Freedom Summer - Bruce W. Watson [175]
The day after the election, racial tension flared at a high school in Columbus, Mississippi. A heated argument over Obama scared some teens into texting their parents, who came to take them home. Elsewhere in Mississippi, some whites grew tired of hearing about the “first black president.” “Why can’t it be that he’s the next president?” one woman asked. “If he can get America back to where it should be, it doesn’t matter what color he is.” And near Jackson, a school bus driver ordered two boys to stop talking about Obama. They refused. “This is history, woman,” one said to the driver, who threw both kids off the bus. District officials promised to discipline the driver. By Inauguration Day, however, Mississippi seemed more amazed than concerned by the change. “I voted for Obama,” said seventy-eight-year-old James “Little Man” Presley, still working the cotton fields in Panola County. “There’s a heap of pride in voting for a black man.”
As the new president put his hand on the Lincoln Bible, Mississippi held its breath. In classrooms that had excluded their ancestors, in courthouses where registration had been a cruel farce, in cafés they had dared not even enter, blacks watched alongside whites. And when President Obama finished his oath, cheers erupted. In Hattiesburg, Vernon Dahmer’s widow wept. “Oh, if he’d just been able to see it, Lord,” Ellie Dahmer said. “I hope he can see this day.” At a Greenville café where Obama had stopped during his primary campaign, the elderly owner beamed. “It’s the most wonderful day of my life,” Demetrius Buck said. And in Ruleville, Fannie Lou Hamer’s searching question from 1964 seemed to echo down through the decades. Was this finallyAmerica?
Amid many celebrations in the nation’s capital, one group had an especially poignant reunion. Two dozen SNCC veterans gathered in Washington, D.C., to share stories of old times, old battles. Yet the vast majority of Freedom Summer volunteers were nowhere near the limelight on Inauguration Day. Bob Moses spoke on the cable program Democracy Now, recapping the 1964 Freedom Democrat challenge “where the stage was set that allowed this to happen.” But the mainstream media remained fixated on Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King. Meanwhile in New Bedford, Massachusetts, and Mendocino, California; in Englewood, New Jersey, and Lewistown, Montana; in Omaha and Memphis, Indianapolis and Atlanta, some seven hundred Americans no one had ever heard of watched as the living embodiment of the hope that sent them to Mississippi stepped to the podium.
My fellow citizens:
I stand here today humbled by the task before us, grateful for the trust you have bestowed, mindful of the sacrifices borne by our ancestors. . . .
An hour before the inauguration, Chris Williams addressed his colleagues at Williams College. Few had any idea that the gregarious architect had once been a civil rights worker. Chris recapped his tenure as a teenager in Mississippi, told of how three men had been murdered on his first day there, how he had gone to Atlantic City, how America had changed since. Then he went to watch.
. . . They saw America as bigger than the sum of our individual ambitions; greater than all the differences of birth or wealth or faction . . .
For Fran O’Brien, Inauguration Day was “the closest thing to a perfect day one can reasonably expect in this world.” Not having a TV, she listened to the ceremony on the radio, alone in her home. After it was over, she went to a diner and watched clips on TV. She did not plan to tell anyone about Freedom Summer, but a black waitress noticed the white-haired woman’s tears. So Fran told Ebony about teaching in Vicksburg, befriending Mrs. Garrett, enjoying the children. She spoke of fear and hope, but not of horror. The waitress asked many questions and Fran answered patiently. She then went to an art museum, but many of the paintings were blurred.
. . . What the cynics fail to understand is that the ground has shifted beneath them—that the stale political arguments that