Freedom Summer - Bruce W. Watson [130]
Love,
Muriel
Added to her inherited bravado, the courage of local blacks gave Muriel a daring she had not known she possessed. She had learned to drive—in Mississippi. Having passed the state’s written test, she even had a Mississippi driver’s license. Now she was badgering others to “let me drive, let me drive!” Fortunately for her passengers, her ancient SNCC car would not go more than fifty, but once behind the wheel, Muriel bounced over rutted roads and careened alongside cotton fields. Her nemesis was the stick shift. One afternoon, she stalled the car on a slight rise, then watched in terror as a cop pulled behind her. Before she could get in gear, the car rolled backward and crunched the police car’s bumper. Storming out, the cop ranted, raved, cursed, but some smooth talking got Muriel back on the road with just a warning to “get the hell out of Issaquena County.” On she drove, covering fifty or more miles each day before hurrying home by sundown. Everyone had to know about Freedom Day.
Word from the first Freedom Day in another plantation fiefdom stirred the embers of Muriel’s fear. On August 4 in Tallahatchie County, blacks had emerged from the courthouse to find the street filled with whites, some brandishing shotguns. The mob stood stone-faced, rigid, staring bullets at the small black contingent. Finally one man shouted, “You niggers get away from the courthouse! You don’t have any business up here!” The sheriff soon came striding on the scene. Tallahatchie had just been served with an injunction resembling Panola County’s, barring all voter registration tests, but the sheriff told blacks to get out of town and not come back. Every night since, cars had roared past black homes, the drivers waving guns, flashing headlights. And now, Muriel had scheduled a Freedom Day for Sharkey County, where a crop duster had recently doused canvassers with DDT, where, as one cop had boasted, “they beat a nigger’s ass.”
Muriel had already rescued one volunteer from Sharkey County, a fellow Howard student she remembered from her geology class. Late one afternoon, after going porch-to-porch, the man had made a frantic call from a pay phone. Hurry, he shouted. He was being chased. Men with shotguns. Men with dogs. On the line, Muriel heard the dogs baying in the background. Racing from Greenville into the plantations, she and a friend roamed back roads until they found the man hiding in a drainage ditch. Taking him back to Greenville, they let him relax for a few days, then sent him back to the plantations. As Sharkey County’s Freedom Day approached, two volunteers were arrested for leafleting and held overnight in a squalid little jail. But by August 14, leaflets were spread across the county, registration classes had offered instruction, and Freedom Day was on. The morning arrived, blue and blistering. Blacks awoke, dressed, and prepared to risk their lives to vote. Everyone anticipated the worst. Stories of terror from Tallahatchie County were widely known, but as Muriel had seen all summer, “courage overcame fear.”
Throughout that Friday morning and into the afternoon, blacks approached the small brick courthouse in the county seat of Rolling Fork. They shuffled up the steps, smiled meekly at the registrar, filled out papers, filed out. No one was arrested. No one was threatened or chased out of town. Though it did not produce a single registered voter, Freedom Day in Sharkey County was an unqualified success. Merely by surmounting their terror and showing up at the courthouse, blacks raised under neo-feudalism and steeped in the local lore of lynching had shown they would no longer be intimidated, no longer be denied. Still, Muriel scheduled no more Freedom Days that summer. Instead, with less than a week left before Freedom Democrats headed for Atlantic City, she turned her attention to their challenge,