Freedom Summer - Bruce W. Watson [15]
Reluctantly, Moses returned to New York for a final year in his teaching contract. In the summer of 1961, he headed south again. He would stay in Mississippi nearly four years. By the time he left, embittered, exhausted, but somehow still alive, Mississippi would be swarming with voting campaigns, Freedom Schools, and change that had been centuries in coming.
At the Ohio training, volunteers quickly recognized Moses’ inner strength, and some tried to copy him, walking and speaking slowly, wearing bib overalls. But because he was too self-effacing to share his own tales of terror, few yet knew them. Later they would learn how, in August 1961, Moses had set up voter registration classes in the backwoods hill country of southwest Mississippi, a place he described as so “rural, impoverished, brutal that [it] hardly seemed a part of America.” They would hear of him leading blacks to courthouses, walking right up to sour-faced registrars, answering their hatred with gentle words. And how curious clerks had dropped into one registrar’s office to see this “New York nigger,” and how a highway patrolman had pulled him over on his way out of town.
“You the nigger that came down from New York to stir up a lot of trouble? ”
“I’m the Negro who came down from New York to instruct people in voter registration,” Moses corrected. Then he began to take down the cop’s badge number.
“Get in the car, nigger!”
Taken to the police station, Moses was allowed the customary phone call. Cops listened as he asked the operator to call the Justice Department in Washington, D.C. Collect. He then detailed the violations of civil rights laws in Amite County. Startled cops asked Moses to pay just five dollars in court costs. He refused and spent two days in jail. The NAACP finally bailed him out, but not before a local asked him, “Boy, are you sure you know what you’re about?”
Within weeks, word spread. Blacks heard that “Dr. King and some other big people” were in the area. Teenagers Hollis Watkins and Curtis Hayes went searching for King, found Moses, and joined SNCC. Meanwhile, whites heard that some “nigger from New York” was stirring up trouble, and the name Bob Moses soon topped a Klan hit list. The hit was not long in coming. In late August, as Moses led three people to the squat brick courthouse in Liberty, a man pounced, smashing his head with a knife handle. With blood streaming down his face, Moses led the trembling applicants up the courthouse steps. The registrar’s office was closed. After getting nine stitches, Moses then did another thing blacks simply did not do in Mississippi in 1961—he pressed charges. Before a courtroom packed with shotgun-toting farmers, Moses coolly testified about the beating, then let the sheriff escort him to city limits. His assailant was acquitted—self-defense. The terror soon escalated, culminating in the murder of Herbert Lee. Fear crippled the Movement, and SNCC pulled out of southwest Mississippi, but stories about Bob Moses inspired more to join him in SNCC’s new beachhead—the Delta. By 1964, Moses was little known outside civil rights circles but a legend within. Still, those few volunteers who had heard of him must have been surprised when they heard him speak.
In a voice as soft as silk, Moses spoke briefly on Sunday night, then periodically throughout the week. He broke every rule of elocution. He often looked at his feet. He never repeated himself, rarely told stories, never smiled. And yet, because in the timeless tradition of genuine leaders he spoke truth to power, he had everyone’s attention.
“No administration in this country is going to commit political suicide over the rights of Negroes,” Moses told volunteers. “This is part of what we are doing . . . getting the country involved through yourselves.” Convinced that only a bold move would change Mississippi, Moses had lobbied heavily for the summer project, overcoming strong objections by Movement veterans. But now he did not seem so sure: “Don’t come to Mississippi this summer to save the Mississippi