Freedom Summer - Bruce W. Watson [51]
SNCC had decided not to send volunteers to McComb. After further discussion, Klan-infested Pike County, where blacks had been disappearing all spring, was deemed too dangerous. Shortly after 10:00 p.m., SNCC’s decision suddenly seemed wise. Bolting upright in bed, a black woman looked out her front window to see a shiny new Chevy skid to a halt. A man jumped out and tossed a package. As the woman scrambled to the back of her house, the explosion leveled the porch, blew in the front door, and littered her bed with glass. Moments later, another bomb, then another, rocked homes of longtime civil rights supporters. The following morning, while blacks surveyed the rubble, the eyes of America turned to a remote corner of the Magnolia State and to a town whose name meant “Brotherly Love.”
When it awoke on the last morning of its past, Philadelphia (pop. 5,017) looked much like any other Mississippi hamlet. Rising above a two-story skyline, dozens of short, sharp steeples aimed at the heavens. Smokestacks from three sawmills belched black clouds. Downtown merchants pushed brooms outside the Ben Franklin Five and Dime, the A & P, and the Piggly-Wiggly. Along covered sidewalks, clusters of sun-shriveled old men sat on wooden benches, smoking, spitting, watching their town awaken. Pickups passed as if on parade. A farmer in overalls waved from a tractor. Mothers walked with crew-cut boys in tow. By 9:00 a.m. the sun baked the gravel streets, giving the old men no reason to believe June 23 would be different from any other Tuesday. Some may have seen network reports about the three men said to have disappeared in their county—more “Northern-managed news.” Whatever the problem was, things would soon go back to normal. “Normal” in Philadelphia was as homespun as the upcoming Neshoba County Dairy Princess contest; “normal” was as timeless as the courthouse. With its Corinthian columns and Confederate statue, the brick building was the bedrock of the town some called “the other Philadelphia.” Yet there was still another Philadelphia within this one.
Down a snaking dirt road and across the railroad tracks stood Independence Quarters. There, in tiny homes with boarded-up windows, Philadelphia blacks “scratched it out.” Independence Quarters had its own school, its own churches, its own version of Mississippi. And when word spread that three men were missing in Neshoba County, few in “the quarters” doubted the story. Folks said it must have something to do with the burning of that church. The church that was supposed to host a Freedom School. The church that a young CORE worker had visited a few weeks back.
White Philadelphia had not heard of the church burning. A local bank president had convinced editors to kill the story, and it had not run in a single Mississippi paper. Those few who knew considered it typical—niggers fighting over this or that, burning their own church. That, too, would all blow over. Things always did in Philadelphia, which, having no antebellum mansions, no battlefields or plantations, prided itself on its hospitality and its “fair-minded, Christian people.” Yet that was about to change, starting with the people.
The old men spotted the invaders first. By 10:00 a.m., whichever way they looked, they saw strangers with sunglasses and briefcases, white shirts and skinny ties. Each man drove a dark sedan with a whiplike antenna, and each seemed nervous, scribbling notes, scanning the town square, avoiding eye contact. The old men huddled on benches, sharing fears instilled by grandparents, fears of Yankees, carpetbaggers, and a war that had never really ended. Now the nightmare was starting again. Now, in numbers no one in Mississippi could have imagined, the FBI had invaded Neshoba County.
All Tuesday morning, the FBI set up operations. At the Delphia Courts Motel, a right angle of dilapidated rooms fronting a concrete lot, Room 18 became FBI headquarters. Behind city hall, agents installed a communications center and began erecting an antenna on the wide, squat water tower. After establishing