Freedom Summer - Bruce W. Watson [129]
“If God had intended for the races to mix, he would have mixed them himself. He put each color in a different place.”
Across the stage, a black man responded. “The American white man has a conscience, and the non-violent method appeals to that conscience.”
“Negroes are demanding something that isn’t so unreasonable,” a white woman pleaded. “To get a cup of coffee at a lunch counter, to get a decent job.”
“What they really feels on the inside never changes,” answered a black woman. “Eventually they’ll wind up calling you a nigger.”
Throughout August, the Free Southern Theater performed in cramped Freedom Schools, on Freedom House porches, beneath starry skies from McComb to Holly Springs. Pleading, praying, strutting each small stage, actors spoke the words of Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, and a host of archetypal Americans. Each performance of In White America reviewed subjects Freedom Schools had covered all summer—the Middle Passage to slavery, the truth about Reconstruction, the integration battle at Central High in Little Rock—but actors touched feelings teachers could never reach. For students, the drama re-created classroom history—for adults in the audience, the pain was personal.
In White America drew standing-room-only crowds, stomping, clapping, clamoring for more. As if in church, people shouted, “That’s right!” and “Tell it!” In Mileston, the setting—a community center with one wall open to a bean field—brought Mississippi itself into the play. The new center was the gift of a southern California carpenter. Hearing of Freedom Summer, Abe Osheroff, veteran of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade during the Spanish Civil War, raised $10,000, then drove to Mississippi to build “a beacon of hope and love in a sea of oppression and hatred.” In the Delta, In White America drew two dozen members of Indianola’s Citizens’ Council. While cops stood guard outside, actors strutted through Indianola’s new Freedom School, hamming it up for whites who watched in silence. All were polite, but one later said the play convinced him the summer project was Communist inspired. Local whites also watched the play on the sagging porch of the Ruleville Freedom School, where chickens and roosters crowded the stage. But regardless of the audience, In White America’s final scene, juxtaposing “We, the people . . .” with the strains of “Oh, Freedom,” brought crowds to their feet, and sent them out singing.
Before I’ d be a slave, I’ll be buried in my grave And go home to my Lord and be free.
On Friday, August 14, In White America played in Greenville. Muriel Tillinghast was not in the audience. She had a Freedom Day to run. Since the first of the month, Muriel’s work had taken her deeper into the shimmering plantations of Issaquena and Sharkey counties. Sleeping on the floors of shacks—one host family had sixteen children—she was learning Mississippi from the inside out. She marveled at how sharecroppers could tell whose pickup was roaring past, just by its sound. She had learned which “firecracker” whites were bluffing and which were “not playin’.” Given a single contact in one “nasty little town” or another, she had scrounged up a half dozen with the courage to go to the courthouse. She now knew where to get the best meal in Mississippi—a savory stew of pork, rice, and beans served at Aaron Henry’s drugstore in Clarksdale. And she had mastered black Mississippi’s merciless time clock, waking at ungodly hours to talk to sharecroppers trudging to the fields, sleeping later before meeting maids crossing the tracks to clean and cook in white homes.
Responsibility for the Greenville project had restored all of Muriel’s nerve, with some to spare. Her feistiness came through in her letter to a SNCC staffer.
Dear Doug,
This letter is being brought to you by Cleve. I do hope that you and Jesse and Cleve and Guyot WILL GET TOGETHER AND WRITE A FORMAT ON WHAT THE HELL NEEDS TO BE DONE. To this date, I have not received a damn thing on what you guys are thinking/what’s working and not working, etc. And