Freedom Summer - Bruce W. Watson [161]
In July 1965, four summers after Bob Moses came to Liberty, Mississippi, the town had its first Freedom Day. SNCC staff had organized for months in preparation, and by 9:00 a.m., the line to register stretched from the courthouse—where Moses had been beaten—all the way to the sidewalk. The sheriff approached. “Okay, who’s first?” he asked. A shriveled farmer stepped forth and said softly, “Me.” Twenty-two people filled out forms that day in Liberty. All twenty-two passed the test. Within a month, two hundred more were registered, including the widow and oldest son of Herbert Lee.
The following month, a further challenge to Mississippi’s old order came to a head on Capitol Hill. Shut out of the 1964 election, when Mississippi gave Barry Goldwater 87 percent of its vote, Freedom Democrats had quickly filed a formal challenge in Congress. Mississippi’s all-white congressional delegation was not duly elected, the challenge claimed, because blacks had been systematically disenfranchised. When the challenge was introduced on the floor of the House, 149 congressmen supported it, not enough to win but enough to shake the assurance of Mississippi. Congress then gave Freedom Democrats time to gather affidavits proving voter discrimination. William Kunstler put out a nationwide call for lawyers and more than a hundred came to Jackson. Depositions describing voter fraud, beatings, and shootings were taken throughout Mississippi. Rita Schwerner returned to roam the state getting affidavits notarized. Federal hearings in Jackson stunned commissioners who listened as blacks told of terror inflicted on them just for registering to vote.
By the end of summer, Kunstler’s team had assembled more than ten thousand pages of testimony. As he prepared to submit his evidence, Kunstler saw “a lawyer’s dream case. Almost everyone in the United States conceded that Negroes could not vote in Mississippi.” On September 17, 1965, the challenge was finally heard before a congressional gallery packed with Freedom Democrats. Nearly five hundred had come to Washington, D.C., to hold a silent, all-night vigil outside the Capitol. On the morning of the debate, Freedom Songs broke out. Then dozens of sharecroppers and maids, barbers and cooks filed into the House chamber where three MFDP candidates, Fannie Lou Hamer, Victoria Gray, and Annie Devine, were seated below them, the first black women ever allowed on the House floor. But when the challenge was finally heard, southern congressmen argued that if Mississippi’s delegation was unseated, “every congressman from the Potomac to El Paso can expect the same.” After two hours of debate the vote was finally taken. One hundred and forty-three congressmen supported the challenge, 228 opposed it. Speaking to the crowd gathered outside the Capitol, Fannie Lou Hamer broke into tears. “I’m not crying for myself,” she said. “I’m crying for America.”
Yes, Mississippi was, but Mississippi is, and we are proud of what we have become.
—Myrlie Evers Williams
Epilogue
On a sunny October morning in 1967, Sheriff Lawrence Rainey and Deputy Cecil Price waved to crowds of supporters as they strode toward the granite courthouse in Meridian. Wearing suits and fedoras instead of cowboy hats and police uniforms, both men looked more like salesmen than “the law.” Rainey still had a chaw in his cheek but horn-rimmed glasses made him seem less the caricature of a southern sheriff. Price, who had lost his recent run to succeed Rainey, smiled softly at rows of clicking cameras. Both men, along with the sixteen others about to be tried with them, seemed in high spirits, confident that no jury of their peers would convict them. In the thirty-three months it had taken to bring the Neshoba murder case to trial, Price and Rainey had toured the South.