Freedom Summer - Bruce W. Watson [134]
Recent news from the North was driving another wedge between the races. Profiling Freedom Summer, magazines such as Look and the Saturday Evening Post focused on whites, especially white women, making blacks feel their own struggles hardly mattered. And then there were the riots. The day after Harlem erupted, staffers and volunteers sat on the lawn outside the Holly Springs Freedom School discussing the news. With few exceptions, whites deplored the riot, but blacks said it was “about time something happened to force America to wake up to racism in the North.” Teacher Pamela Allen was shocked. Though she said nothing, she saw that “the project was polarized. I found it didn’t matter that I never condemned the riots. I hadn’t supported them. And I was white.”
Yet nothing was eroding racial harmony more than sex. From their first day in their sites, volunteers who had never thought much about interracial sex found Mississippi obsessed with it. All summer long, white terror of “mongrelization,” dating to slave days, had surfaced at every encounter. A Jackson cop asked a medical student if he had come south “to give abortions to all them white gals pregnant by nigrahs.” A white woman invited to visit a project office responded, “And get raped?” SNCC recruiters had tried to weed out whites who expressed sexual interest in blacks, and vice versa. In Ohio, Bob Moses had warned against pursuing “My Summer Negro” or “the white girl I made.” Yet all summer blacks and whites had worked together, gotten drunk together, faced danger together, suffusing the summer project with a wartime sexual tension. And the fact that it was 1964, with mores changing, birth control pills available (though not in Mississippi), and hundreds in their early twenties suddenly on their own far from the strictures of home . . .
Many have speculated on the sexuality of that summer. One observer claimed, “Every black SNCC worker with perhaps a few exceptions counted it a notch on his gun to have slept with a white woman—as many as possible.” But others remembered Freedom Summer as far too chaotic for sex. “I didn’t see any white women being victimized by black men,” volunteer Sally Belfrage recalled. “We were just too busy and crowded. I can’t even work out where they did it, where people went to be victimized. My greatest problem in Greenwood was the absolute impossibility of being alone.” Fred Winn offered tacit agreement in a letter: “Now, Dad, I know the I.C.C. might object to you sending certain things in the mail but would it be possible for you to send a local S.F. girl? ” Nonetheless, in late July, a visiting doctor had warned volunteers of venereal disease spreading through the ranks of SNCC and COFO. And although how much went on behind closed doors will never be certain, many volunteers were startled by a sexual frankness unknown back home.
Black men raised with an exacting terror—“jus’ one boy touch a white girl’s hand, he be in the river in two hours”—now met white “girls” whose gaze they did not have to avoid. And white women, suddenly the object of obsession and desire, were confused, flattered, charmed. A strange and enticing courtship dance sometimes began, driven as much by taboo as temptation. The dance accelerated when female volunteers wore makeup, earrings, and décolletage that marked them as “easy” in a state where men did not even wear shorts in public. Approached again and again, some surrendered to curiosity or a need to prove they were not racist. The result, Mary King recalled, was that some white women “fluttered like butterflies