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By Root 1704 0

SNCC had ever dared. What might go wrong? What had they not anticipated? Should they send volunteers to southwest Mississippi, where the Klan was most vicious? The danger had to be weighed against the “danger to local Negroes if we don’t work there.” Perhaps Natchez, they decided, but definitely not McComb. Not yet. Talk then turned to nonviolence. SNCC’s founding faith—“through nonviolence, courage displaces fear; love transforms hate”—was breaking down. The Greenwood SNCC office, Bob Moses now learned, had a few guns. No one was preaching violence, but shouldn’t an office firebombed and sprayed with bullets be able to defend itself? The argument lasted nearly an hour. Mississippi was explosive—blacks arming themselves, whites “more convinced than ever that they can kill a Negro and get away with it.” Wasn’t it time to fight back? How long would SNCC “lead people into the fire, then ask them to sing a song and return to church? ” Long silences brought only one consensus—death would hover over Mississippi all summer.

Finally, a deeply religious woman many times jailed and once shot spoke up. All heads turned to the slight, somber Prathia Hall. “No one can be rational about death,” Hall began. “For the first time we are facing that this may be the last time. We are fighting because we want life to be worth living. . . . When the kids in Birmingham were killed, I wanted to pick up a gun until I realized that by destroying lives we don’t preserve them.” The answer, Hall said, lay not just in nonviolence but in national awareness. “We must bring the reality of our situation to the nation. Bring our blood onto the White House door. If we die here, it’s the whole society which has pulled the trigger by its silence.” Consensus was finally reached. SNCC would not discourage locals from self-defense, which, Moses said, “is so deeply ingrained in rural southern America that we as a small group can’t affect it.” But SNCC staffers “have committed ourselves not to carry guns.” Weapons in the Greenwood office would be removed. No SNCCs would be armed that summer.

The meeting lasted until early morning. Race proved the thorniest issue. Would white volunteers take over from locals? Should they be allowed any authority at all? “When whites come into a project,” one man said, “the ego of Negroes is destroyed.” But Ella Baker objected. Since forming SNCC in 1960, Baker had seen her lifelong ideals taken up by the young organizers she often called “the kids.” But the kids were quarreling now, arguing over black and white. Believing in consensus, Baker usually let her protégés argue on, but now she spoke up. Might it be time, she suggested, “to take the revolution one step further?” “We have a responsibility to live up to an agreement,” she added. “The agreement is not that the white volunteers are coming as emissaries to the white community. One of the reasons we’re going into Mississippi is that the rest of the United States has never felt much responsibility for what happens in the Deep South. If we can simply let the concept that the rest of the nation bears responsibility for what happens in Mississippi sink in, then we will have accomplished something.” The meeting concluded with a financial report. SNCC had $11,600 in the bank. Bills totaled $17,600. Everything—money, time, energy, and spirit—had been spent on the summer project. Eleven days later, on the first day of summer, volunteers had been welcomed beyond all expectation. Yet no amount of spending, planning, or caution could stop the night from coming.

Evening came late on the longest day of the year. Adults rose from porches. Children were called home from their games. Twilight lingered as if, like the old blues lyric, it hated “to see that evenin’ sun go down.” Finally just after 8:00 p.m., the last pink filaments faded over the Mississippi River, taking with them the last welcomes of the day. Fireflies startled volunteers from out west who had never seen whole fields glitter. Despite such magic, fear crept over volunteers’ host homes and over their souls. Night had come