Freedom Summer - Bruce W. Watson [142]
Earlier that Saturday morning, an NBC cameraman shouted to Rauh, “They’ve screwed you, Joe!”
“My God,” Rauh responded. “Already? ”
Party officials had moved the Credentials Committee meeting to a room that fit only one network camera. Rauh protested to a White House aide, who phoned the Oval Office. After a half hour of calls, the president, who was controlling the convention from the contents of its souvenir book to its hourly schedule, agreed to let Freedom Democrats make their challenge in the cavernous convention hall. And at 2:00 p.m., Rauh stood on the floor beside four tall filing cabinets. Inside the cabinets were 63,000 registration forms signed on porches, in cotton fields, in barbershops and beauty parlors. On one side of Rauh sat Mississippi’s all-white delegation, glaring at Mississippi’s mostly black delegation on the other side. Between them was the committee—prim, nattily dressed women and men in dark suits, smoking, nodding off, or scribbling notes. All three networks carried the challenge, but it did not promise to be exciting television.
Americans stuck in front of TV on a Saturday afternoon saw a bespectacled, nasal-voiced lawyer with “only an hour to tell you a story of tragedy and terror in Mississippi.” The story began with Aaron Henry denouncing Mississippi’s “white power structure . . . on them is the blood and responsibility for the reign of terror.” Next, the Reverend Edwin King summed up his ordeals. “I have been imprisoned. I have been beaten. I have been close to death. . . . We have shed our blood. All we ask is your help.” Neither Henry nor King was especially eloquent, and many viewers may have changed the channel. But when Rauh called his third witness, all the suffering, all the oppression, all the earth-born hardships endured by generations of blacks in Mississippi limped to center stage.
Fannie Lou Hamer had not ridden a bus to Atlantic City. She and other SNCCs had flown to New York a day early to address a town hall meeting. There she had told of her beating in Winona, Mississippi, the previous summer. But her story had not gone beyond the meeting hall. On Saturday afternoon, Hamer knew she would speak to the nation. Before marching to the convention hall, she had talked with Unita Blackwell at the Gem Hotel.
“Girl, you reckon I ought to tell it? ”
When Blackwell echoed encouragement, Hamer continued. “I’m going to tell it today. I’m sure going to tell it.” Later she would say she felt as if she were telling it on the mountain, but as she moved to the front of the hall and placed her white handbag on the witness table, she did not seem inspired. Waiting as a microphone was fastened around her neck, Hamer looked exhausted, terrified, troubled. She began almost before she sat down.
“Mister Chairman, and to the Credentials Committee, my name is Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer. . . .” A worried look came over her, as if tears might come, but she steeled herself. Her accent was unmistakably Deep Southern. “An’ ah live at six-two-six East Lafayette Street, Ruleville, Mississippih.” Her face was broad, glistening, and grim. SNCCs who had seen her lift mass meetings, volunteers who had watched her hold forth in Ohio, in church, in her kitchen, had waited all summer for this moment.
“It was the 31st of August in 1962 that eighteen of us traveled twenty-six miles to the county courthouse in Indianola to try to register to become first-class citizens. . . .”
The night before, while Freedom Democrats lobbied, Mississippi had provided additional evidence for their challenge. A church burned in Itta Bena. Several pickups surrounded a black café in Belzoni, trapping volunteers trying to register voters. A firebomb hit the project office in Tupelo. But on Saturday afternoon, Mississippi was “calm.” By the time Fannie Lou Hamer began, TVs in black quarters across the