Freedom Summer - Bruce W. Watson [153]
However beautiful the golden leaves may be, they will have to decay and become manure for the future of civilization. But it is only the seed persons that really count. And it is those you should look for.
—Victoria Gray Adams
CHAPTER ELEVEN
“Give unto Them Beauty for Ashes”
For the rest of the twentieth century, Mississippi struggled to put the past in its proper place. The lessons were bitter, and some refused to learn them. In the years following Freedom Summer, rancor and hatred reigned. Torn between nonviolence and a surging militance, blacks split into factions, arguing about everything, even funding for child care. Marches continued, and cops continued roughing up marchers. The Klan rallied in public, plotted in private, and made a last-ditch stand for its ludicrous lost cause of white supremacy. But with time, the state haunted by the Civil War surrendered to the inevitable future. Old customs died out with old people, and new generations found neither the energy nor the hatred needed to prop up Jim Crow. The past, in defiance of William Faulkner’s cautionary adage, came to be past. Like some cantankerous grandfather, Mississippi’s cruel legacy of war and Reconstruction, segregation and lynching, night riding and shotgun justice, was relegated from the kitchen table to the back porch. There it no longer required constant vigilance, let alone violence.
Even as Mississippi shed timeworn ways, life remained hard. Air-conditioning tamed the savage summers, while industry drew thousands from the land. New highways—asphalt and electronic—linked remote hamlets, bringing fresh faces and ideas, yet Mississippi remained America’s poorest state. Touring the Delta in 1967, Robert Kennedy visited sharecroppers’ shacks, reached out to touch starving children, and came away stunned. “My God,” he said, “I did not know this kind of thing existed. How can a country like this allow it?” More machines picked cotton and more field hands fled, leaving the land dotted by empty shacks. Hurricane Camille splintered the Gulf Coast. The river rose and fell, but the price of cotton never returned to what it had been. And through it all, decade by decade, a halting progress accumulated until by the new century, Mississippi had achieved a racial reconciliation few states or countries can match. But the first steps came on a minefield.
By mid-September 1964, another “lay-by time” was over. August’s gauze lifted, leaving a stark and flaxen beauty across the land. Crisp air smelled of smoldering leaves. Even the swamps seemed magical, tinged in gold and green. Black schools in the Delta closed, sending students and their parents back into the fields. To whites, the field hands in their cloth caps and overalls seemed as perennial as the goldenrod blooming beside the roads. So it had been for more than a century, but it would not be so for long.
Autumn soothed the scars of summer, yet ten weeks of tension had frayed nerves to a nub. Many volunteers had thought they were used to the stress, but when they returned home, they discovered that they would never return home. Not for the rest of their lives.
Among SNCC staff, bitterness over Atlantic City mixed with relief. “The longest nightmare I have ever had,” as Cleveland Sellers called Freedom Summer, was over. Some eighty volunteers were staying on, but with the rest gone, SNCCs could go back to helping locals shine their own lights. Or could they? “At the end of summer, I knew I had been right in opposing the project,” Hollis Watkins remembered. “Trying to reactivate and get people motivated was much, much harder.” And along with enervating blacks, Freedom Summer left white Mississippi filled with shock, shame, and outrage.
In September, six more churches went up in flames. Another black body was pulled from a river. South of Jackson, the Klan went on a rampage, bombing the mayor’s home in Natchez and the Vicksburg Freedom House where Fran O’Brien had taught. And in McComb?
On September 9, McComb COFO director Jesse Harris wrote the Justice Department: “If the