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By Root 1739 0

just a drugstore, a few juke joints, and some boarded-up blues clubs clinging to life. To a young woman from Washington, D.C., Nelson Street looked like a one-horse town from an old Western movie. Muriel had seen poverty before. As part of a Lutheran mission to Guyana, she had traveled into “the bush,” met descendants of slaves living in bamboo huts, saw a child die of malnutrition. But that was another country; this was her own. All her life she had heard about the Mississippi her mother had fled, and now she was there. Gone were the idealism, the solidarity that had sent her south. In their place was a primal dread that recalled every tale of lynching she had ever read, every southern horror she had ever heard. Greenville project director Charlie Cobb, the man she had called each Sunday throughout the spring, might have calmed her, but he was still in Ohio, preparing for the second training. And nothing any fresh-faced volunteer said could convince Muriel to leave the office. “I was petrified,” she recalled.

Bob Moses had told her, “Mississippi can’t be exaggerated.” Now it did not need to be. As night blackened office windows, as other volunteers went to their homes, leaving her alone with a sleeping bag and a host of mice scurrying in the walls, her sense of alarm spiraled. Holed up in the office, she asked herself hard questions. All right, she had always been the organizer, the take-charge person. What now? How could she survive the summer? How could she canvass door-to-door if she could not even force herself to leave the office? Greenville, everyone assured her, was known for its moderation. Freshened by new people and new ideas that came along the river, it had a reputation as “different.” SNCCs said they would “rather get arrested in Greenville than any town in Mississippi.” Yet Muriel did not kid herself.

“Many Mississippi towns were predatory,” she said. “Greenville was not predatory, but it was reactionary. In West Hell the heat may not be boiling, but . . .” For a young black woman on her own a thousand miles from home, accustomed to big cities with well-lit streets, regular traffic, pragmatic people, night released inherited terrors. Night was when Muriel’s grandmother, walking from Texas to D.C., had taken refuge in barns to hide from the Klan. Night was when crosses were burned. Night had been her introduction to Mississippi, and now night had come again. “Mississippi has a black and inky night,” she recalled. “Most of us were city kids. We’d never been in a rural area, certainly had never been in a southern area at night. I shed all the veneer of urban life and got down to basics—food, water, paying attention to even the smallest detail.” All that first night alone in the office, the smallest details made her heart race. Each headlight flashing across a wall startled her. Each shout from the street sat her up. Each creak on the office stairs made her jump. Mississippi, it seemed, could be exaggerated.

To cope with the night, COFO had set up a warning system. All project offices were connected to the Jackson headquarters by a WATS (wide area transmission service) line. Long-distance calls in 1964 were expensive, reserved for emergencies, but the WATS line allowed unlimited calling for a monthly fee, enabling hourly check-ins from offices throughout Mississippi. Like a delicate spiderweb stretched across the state, COFO’s phone network kept a vigil on the summer project, recoiling with each report of violence, relaxing with each report of calm. That first day, only minor flare-ups had been phoned in. Cops had detained a CBS camera crew in Ruleville. A Molotov cocktail exploded in a church basement near Jackson, causing minor damage. That was all. But night had just begun.

COFO’s phone network also protected workers traveling through Mississippi. Anyone sent out from a Freedom House provided a precise return time and promised to phone in if delayed. If the hour came and went with no contact, calls went out to all area jails and police departments. Often these calls turned up a worker arrested and detained.