Freedom Summer - Bruce W. Watson [2]
That fall in Southeast Asia, American advisers sent back discouraging reports, causing President Kennedy to consider ending involvement in Vietnam. College students strummed folk songs, their younger siblings danced to syrupy pop music, but off in England a shaggy-haired rock band was riding a wave of frenzy that would soon sweep across the Atlantic and sweep away old mores. Across the South, blacks were marching into police dogs and fire hoses, demanding decency and human rights. But the most significant signpost in the autumn of 1963 arose in the nation’s poorest state. There, on a November weekend shortly before events in Dallas began to change everything, thousands of bone-poor citizens gave America a long-overdue lesson in democracy.
Mississippi’s official ballot listed Republican and Democratic candidates for governor. Yet in a southern state still voting as if Lincoln headed the GOP, the election was never in doubt. Everyone knew Democrat Paul B. Johnson, following in his father’s footsteps, would be the next governor. White voters admired how, as lieutenant governor, “Paul Stood Tall Last Fall,” blocking a black man’s entry to the state university. White voters relished Johnson’s sneers at the most hated politicians in Mississippi, Jack and Bobby Kennedy, whose federal troops, so the story went, had incited the integration riots at “Ole Miss.” White voters sniggered at Johnson’s joke that NAACP stood for “Niggers, Alligators, Apes, Coons, and Possums.” And on November 5, white voters comfortably elected “Tall Paul.” But that Tuesday, whites were not the only voters in Mississippi.
From the buff sands of the Gulf Coast to the cotton fields of the Delta, a parallel election was held, a black election, a “Freedom Election.” In little wooden churches with majestic names, whole congregations rose from the pews. While gospel choirs chanted—“We-ee shall not, we shall not be moved”—men and women slipped “Freedom Ballots” into wooden boxes. In cafés sweetened by the smell of cornbread, withered hands marked Xs beside “Aaron Henry—Governor” and “Reverend Edwin King—Lt. Governor.” On teetering porches, black men in overalls and black women in gingham spoke with students from Yale and Stanford recruited for this prelude to “Freedom Summer.” Nodding politely, calling their clean-cut guests “sir,” lifelong sharecroppers learned that voting did not have to remain “white folks’ business.” And thousands, forging raw democracy out of Mississippi’s red clay, cast “Freedom Votes” in beauty parlors and grocery stores, in barbershops and pool halls. Yet thousands more were far too terrified to risk anything so dangerous as voting.
Throughout that weekend, fear had quickened the pulse of Mississippi. Much more than a governorship was being decided. In a “closed society” where segregation ran as deep as the fertile soil of the Delta, black and white agreed on little, yet both knew that voting equaled power. Elsewhere in the South, blacks had begun to register—44 percent in Georgia, 58 percent in Texas, 69 percent in Tennessee—but in Mississippi just 6.7 percent could vote. So long as they remained “second-class citizens,” blacks knew they would remain powerless. And whites knew that if “our colored” registered en masse, or worse, if they were led to courthouses by “goddamned NAACP Communist trouble makers,” all the nightmares recounted by grandparents