Freedom Summer - Bruce W. Watson [18]
Savvy, street-smart, and fiercely independent, Muriel Tillinghast was the latest incarnation of the rock-solid women who helped generations survive slavery. When gripped by fear, she was sometimes overwhelmed, yet able to summon deep rivers within. When despair surfaced, a quick and sarcastic wit kept her going. And when these resources failed, she fell back on her family. “I did not come out of a family where you played the victim,” she said, “but from multi generations of people who fought back.” The Tillinghasts, intensely involved in the Lutheran church and “about eighty other groups,” had long been an “organizational family.” Even in 1964, they still shared the story of how, sometime around 1900, Muriel’s grandmother had left a Texas plantation and walked to Washington, D.C. There Gloria Carter had married a “race man.” Muriel’s grandfather was “no bigger than a match stick” but, widely traveled and defiantly self-educated, he shared a household where books were cherished, college was mandatory, and children “spent time in meetings from when we could walk.”
Growing up in D.C., Muriel rarely encountered the dark racism of the Deep South. But she remembered a visit to Florida where she was told not to even touch the clothes in a department store, and never to try them on. And closer to home, she had often met racism’s lighter-skinned cousin. Like the old spiritual turned into SNCC’s anthem, she had been “ ’buked and scorned” more times than she cared to count. Her sophomore class had been the first to integrate D.C.’s Roosevelt High School, facing down the hatred of the principal and student body. Each affront gave Muriel a steely strength hidden in a slight frame. By the time she reached Howard, meticulous and driven, she was a natural for NAG’s nonviolent protests. But as an urbanite who knew the Deep South only in legend and in Movement lore, was she ready for Mississippi? As a woman who had not yet learned to drive, was she prepared for harrowing chases down back roads? And as a black woman who chose not to straighten her hair, instead letting it grow into an Afro long before the style became popular, could she stand up to the relentless bigotry she was about to encounter?
Muriel knew Mississippi only as “a distant well of human woe,” yet human woe had been beckoning. During the winter of 1963, when Delta officials cut off federal food allotments, she had collected enough clothes and food to fill half a semitruck, then found a teamster willing to arm himself and drive it to Leflore County. A year later, she had again reached out to Mississippi when NAG members began calling isolated SNCCs there, offering solidarity, friendship, human contact. Muriel recognized one name on the list—Charlie Cobb in Greenville. Cobb had been a fellow Howard student and NAG member. His aunt had also been Muriel’s fifth-grade teacher, so she called him up unannounced. Cobb soon became her “Sunday call.” “He would tell me about what they were doing, their daily work which was mostly staying alive.” As plans for the summer solidified, Cobb began telling this kind female voice on the phone about the upcoming project.
Some volunteers had agonized about going to Mississippi. Others had leaped at the chance. For Muriel, Mississippi was simply the next logical step. Her mother, having taught school in Mississippi, was “beside herself” over her daughter’s decision, but Muriel did not consider it a decision. “At NAG meetings, I was informed around February that something was going on in Mississippi