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By Root 1776 0

the clutter was Informant Y. Along with stealing key documents, including lists of all volunteers with their home addresses, Y also sent fanciful reports to the Sovereignty Commission. Apparently the COFO office was thick with Communists and even a “queer.” Photos of Khrushchev and Lenin adorned the wall, Y reported, Marxist literature was everywhere, and talk was of a new world “where black and white will walk together and where Communism will dominate. They do not talk of love but only of sex to satisfy the body.” As the summer unfolded, Informant X would continue to file dry reports while Informant Y would tell the State Sovereignty Commission just what it wanted to hear.

By June 1964, Mississippi’s past was digging in against the onslaught of the present. All but a few moderates had been silenced or exiled. Pascagoula publisher Ira Harkey had sold his crusading paper. Frank Smith, the lone Mississippi moderate in Congress, had been defeated for reelection. P. D. East had moved to Alabama, and William Faulkner was dead. Unfettered, Confederate pride resurged with a vengeance. Reconstruction-era insults—“carpetbagger” and “scalawag”—were common. The Jackson Clarion-Ledger was running a Civil War column—“This Week in 1864”—recounting atrocities by Union troops. Behind the scenes, softer voices pleaded for understanding. “I know we’ve had a hundred years,” a Hattiesburg doctor said. “I know that, and I’m ashamed to ask it, but we need more time. If we had more time, we’d work it out.” To most Mississippians, however, it was too late for pleas. “In my life span, I have never felt so compelled to stand up for God and our country,” a Jackson man wrote the Clarion-Ledger. “I ask both white and colored not to let Mississippi turn into a small New York.”

With Freedom Summer just a week away, rumors verged on panic. Not just a few hundred but thirty thousand “invaders” were on their way! In Jackson, word that Negro gangs were “forming to rape white women” led to a run on gun shops. Mississippi police stockpiled tear gas, riot guns, and electric cattle prods. Cops took riot training. The Klan announced it had 91,000 members in Mississippi and was actively recruiting. In this spreading alarm, violence became common currency.

Early one June evening, two cars stopped in front of COFO headquarters in Jackson. Two young white men stepped out. Each calmly pulled out a gun, aimed at the office, and fired. Windows shattered. Screams came from inside. The men drove off. Six days later, a bomb hit the Freedom House in Canton. That same day in volatile southwest Mississippi, whites mauled three journalists. “This is just a taste of what you Northern agitators will get,” one attacker said.

With the days melting away, Mississippi braced for the “long, hot summer.” Chambers of commerce shared strategies. Stay calm. Discourage the Klan in your area. Trust the police. Stonewall the press. In southwest Mississippi, two new organizations began meeting. The Americans for the Preservation of the White Race urged peaceful defiance. “Don’t do no violence,” a preacher told the group. “The day we kill three or four, they’d be martial law in Mississippi.” In McComb, the neighborhood watch group Help, Inc. organized block captains and mailed out “Guidelines for Self-protection and Preservation.” Among them: “Know where small children are at all times. . . . Look before unlocking door to anyone. . . . Learn alarm codes. . . . Temporary alarm to be three blasts from a shotgun or car horn.” And in klaverns dotted throughout Mississippi, Klansmen steeled themselves. “This summer, within a very few days, the enemy will launch his final push for victory here in Mississippi,” the Klan’s shadowy Imperial Wizard announced. “We must use all of the time which is left to us in these next few days preparing to meet this attack. Weapons and ammunition must be accumulated and stored. Squads must drill. . . . And a solemn, determined spirit of Christian reverence must be stimulated in all members.”

On the last day of spring, as volunteers boarded buses in Ohio, Jackson