Freedom Summer - Bruce W. Watson [65]
When asked in workshops why he had come, Fred spoke frankly about his father’s interracial affair. And on that Monday morning when Rita Schwerner told volunteers to write their congressmen, Fred wrote his, then fired off letters to the San Francisco Chronicle and to his mother, calling her a racist. Yet as the mood on campus turned funereal, his righteousness was tested. The disappearance had made it clear—“There were people in Mississippi who might murder me.” His roommate, a football player from the Midwest, went home, but Fred was determined to go to Mississippi. For a laugh, he recalled his father’s parting advice—“If the Klan gets a hold of you, yell ‘My father is a Mason!’ ” A Masonic code, he was told, prevents Masons from harming each other’s families. Armed with that and his tools, Fred Winn went to Mississippi, where it was midnight and he still could not sleep.
Fred found nights in Mississippi “scarier than shit.” He had already faced down the food. He took one bite of pigs’ feet, one of pigs’ ear, no more. Okra gagged him—“It’s like eating sandpaper slugs”—but he would learn to like it. Yet he could not get used to the danger. In his first letter from Ruleville, he shared news of the disappearance. “Dad, I hope you realize that I may be in that same position in a few days. Do not worry and for shit’s sake don’t come running down here. We have a very good investigation division of our own.” His father read each letter over and over. Reminded of his own experiences as a green World War II enlistee who rose to the rank of captain, the elder Winn dutifully sent “Freddy” money, signed letters to LBJ, and worried. And each night his faraway son, after hanging screens, fixing toilets, and singing at mass meetings, made a pallet on the Freedom School floor, set his glasses beside it, and struggled to get some sleep. For protection, Fred had covered the school’s windows with corrugated tin, cutting off any breeze, turning his “bedroom” into a sweatbox. A volunteer from New Jersey was stretched out nearby, breathing deeply, but Fred just lay there thinking about his fractured family back home, thinking about his tasks the next day, wondering what he had gotten himself into. The room was pitch-black, and he listened to every car that passed.
On Monday morning, June 29, Rita Schwerner and Bob Zellner were escorted into the Oval Office of the White House. Rita must have looked like a child standing before the president, more than a foot taller and more than twice her weight. LBJ stooped, shook her hand, and said he was glad to meet her. But convinced now that she was a widow—at twenty-two—Rita was brusque. “I’m sorry, Mr. President, this is not a social call,” she said. “We’ve come to talk about three missing people in Mississippi. We’ve come to talk about a search that we don’t think is being done seriously.”
“I’m sorry you feel that way, Miss,” the president replied.
The conversation was brief. Rita demanded that five thousand federal marshals be sent to Mississippi. The president said everything that could be done was being done. When LBJ abruptly turned and left, press secretary Pierre Salinger chewed out Rita, saying one did not talk to the president of the United States that way.
“We do,” Rita said, and left for a press conference.
Throughout that second week, volunteers went about their business in black Mississippi. They readied Freedom Schools, opened community centers, sat on rickety front porches, shucking peas and getting to know their hosts. And white Mississippi went about its business—repelling the invasion.