Freedom Summer - Bruce W. Watson [40]
Early that spring, Bob Moses formed “Friends of Freedom in Mississippi.” The ad hoc group of civil rights leaders and celebrities soon wrote President Lyndon Johnson. Calling Mississippi “a virtual police state,” the Friends of Freedom warned of “a clear and present danger” of violence that summer, and urged federal protection for volunteers. Receiving no answer, SNCC took its appeal closer to the White House—within a few blocks.
On June 8, a distinguished panel gathered at the National Theater on Pennsylvania Avenue. Seated beneath the glittering chandeliers of the stately old theater, the panel included authors Joseph Heller and Paul Goodman, Harvard psychiatrist Robert Coles, and various educators. With grim faces, panelists listened to Fannie Lou Hamer recount her savage beating in jail. “I can say there will be a hot summer in Mississippi,” Hamer said, “and I don’t mean the weather.” Elizabeth Allen, widow of Louis Allen, told of the murders of her husband and Herbert Lee. Panelists were shocked. Hadn’t anyone been charged? “They don’t arrest white people in Mississippi,” Allen’s widow replied. “They arrest Negroes, but they don’t do anything to white people.” A stocky farmer named Hartman Turnbow charmed the group with his sweet Mississippi drawl, then told how his house in Tchula was firebombed after he tried to register. Again, wasn’t anyone arrested? “I was,” Turnbow replied. Police had charged him with arson. After the hearing, the panel wrote to LBJ describing “incidents of brutality and terror we scarcely believed could have happened in the United States. . . . children beaten . . . people shot . . . men murdered for no other offense than seeking to vote.” Citing threats to human life and to “the moral integrity of this country,” panelists urged the president to send federal marshals, to hold hearings, to enforce voting rights. The president did not respond. In private, LBJ’s special counsel mocked requests for protection, finding it “nearly incredible that those people who are voluntarily sticking their heads into the lion’s mouth would ask for somebody to come down and shoot the lion.” Freedom Summer planners, having expected little from the president, turned to each other for support.
Two days after the D.C. hearing, on a sweltering evening in Atlanta, SNCC convened a final meeting to discuss the looming summer. Everything seemed set. Money had come in and rolled out. Books were stacked up, ready to fill Freedom Schools. The “Sojourner Motor Fleet,” dozens of beat-up old cars and a handful of new white Plymouths, was ready to drive volunteers from site to site. SNCC, COFO, and CORE, though they would quarrel over details all summer, had their territories—who would coordinate what in which region. (Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference approved of the summer project but was not involved. The NAACP still disapproved, its leader saying, “We’re sitting this one out.”) And despite threats of retaliation, hundreds of blacks across Mississippi had agreed to open their homes to volunteers. Now, two dozen people crammed into a basement around a table strewn with papers and pitchers of iced tea. For the next several hours, SNCCs wrestled lingering doubts to one last draw.
Faces at the table were anxious, worn, weighted with thoughts of mortality. This was new ground. The summer project was far scarier than anything