Freedom Summer - Bruce W. Watson [19]
Once on the Ohio campus, Muriel did not concern herself with the tension between staff and recruits. As she had all her life, she got down to business. Her experience with NAG immediately moved her from volunteer to SNCC staffer, privy to all the endless meetings, strategies, and concerns. Becoming “a sponge” of information, she pestered Charlie Cobb and other veterans for survival tips. She learned how she would have to walk in Mississippi—a slow rural pace that did not call attention to her. She learned how she would have to address people, and how she could organize small, quarreling communities into cohesive armies united in the fight. SNCC’s horror stories “brought us to the stark reality that some of us were not going to come back,” but Muriel tried not to think about that. Instead, she called on her inherited strength, her organizational skills, the solidarity she had learned at Howard, and prepared to take them south. Courage had nothing to do with it. “It was esprit de corps. These were my friends and they were going and I was going with them.”
Suddenly there were just two days till departure. Volunteers wrote to President Lyndon Johnson, asking, “As we depart for that troubled state, to hear your voice in support of those principles to which Americans have dedicated and sacrificed themselves.” Bob Moses had already written LBJ requesting federal protection for the project. Neither Moses nor volunteers heard from the president.
Buses would head south on Saturday afternoon, entering Mississippi on Sunday under cover of darkness. As if to highlight the danger, the media began to swarm over the campus. Final workshops unfolded before TV cameras. Volunteers were interviewed again and again. “Are you scared?” “Do you really think it will do any good?” “You are scared, aren’t you?” Besieged by reporters, volunteers tried to explain their motives. “Part of it is the American dream, you know, and part is shame,” one told the Saturday Evening Post. “I feel a very real sense of guilt. But I hope I’m not going down there to get my little red badge of liberalism.” Berkeley student Mario Savio told the Los Angeles Times, “The injustices to the Negro in Mississippi are also an infringement upon my rights.” Newspapers alerted the country—Mississippi was in for “a long, hot summer,” a “racial explosion.” Syndicated columnist Joseph Alsop feared “guerilla war.”
Muriel Tillinghast barely noticed the media, but Chris Williams was incensed. “The guy from Life was a real jerk,” he wrote in his journal. “The TV men were a pain in the neck as well with their big grinding cameras. They loved Non-Violent Workshops because that was where the action was. It was the closest thing to actual violence they could find. Sadists!” Volunteers wrote to parents, telling Mom and Dad to look for them in print or on TV. “Look magazine is searching for the ideal naïve northern middle-class white girl,” one wrote. “For the national press, that’s the big story. And when one of us gets killed, the story will be even bigger.” Two days left.
On Thursday, volunteers learned of their legal rights and how little they would mean that summer. Chris met attorney William Kunstler, later famous for defending the Chicago Seven, who was handling his case in North Carolina. Kunstler’s daughter, Karin, was among the volunteers. That morning, a graying man puffing a cigar stepped before the group. Jess Brown, one of four black lawyers in Mississippi, pointed a bony finger at the sweep of faces before him. “Now get this in your heads and remember what I am going to say!” Brown began. Mississippi sheriffs, cops, and highway patrolmen already knew their names, their hometowns, their full descriptions. “All I can