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By Root 1700 0

touched down in Greenwood, a small city in the cotton fields that boasted of being “the long staple cotton capital of the world.” Though the majority of Greenwood’s residents were black, whites owned 90 percent of everything. Fine mansions and stately oaks earned Greenwood’s Grand Boulevard the title “America’s Most Beautiful Street.” But rows of decrepit shacks stood on “the other side of the tracks,” and all public facilities—pools, drinking fountains, even popcorn stands—were segregated. A tired joke said that Greenwood had one black voter, but no one could find him. In the summer of 1962, enraged whites beat back a voting drive with mass arrests, drive-by shootings, and Molotov cocktails torching black homes. When dozens continued marching to the courthouse, when no number of cops flailing nightsticks could stop them, county officials used a more elemental weapon—hunger. As winter approached, they seized federal allotments of rice, flour, and dried milk that helped many sharecroppers survive the lean season. Across Leflore County, as temperatures plunged below zero, thousands were left “neckid, buck-barefoot, and starvin’.” Only a “Mississippi airlift,” activists driving tons of food into the Delta, averted a famine. Still, one infant died of starvation, and two sharecroppers froze to death. As spring approached in 1963, blacks marched to the courthouse in greater numbers. Whites fired point-blank into cars. Firebombs gutted the movement’s headquarters. A snarling police dog tore into a line of marchers. By summer, with just thirteen new voters to show for all the arrests, all the violence, the Greenwood movement stalled.

Mississippi stood at a crossroads. Years of peaceful protest had been met with bombings, beatings, and simple murder. And the rest of America did not seem to care. With Martin Luther King focusing attention on southern cities, Mississippi remained a neglected outpost of civil rights, too removed, too rural, too simmering with hatred to offer the slightest hope. In the wake of the fall’s Freedom Election, a new tactic was needed. The election’s architect, a man so saintly he was often compared to Jesus, labored to find that tactic. The Freedom Election, Bob Moses said, “makes it clear that the Negroes of Mississippi will not get the vote until the equivalent of an army is sent here.” Finally, the idea blossomed.

What if, instead of Mississippi’s black folk struggling in isolation, hundreds of college students from all across the country poured into the state? Wouldn’t America pay attention then? And what if, along with registration drives, these volunteers staffed Freedom Schools, teaching black kids subjects their “separate but equal” schools would never teach? Black history. Black literature. The root causes of poverty. What if, in the spirit of America’s new Peace Corps, this “domestic Peace Corps” set up Freedom Houses all over Mississippi, with libraries, day cares, and evening classes in literacy and voting rights? And what if, at the culmination of the summer, delegates from a new Freedom Party went to the Democratic National Convention to claim, beneath the spotlight of network news, that they, not Mississippi’s all-white delegation, were the rightful representatives from the Magnolia State? “Before the Negro people get the right to vote, there will have to be a massive confrontation,” said twenty-four-year-old John Lewis, chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, “and it will probably come this summer. . . . We are going to Mississippi full force.”

The idea haunted a state still haunted by the Civil War. Mississippi had long been a land of stark contrast—red clay and green grass, mansions and shacks, folks as pleasant as flowering magnolias, folks as mean as swamp snakes. But Freedom Summer, while it brought out the best in America, brought out the worst in Mississippi. When word of the summer project leaked, it sparked rage and resentment not seen in America since Reconstruction. Mississippi newspapers warned of an “invasion.” Governor Johnson denounced the “invaders” and