ONE
“Lay by Time”
All that weekend while three families mourned, while Mississippi seethed in denial, while America’s discontent deepened, Bob Moses swathed his grief in the solace of the future. The Mississippi Summer Project had claimed four lives. Twenty black churches lay in ruin, and no one knew what further mayhem might soon scar hot and hotter nights. “Success?” Moses told the press. “I have trouble with that word. When we started we hoped no one would be killed.” Yet on the same weekend that Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney were laid to rest, more than one hundred Freedom School students gathered at a Baptist seminary in Meridian. What Moses saw there allowed his embattled soul, and Freedom Summer itself, to touch bottom and ascend again.
The students had come neither to mourn nor grieve but, in the old black tradition, to testify. Testify to the joy of their Freedom Schools, to their rights as Americans, to their hunger for learning. Beneath a banner proclaiming “Freedom Is a Struggle,” the Freedom School Convention lasted three days. Moses spoke briefly—his “speech” consisted entirely of questions—but students ran the convention. Forming eight committees, they hammered out a platform demanding equal housing, slum clearance, sanctions against South Africa, and an end to the poll tax. They endorsed a revised Declaration of Independence, declaring independence “from the unjust laws of Mississippi,” and cheered a student play about Medgar Evers.