Freedom Summer - Bruce W. Watson [139]
Many had been trying to “reddish” since the murder of Emmett Till. Only a few had succeeded. The rest had taken the parallel path to democracy. Five days before Freedom Summer began, all had been shut out of county conventions choosing Mississippi’s “official” Atlantic City delegation. Party leaders, alerted by the Sovereignty Commission’s Informant Y of “Negroes carefully picked and trained to crash the conventions,” had connived to exclude them. On June 16, blacks across Mississippi had arrived at designated halls to hear: the meeting is canceled; the meeting is over; the door is locked. “We can’t open the door! They called down and told us not to open the door! There are no precinct meetings here! We don’t know anything about precinct meetings!” In the few meetings they managed to “crash,” blacks saw jittery whites huddling, whispering, peeking around corners. The lily-white conventions chose a lily-white delegation of sixty-eight Democrats. Blacks were left to sign affidavits detailing their exclusion, affidavits they took to Atlantic City, where they would try to force democracy’s parallel paths to converge.
And so they had held their own conventions—in churches, community centers, under trees. Initially uncertain about regulations and rules of order, farmers and sharecroppers, maids and cooks had learned democracy by trial and error. Following SNCC’s instructions, they elected Freedom Party chairmen, secretaries, and delegates. These went on to a rousing state convention in Jackson. There, when Freedom Songs finally ended, when the Stars and Stripes and signs with county names stopped bobbing, 2,500 delegates heard from their lawyer that the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party stood a good chance of being seated in Atlantic City. A summer of behind-the-scenes lobbying had gathered enough support to bring their challenge to the convention floor, and enough votes there to win. They could only be stopped by Lyndon Johnson, and he would not dare, not with the whole nation watching.
Following this good news, delegates listened to keynote speaker Ella Baker, who had been tirelessly working for Freedom Democrats in Washington, D.C. Her damp face uplifted, her finger pointing at the worn faces before her, SNCC’s founder praised this “assemblage of people who, yes, have come through the wilderness of tears, who, yes, have come through the beatings, the harassment, the brutalization. . . .” Turning to Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney, whose bodies had been found two days earlier, Baker added, “Until the killing of black mothers’ sons is as important as the killing of white mothers’ sons, we must keep on.” The convention concluded by choosing five party leaders, forty delegates, and twenty-two alternates. As the votes were announced, a volunteer from Manhattan watched from the sidelines. “This,” Rita Koplowitz wrote home, “is the stuff democracy is made of.”
In the thirteen days between their state convention and their departure for Atlantic City, Freedom Democrats met further obstacles. Radio stations refused to run their ads. Mississippi’s attorney general denied their charter, denied them the use of the name “Democratic,” and issued an injunction barring them from leaving the state. Freedom Democrats were also firebombed in Hattiesburg, arrested in Greenwood, and beaten by Klansmen near Vicksburg. By the time they stepped off their chartered buses after their long ride north, they doubted the Democratic Party could treat them worse than Mississippi had throughout their weary lives.
Stretching stiff limbs, smiling in the cool breeze, delegates sat beside piles of luggage and waited to check in to the Gem Hotel. The Gem, like its neighborhood, had seen better days. In their last mile on the bus, Freedom Democrats had been stunned into silence. They had heard