Freedom Summer - Bruce W. Watson [17]
On Wednesday, a workshop turned into a heated debate. The Reverend James Lawson, who had written SNCC’s lofty mission statement on nonviolence, argued with Stokely Carmichael, who would later take SNCC into the realm of Black Power. As rapt volunteers watched, the tall, gangly Carmichael said nonviolence had once worked because it was new and made news. But having been beaten in jail and tortured in Parchman Farm, he considered nonviolence useless against vicious racists. Lawson admitted goodness had its price. “When you turn the other cheek,” he said, “you must accept the fact that you will get clobbered on it.” Many volunteers remained uncertain. Wasn’t violence sometimes justified? In self-defense? Finally, one of the few white SNCC staffers spoke up. Alabaman Bob Zellner had been the lone white in a peaceful protest in McComb in 1961. Singled out by a mob, he was clubbed, beaten, and had his eyes gouged while he gripped a railing, holding on for his life. “You must understand that nonviolence is essential to our program this summer,” Zellner told the group. “If you can’t accept this, please don’t come with us.” Again, no one left.
After lunch, an outdoor workshop beneath a bright blue sky taught volunteers how to take a beating. Near a tree pinned with a sign—“Courthouse”—students became a mob, shouting “Nigger!” and “Commie bastard!” swarming around their new friends, lashing out, knocking some to the ground. Volunteers learned to fall, roll in a ball, absorb the blows. “Your legs, your thighs, your buttocks, your kidneys, your back can take a kick or a billy club. So can your arms and your hands. Your head can’t. Your neck can’t. Your groin can’t.” Some students shuddered at the viciousness of the “mob.” One attacker, twenty-year-old Andrew Goodman, seemed to lose himself in the moment, shouting, screaming, then looking slightly sheepish at the anger within. Yet this faux Mississippi still seemed surreal—college kids playing at violence on a green lawn in Ohio. College kids who would be in Mississippi in just four days.
That Wednesday afternoon, a call came to SNCC’s campus office. The long-distance line was scratchy, but the voice had an unmistakable drawl. No one ever found out how the caller got the number. “I got me a twen’y foot pit out bay-ack,” the voice said. “Y’all just come on down.” SNCC did not tell volunteers about the call, but the following afternoon, staffers shared hate mail that had come to the campus. Phrases from one letter leaped out: “morally rotten outcasts of the White race. . . . ‘White Negroes’ are the rottenest of the race-mixing criminals. . . . it will be a long, hot, summer—but the ‘heat’ will be applied to the race-mixing TRASH by the DECENT people who do not believe in racial mongrelization through racial prostitution.”
Volunteers listened, sickened by the hatred. But for one black woman, the hate mail was just more information to be filed under “Survival.” Like other volunteers, Muriel Tillinghast had come to Ohio straight from another campus. Two weeks earlier, she had graduated from Howard University, where she had majored in sociology and political science but spent most of her time with NAG, Howard’s Non-Violent Action Group. “We were renegades,” Muriel recalled with pride. “Within the black community of Washington, D.C., we were an alienated group. We looked different, we talked differently, we hung together.” Centered