Freedom Summer - Bruce W. Watson [14]
Moses studied newspaper photos of that first sit-in, studied them for weeks. Seated at the counter, the four seemed so serene, so confident. “Before, the Negro in the South had always looked on the defensive, cringing,” he recalled. “This time they were taking the initiative. They were kids my age, and I knew this had something to do with my own life. . . . This was the answer.” While in college, Moses had worked in Quaker summer camps in Europe and Japan, building housing for the poor, talking with new friends about pacifism and its power. His favorite author was Albert Camus, whose novels portrayed ordinary men ennobled by their opposition to evil, whose essays convinced him that “words are more powerful than munitions.” Four months after the Greensboro sit-ins, Moses, then twenty-four, put Camus’s philosophy and his own to the test, heading south.
While visiting his uncle, an architect in Virginia, Moses picketed in Newport News. The simple protest brought him great relief. After a lifetime of stifling resentment, of “playing it cool,” he was finally, as Camus would have said, engagé. Heading on to Atlanta, he worked for Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), stuffing envelopes at an old desk and discussing Kant with a coworker. The intense newcomer unnerved some in the SCLC office. Julian Bond recalled many thinking the somber, intellectual Moses had to be a Communist. “We were immensely suspicious of him,” Bond remembered. “We had tunnel vision. . . . Bob Moses, on the other hand, had already begun to project a systematic analysis; not just of the South, but of the country, the world.” When SNCC needed someone to go to Mississippi to recruit for a conference, Moses volunteered, paying for his own bus ticket. Armed only with his passport and the names of local NAACP leaders, he crossed Alabama and headed for America’s poorest region, the land of sprawling cotton fields flanked by sharecroppers’ shacks, the land whose sorrows birthed the blues, the land known simply as the Delta.
In the flat, sun-baked town of Cleveland, Mississippi, Moses met NAACP organizer Amzie Moore. The Harvard Ph.D. candidate and the owner of a Delta gas station became instant friends. Moore saw in Moses the quiet courage black Mississippi needed to “uncover what is covered.” And to Moses, the stout, stocky Moore suggested the old spiritual, “a tree beside the water” that would not be moved. Amzie Moore wasn’t interested in sit-ins, Moses learned. Sharecroppers earning $500 a year could not afford to eat at lunch counters. Voting, Moore said, was the key to change in Mississippi. Blacks outnumbered whites two to one in the Delta, but only 3 percent could vote. Since World War II, even the smallest registration campaigns had sparked shattering violence. As they talked in the fading light, Moses noticed the loaded rifle Moore kept at his side and the bright lights outside protecting him from the drive-by shooting, the sniper, the firestorm in the night. And as they talked, Moses drafted a plan for voter registration to begin the following summer. Moore soon drove his young protégé around the Delta, talking of local politics, explaining how a burdened people moved and survived—a black ocean, deep and serene, encircling human volcanoes. Moore had Moses speak to church groups, watching to see how Delta folk responded. “There’s something coming,” Moses told the tired faces in each tiny church. “Get ready. It’s inevitably coming your way whether you like it or not. It sent me to tell you that.” Most people lowered their eyes, but some softly said, “Amen.” With these few, a handful of seeds in each terrified town, Moses and