Freedom Summer - Bruce W. Watson [63]
While whites talked—or refused to talk—blacks in Philadelphia opened up to the press. Mrs. Junior Cole told the New York Times how a white mob had gathered outside the Mt. Zion Church on the evening before it burned. The elderly woman trembled as she described emerging from a church meeting with her husband. Suddenly, a man with a gun had stepped in front of their car. Seconds later, the road was filled with white men, rifles across their chests. One shone a flashlight in Junior Cole’s face, asking about the church meeting. When Cole replied that it was just a routine gathering, the white man barked, “You a damn liar. You having an N-double-A-CP meeting out here, ain’t you? ” Yanking the old man out of the car, the mob pummeled him to the ground, thrashing and kicking. Mrs. Cole dropped to her knees in the gravel.
“Lord, don’t let them kill my husband.”
“If you think prayer will do any good, you’d better pray.”
As fists and a pistol butt thudded in the darkness, Mrs. Cole lifted both arms to heaven. “Father, I stretch my hands to Thee,” she said. “No other help I know.” The words seemed to calm the men. Leaving Junior Cole in a heap on the ground, they got into cars and pickups and drove off. A few hours later, an orange glow lit the night sky from off toward the church.
While the FBI investigated and the public feasted on rumors, 450 volunteers stifled their fears and settled into Mississippi. Bob Moses had once written to a “Friends of SNCC” chapter, explaining how that was done.
You dig into yourself and the community to wage psychological warfare; you combat your own fears about beatings, shootings, and possible mob violence; you stymie, by your mere physical presence, the anxious fear of the Negro community . . . you organize, pound by pound, small bands of people . . . a small striking force capable of moving out when the time comes, which it must, whether we help it or not.
The time had come. The first week of July 1964 was an American Rubicon. On July 2, President Johnson would sign the Civil Rights Act, banning segregation in all public facilities. And all that holiday weekend, blacks would test the waters—ordering breakfast from white waitresses, getting haircuts from white barbers, checking into hotels where just a week before they had been welcome only as maids and kitchen help. But just offstage at this revolution, blacks and whites scattered across Mississippi won smaller victories. They signed papers on porches, learned together in Freedom Schools, played together at picnics, and shared the most integrated Fourth of July in American history.
Deepening its denial, white Mississippi continued to sneer at the invaders. “While professing to believe in ‘equality,’ ” a Jackson Clarion-Ledger columnist wrote, “these self-appointed reformers evidently regard themselves as mentally and morally superior to Mississippians. What the students think of us is not very important . . . because the invaders couldn’t possibly think less of us than the majority here thinks of them and their sponsors.” In his home overlooking his cotton fields, Senator James Eastland echoed the denial that was becoming the common wisdom among Mississippi whites. “I find more resentment on the part of Negroes than white people to this effort in our state,” the bald, bespectacled senator told reporters. But Eastland did not know the 40 percent of his constituents who had never been allowed to vote. “It’s the best thing that’s happened since there ever was a Mississippi,” one black man said. “I just love the students like I love to eat. . . . If more come down here, I’d get out of my bed for them and sleep on a pallet in the tool shed. They’re doing things we couldn’t do for ourselves in years on end. . . . A lot of bad smells are getting out to the outside world that never did before.