Freedom Summer - Bruce W. Watson [143]
“There’s Fannie Lou!”
“Look at that!”
“Come on, kids!”
And in Philadelphia’s Independence Quarters, blacks and whites in the new COFO office kept one eye on the TV and the other on the street. In the ten days since COFO had defiantly moved into Philadelphia, its office in the Evers Hotel had been a target of white rage. Rumors said a bomb would hit any day now. “We’re gonna get the job done tonight,” one man told a carload of whites. Calls came in every five minutes, like clockwork: “Your time is short!” “Your time is up!” More than a hundred locals met at the courthouse to discuss driving COFO out by firing “every nigger in town.” Sheriff Rainey and Deputy Price often burst into the office without warning or warrants, storming through the clutter, photographing papers and people. Deputy Price took delight in racing past the Evers Hotel, his siren blaring. One morning, a car stopped across from the hotel’s striped awning. The driver stepped out and leveled a double-barreled shotgun. His finger on the trigger, the man aimed, riveted, for five minutes, then drove away.
Each night, staffers stood guard on the hotel roof. The darkness pulsed with insects but was otherwise quiet. One morning the group saw a car pass on the street below. A small package hit the office door. Cautiously, they tip-toed downstairs. The Neshoba Democrat lay on the steps. Volunteers could joke about the “comedy of terrors,” but Philadelphia’s black community was panicky. “If you people leave us, they are going to kill us all,” one woman said. “They gonna pile our bodies on top of one another.” On August 20, Price and Rainey served an eviction notice, but COFO lawyers filed for a hearing, set for the following Thursday. A call went out for more volunteers, and several soon joined the all-night vigil atop the hotel. These were among the many who had decided that a single summer in Mississippi was not enough.
By August 22, with hundreds of volunteers about to leave, COFO’s WATS line resembled a college “ride board.” Was anyone headed for Boston? Denver? California? Across Mississippi, volunteers were saying sad good-byes, but eighty would not be leaving. Throughout August, they had wrestled with the thought of staying, convincing first themselves, then their distraught parents. One woman only changed her mind the night before she was to leave. After notifying advisers at Johns Hopkins, she wrote home: “I can simply no longer justify the pursuit of a Ph.D. When the folks in Flora have to struggle to comprehend the most elementary materials of history and society and man’s larger life, I feel ashamed to be greedily going after ‘higher learning.’ . . . It would be living a kind of lie to leave here now.”
Fred Winn had come up with a stock reply to explain why he had decided to remain. “I wasn’t going to stay in Mississippi,” he wrote his father, “until I stepped outside one day without my shoes on. Of all goddamned things I got some mud in between my toes. I haven’t been able to get it out since.” After moving from town to town, Fred felt right at home in Indianola. Living in stalwart Irene Magruder’s house, working all hours at the project office, he was getting to know people. People like “Smith,” a seven-year-old boy who came to the office, would only answer to “Smith,” and just stared at him. People like the middle-aged woman who, having had childhood polio, picked cotton on her knees. In just eight weeks, the naive, slightly nerdy carpenter had become a Freedom Fighter. Fred was no longer “a young twenty.” His speech was saltier, his righteousness tempered. He felt more at ease among blacks, among whites, and among women.
One of several high school seniors teaching adults at the Freedom School had caught Fred’s eye. He admired the black girl’s spirit as much as everything else about her. She belted out Freedom Songs, threw herself into her work,