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By Root 1701 0

’s huge armored tank waited at police headquarters. Nearby, the county fairgrounds had become a holding camp big enough to house thousands of prisoners. After months of rumors and threats, Mississippi hunkered down for the worst. In Jackson, Eudora Welty wrote a friend, “I hear that this summer all hell is going to break loose.” The State Sovereignty Commission reported “increased activity in weapon shipments.” From towns carved out of the clay to those rising from cotton fields, Mississippi waited. Then shortly after midnight on the first day of summer, young men and women rode buses south from Memphis, singing as they approached the state line. When a blood-red sun rose that Sunday, Mississippi was again engulfed in the wars—between white and black, between North and South, between tolerance and intolerance—that had never really ended.

“Why doesn’t everybody love each other?” “Do what?” “Love each other. Why don’t they love each other?” “Say, what are you anyhow? Some kind of a nut?”

—Shelby Foote, Jordan County

CHAPTER THREE

Freedom Street

The land was a pool table of green, the sky was bigger than Montana’s, and the asphalt was long, straight, and empty when eight volunteers and two SNCC staffers were dropped by the side of a highway somewhere in Mississippi. They knew the date—June 21, 1964. They knew the time—5:00 a.m. But where were they?

The last sign had read, “Batesville—Corp Limit,” but there was no town in sight. Other than the felt fields and skinny two-lane, there was nothing in sight except a vacant Greyhound bus station and, across the highway, a squat brick building stamped with the words “Mississippi Highway Patrol.” Chris Williams, still bleary from the bus ride, found this “unpleasant, to say the least.” Where the hell was Batesville? Back in Ohio, they had learned the rudiments of Mississippi geography—the Delta cotton fields, the low central hills, the matchstick Piney Woods farther south—but standing by the road near Batesville, the group saw no cotton, no hills, no woods, just a sweep of emptiness filling them with a vague terror that something had gone very wrong.

Someone was supposed to meet them. Someone had met the dozen people dropped an hour earlier at the small college in Holly Springs. But no one was there now, just the highway patrolman across the street. Sitting in his car. Sunglasses glinting. Volunteers talked among themselves, trying to remain calm, but they had been warned to expect the worst, and it looked as if they had been dumped right into it. Wherever they might be in Mississippi, it seemed far from any America they knew. A billboard farther back had read “Impeach Earl Warren.” Gorgeous white magnolias burst from roadside greenery while lush vines strangled telephone poles, fences, and trees. Even the morning sun was so blinding it hurt. Scattered houses seemed buried in an impoverished past, their faded clapboards barely rising above piles of old refrigerators, rusted sedans, and decaying pickups. The last gas station had advertised “Ethyl—29.9¢/gal,” but it looked as if no one had filled up there since World War II.

SNCC staffer Tillman McKellar, having been to Mississippi, quickly took charge. McKellar walked to a phone booth at the bus depot to call their contact, then returned to the highway to flag down the first passing black driver. The highway patrolman revved his engine, followed, and pulled the car over. The cop seemed to be lecturing—McKellar later said the cop told him they would all end up at the bottom of the Tallahatchie River. Then both cars drove off, leaving nine people by the roadside, alone—but not for long.

June was “hospitality month” in Mississippi, and on Route 6 the hospitality started with mosquitoes. Mississippi “skeeters,” locals joked, were “so big they could stand flatfooted and fuck a turkey.” As they swarmed, their piercing whines and stinging bites made the rising sun feel hotter, the sky more like a pot’s lid than open space. June bugs followed—nasty brown lumps buzzing ears and eyes. Then came the human pests. A pickup