Freedom Summer - Bruce W. Watson [13]
Even among daring civil rights workers, SNCC staffers—often just called “SNCCs”—stood out. SNCCs were cooler, braver, feisty to a fault. “They would argue with a signpost,” member Joyce Ladner recalled. Though they waxed eloquent about creating a “beautiful community,” “a circle of trust,” SNCC jargon made the Movement sound like World War II. They spoke of “cracking Mississippi,” of establishing “beachheads,” of working “behind enemy lines.” Historian Howard Zinn, who traveled with SNCC, wrote: “To be with them, walking a picket line in the rain in Hattiesburg, Mississippi . . . to see them jabbed by electric prod poles and flung into paddy wagons in Selma, Alabama, or link arms and sing at the close of a church meeting in the Delta—is to feel the presence of greatness.” And in their presence in Ohio, most volunteers were in awe. The training changed her life, one later said, “because I met those SNCC people and my mouth fell open.”
Disdaining the celebrity status of Martin Luther King, SNCC fostered “group-centered leadership,” no member more important than another, all decisions made by consensus hammered out in meetings that seemed to last for days. SNCC became its own university as members shared books or talked in jail cells—about overcoming fear, about philosophy, mathematics, or sometimes just about women. Seeing themselves not as leaders but as organizers, SNCCs empowered locals to stifle fear and organize the Movement in their own communities. Group-centered leadership meant that while every volunteer in Ohio knew of Dr. King, few recognized the pantheon of future civil rights icons in their midst. In one corner stood James Forman, the suave, pipe-smoking air force veteran who had grown up in Mississippi so poor he had sometimes tried to eat dirt, but who returned from college to forge SNCC’s ragtag revolutionaries into a white-hot force. Elsewhere was John Lewis, the shy son of Alabama sharecroppers who was SNCC’s chairman and would later serve in Congress. Also on campus were other future leaders of this brave new generation of African Americans—Julian Bond, Fannie Lou Hamer, Stokely Carmichael, Victoria Gray, Marion Barry. . . . But even in this remarkable gathering, one SNCC stood out, no matter how hard he tried not to.
With his bib overalls, glasses, and thick, furrowed brow, he looked like a wise sharecropper, and his small stature helped him slip unnoticed through crowds. But when he spoke, he gave himself away. “He is more or less the Jesus of the whole project,” one volunteer noted. This was the man the press recognized as the mastermind, the Negro with “the Masters’ degree from Harvard.” Who left a cushy job teaching math at a New York prep school. Who went to Mississippi in 1960, when no other civil rights leader dared to. Who went there alone. Frequently arrested and attacked, he had developed an icy calm that astounded everyone in his presence. How could one comprehend the courage it took to enter an office just ransacked by a mob, set up a cot, and take a nap? And his name, as if chosen by more than chance, came straight from the Freedom Song they had sung the night before. This was Moses. Bob Moses.
Before he came to Mississippi, there was little in Robert Parris Moses’ life that suggested he would be a leader, let alone a legend. Raised in Harlem, one of three sons of a hardworking janitor, he had excelled in school, earning scholarships to Stuyvesant High, Hamilton College, and finally a doctoral program at Harvard. There he studied mathematical logic, earning his master’s in 1957. The following year, however, his mother died of cancer, and his father, overcome with grief, wound up in a mental institution. Moses left Harvard and went home, taking odd jobs to support the family and his father’s eventual recovery.