Freedom Summer - Bruce W. Watson [36]
June 21, 1964
Dear People,
Greetings from Batesville, Miss. The Freedom Riders, as we are called by the locals, arrived here at 5 a.m. after leaving Oxford at about 2 p.m. Sat. . . . This morning as we waited to be picked up at Batesville, we were greeted by the police, sheriff, and members of the White Citizens Council. One heckler told us, “We’re going to give you a hard time, goddamn it.” Another fellow said to his companion, “We ought to kill these bastards right now.” However, the Negro community assures us that this is the common bluff. The people here are very friendly and Panola County should be easy. Send mail to Rev. Robert Miles, Route 2, Box 20, Batesville, Miss.
Love,
Xtoph
Late that afternoon, Chris and other volunteers dropped in at Batesville’s two juke joints. Dimly lit bars festooned with beer signs and Christmas lights, each had a soda fountain and general store up front. On Saturday nights, there would be live music, but it was Sunday afternoon down at the Thomas Sundry, and even if it looked like the kind of place their parents warned them against, Chris and other volunteers passed beneath the neon Coca-Cola sign and were inside. Moving deeper into a room that reeked of barbecue sauce and kerosene, they found a bar, a pool table, and a jukebox with the best R & B selection Chris had ever seen. The volunteers were soon surrounded by dozens crowding in to meet “The Riders.” After a half hour, the crowd followed Chris and his new friends through the black section of Batesville—little more than a drugstore, beauty parlor, and gas station—to the H & H Café. There locals convinced Chris to try “some good old southern bourbon.” Eager to oblige, amazed to be served hometown hooch in the last dry state in America, the teenager had his first burning sip of moonshine. It was shaping up to be quite a summer.
No one is certain who dreamed up Freedom Summer. Some say Bob Moses, some say Allard Lowenstein. A quixotic academic and Pied Piper of young idealists, Lowenstein had brought Stanford and Yale students to the previous fall’s Freedom Election, then suggested a larger white influx the following summer. But this much is agreed upon: “Had Moses not wanted it to happen, it wouldn’ta happened.” And the summer project almost did not happen. Hotly debated throughout the winter of 1963, the idea had seemed to Stokely Carmichael “either an act of madness or a daring stroke of genius.” Carmichael had not been the only skeptic. Many SNCC veterans felt theirs was the rightful claim to any progress Mississippi might make. They had braved Mississippi when no one else would. They still bore the scars—bloody welts, broken bones, bullet wounds you could put your finger in. And now a bunch of white college kids with names like Pam and Geoff were being invited to Mississippi to gather headlines and plaudits for bravery. Mississippi natives had other reasons to oppose the project. “We had worked so hard trying to get local people to take initiative for their own movement,” Hollis Watkins recalled. “That process was beginning to take place. And I felt that bringing a large number down from the North would snatch the rug right from under the people in the local communities.”
Yet as Carmichael noted, “This was Bob Moses talking.” As the idea gained credence, several in SNCC tried to limit white involvement. Hadn’t those arrogant Stanford and Yale students “taken over the Jackson office”? Hadn’t it been impossible to maintain SNCC’s “beautiful community” when every office had “a bunch of Yalies running around in their