Freedom Summer - Bruce W. Watson [16]
Sighing as if the world were on his shoulders, Moses told volunteers about the murder of Herbert Lee. But he did not tell them about his nagging concerns. By Tuesday afternoon, he was very worried. Despite all the “hairy stories,” no one had gone home. In long, soul-searching discussions, volunteers had aired their doubts. Weren’t they being egocentric? Masochistic? Did they have Messiah complexes? As whites raised in America, weren’t they also steeped in racism? Volunteers quoted Gandhi, Tolstoy, and James Baldwin, yet none took the commonsense option of leaving. Moses’ concern was shared by other SNCCs.
“It’s not working,” said Charles McLaurin, still nursing bruises from a recent beating. “It’s really not working. They’re really not getting through to each other.” Sitting through sessions that ranged from the character of southern whites to the history of slavery, volunteers seemed studious, solemn. But when released from workshops, they played touch football or strummed “Blowin’ in the Wind,” acting as if headed for summer at the seashore. Students read SNCC’s security handbook: “No one should go anywhere alone, but certainly not in an automobile and certainly not at night. . . . Try not to sleep near open windows; try to sleep at the back of the house. . . . Do not stand in doorways at night with the light at your back.” But just as Mississippi’s strange savagery was sinking in, the naïveté resurfaced. During a frank discussion on sex, one woman asked, “We have talked about interracial dating. Is there a policy you’d like for us to follow? ” SNCC staffers were incredulous. A policy? Had anyone heard of Emmett Till? Beaten to a pulp, shot in the head, tied to a fan, and thrown in the Tallahatchie River for just whistling at a white woman? Emmett Till was fourteen years old. It wasn’t working. Further proof came Tuesday night.
After dinner, volunteers watched Mississippi and the Fifteenth Amendment . The CBS documentary detailed how the Magnolia State had defied the Constitution by disenfranchising its black populace. The federal government had filed lawsuits, but Mississippi judges had stonewalled, nitpicked, thrown most out of court. Volunteers seethed or sat disgusted. But then the camera fell on a hideously fat man in a white shirt and horn-rimmed glasses. Laughter rippled through the auditorium. SNCC staffers fumed. This was no comical stereotype. This was Theron Lynd, registrar in Forrest County, who had never registered a Negro until hit by a lawsuit. The audience quieted as a black man onscreen told of a shotgun fired into his home, wounding two little girls, but when his wife came on in a funny hat, some giggled. Several SNCCs stormed out. When the documentary ended, another jumped onstage. “You should be ashamed! You could laugh at that film!”
“The flash point,” as one volunteer called it, had arrived. Across the auditorium, whispers and stares punctuated an aching silence. A few volunteers stood and spoke, calling SNCC staffers distant, arrogant, patronizing. They acted superior to anyone who had not shared their suffering. In one corner, Bob Moses stood with his arm around his wife, Dona, a recent University of Chicago philosophy grad. Both were stone-faced. Other SNCCs let the tension linger, as in their own meetings, before finally lifting it. They told of the fat registrar—“We know that bastard.” The previous January, Theron Lynd had been the target of Hattiesburg’s Freedom Day. Hundreds had picketed in the rain. Moses was arrested, one marcher was beaten in jail, and here these kids were, safe in Ohio, laughing. Another SNCC erupted: “Ask Jimmie over there what he thinks about Mississippi. He has six slugs in him, man, and the last one went right through