Freedom Summer - Bruce W. Watson [59]
On the fifth night of what everyone was now calling the “long hot summer,” Mississippi erupted. In town after town, volunteers were hounded by pickups, taunted by obscenities, arrested on trumped-up charges. Beer cans flew, and a SNCC car’s tires were slashed. In Hattiesburg, whites spread flyers through the black community warning: “Beware, good Negro citizens. When we come to get the agitators, stay away.” Near Jackson, someone broke into a church, doused the floor in kerosene, and tossed a match. In the midst of this mayhem, the most startling news came from the Delta. On Thursday, two volunteers had been abducted at gunpoint—“Want us to do to you what they did over in Philadelphia?”—and held at a gas station awaiting a bus to send them north. On the COFO log, it was just another in the lengthening list of incidents, but the following evening, the FBI arrested three white men in Itta Bena. SNCCs could barely believe the news. “You dig it?” a volunteer wrote home. “They are in a Southern jail!” That night, warned that a church would be bombed, Itta Bena cops surrounded it and kept all whites away.
Of all the Americans watching the news that week, none watched with greater alarm than the volunteers in Ohio, bound for Mississippi. SNCC structured its second training much like the first, yet volunteers found the mood on campus “like a funeral parlor.” From the first bulletins out of Neshoba County, frantic parents began calling, begging their children to come home. All week, psychiatrist Robert Coles met with anxious, terrified volunteers. Diagnosing panic, “near psychosis,” or just “character disorders,” Coles sent eight students home. But in the rest, he witnessed the power of idealism. “Suddenly hundreds of young Americans became charged with new energy and determination,” Coles wrote. “Suddenly I saw fear turn into toughness, vacillation into quiet conviction.” Many volunteers found their way to the chapel. Others crowded around TVs to watch Walter Cronkite, to see the car towed out of the swamp, to watch the ABC special The Search in Mississippi . When the program ended, volunteers joined hands and sang. “You know what we’re all doing,” one man told the group. “We’re moving the world.”
The first volunteers, trained for voter registration, had arrived with the confidence of young politicos. But this second group consisted of Freedom School teachers. Accustomed to working with children, they now faced the likelihood of being beaten, jailed, even murdered. All that week, they struggled to explain to terrified parents why they would not turn back.
June 27
Dear Mom and Dad,
This letter is hard to write because I would like so much to communicate how I feel and I don’t know if I can. It is very hard to answer to your attitude that if I loved you I wouldn’t do this—hard, because the thought is cruel. I can only hope you have the sensitivity to understand that I can both love you very much and desire to go to Mississippi . . .
Dear Folks,
. . . You should know that it would be a lot nicer in Hawaii than in Mississippi this summer. I am afraid of the situation down there, and the beaches and the safety are very alluring. But I am perhaps more afraid of the kind of life I would fall into in Hawaii. I sense somehow that I am at a crucial moment in my life and that to return home where everything is secure and made for me would be to choose a kind of death. . . . I feel the urgent need, somehow, to enter life, to be born into it. . . .
On their last evening in the safe North, volunteers again filled the campus auditorium. A spectral déjà vu loomed over the meeting. The previous Friday night, the three missing men had sat in this same auditorium, sang these same songs, heard these same leaders. Now this second group would follow them down. First, however, they listened one last time to Bob Moses.
Sighing and starting in, Moses asked if anyone had read the book that was becoming