Freedom Summer - Bruce W. Watson [156]
For ten days, the frazzled Mississippi veterans soaked up the rarefied air of a nation where blacks ran everything. The trip, Hamer later said, was “the proudest moment of my life. I saw black men flying the airplanes, driving buses, sitting behind the big desks in the bank and just doing everything that I was used to seeing white people do.” Hamer was particularly taken by African women—“so graceful and so poised. I thought about my mother and my grandmother.” From Guinea, two SNCCs went on to Kenya where they met Malcolm X, but the rest returned home to sort through the residue of Freedom Summer.
SNCC’s “beloved community” was coming apart. Once a handful of the bravest and boldest, SNCC suddenly had four hundred staffers, 20 percent of them white. Bob Moses saw racial resentment “welling out like poison.” Too many blacks called whites smug, superior, condescending. Too many whites saw blacks as slow or lazy. With the majority of holdovers being white women, sexual tension flared. “The Negro girls feel neglected because the white girls get the attention.” Black women on her project, one white woman wrote, “just seemed to hate me.” SNCC was also nagged by the future. Should it become a structured CORE-like organization? Or should it remain a freewheeling movement whose members “do what the spirit say do”? What should SNCC’s position be on urban riots? On Vietnam? On Third World movements? And did anyone have the energy to plan for the summer of ’65?
On November 5, 160 SNCC staffers gathered at a church in the seaside town of Waveland, Mississippi. James Forman opened the conference by calling SNCC “a band of brothers.” “We must decide if the circle will be unbroken,” he concluded. “If we remain a band of brothers, a circle of trust, we shall overcome!” But few Freedom Songs followed. Slumped in folding chairs, black and white seemed more at odds than ever. Hands went to hips, brows furrowed, and irritation punctuated every weary sigh, every roll of the eyes. SNCCs had often boasted of being “many minds, one heart,” but now, even hearts were at odds. Disputes broke out over the smallest details. One morning, SNCCs squared off with baseball bats and pool cues. The issue? Cafeteria meal tickets. SNCC, Forman noted, was suffering from “too many people high on freedom, just going off and doing what they want.”
In bungalows overlooking the Gulf of Mexico, the rancor continued after hours. Class remained a rut, race a chasm in the road ahead. And there was a new obstacle—gender. One of many position papers presented was “Women in the Movement.” The paper outlined how men in SNCC excluded women from top decision making, relegated them to typing and stenography, and treated even female staffers as mere “girls.” Just as “the average white person doesn’t realize that he assumes he is superior,” the authors wrote, “so too the average SNCC worker finds it difficult to discuss the woman problem because of the assumption of male superiority . . . This is no more a man’s world than it is a white world.”
As the authors had expected, the paper “hardly caused a ripple.” Yet “Women in the Movement,” written by SNCC veterans Casey Hayden and Mary King, would ripple far beyond the Mississippi beach town. Revised and expanded, the SNCC paper became a founding doctrine of the burgeoning women’s movement. When later read at a Students for a Democratic Society meeting, it would lead women to walk out and form their own caucus. Circulated among friends, the King-Hayden manifesto would lead to women’s consciousness-raising circles, many led by Freedom Summer veterans.
Yet in Waveland, the conference continued as if nothing had happened. After a few days, several members, disgusted by the “brutally aggressive hostility,” walked out. Others kept bickering. Returning to their projects, staffers found more disarray. Rumors of an impending “coup” swept through SNCC. Volunteers sat at typewriters banging out long lists of gripes. Whites