Freedom Summer - Bruce W. Watson [72]
It was a Fourth like many. A million people jammed the boardwalk at Coney Island. At Yankee Stadium, Mickey Mantle hit a three-run homer to beat the Twins. The Beach Boys’ “I Get Around” went to number one, and fireworks went off everywhere. Yet it was also a Fourth unlike any in memory. In Atlanta, several SNCCs, black and white, entered a rally for George Wallace. A mob descended with fists, chairs, and lead pipes until a white stranger dragged the intruders to safety. Outside Radio City Music Hall, demonstrators carried black-bordered signs in memory of Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney. At the World’s Fair in New York, SNCCs urged a boycott of the high school band from Greenwood, Mississippi. And in Greenwood, in Vicksburg, in Batesville, volunteers celebrated freedom with those for whom it remained a dream.
So far, most volunteers had met just their host families and a few neighbors. From these few, they had learned that black Mississippi was stronger than its shacks. They noticed how black women always referred to each other with the deference whites denied them—Mrs. or Miss. They learned who in “the quarters” could be trusted and who were the “Judas niggers.” They met practitioners of jobs they thought had vanished—midwife, fortune teller, bootlegger—and they learned about folk remedies, superstitions, and how to survive on three dollars a day. On Sundays in church, they saw how faith and song held lives together. But the Fourth of July introduced volunteers to the local heroes.
Today, when the civil rights movement is mentioned, the same names surface—Rosa Parks and Dr. King, Rosa Parks and Dr. King. . . . The names of everyday people in Mississippi—Bob Moses’ “striking force,” who marched, registered, risked everything in the name of freedom—remain unknown. But volunteers were learning the names and meeting the people they would never forget. “What have I done in my life?” a graying Fred Winn asked, looking back more than forty years. “Well, I’ve done a little of this, a little of that. But I ate at the table of Fannie Lou Hamer, in her home and she called me by my name and we were friends.” Cops called the local heroes “troublemakers” and “uppity niggers.” Most were unknown outside their towns, but legends within, legends passing the potato salad that holiday afternoon.
Shortly after midday, in temperatures one volunteer guessed to be 110, people began pouring onto a farm near Hattiesburg. All afternoon, whites and blacks went on tractor-pulled hayrides, sought shade beneath moss-draped live oaks, and ate mountains of potato salad, watermelon, and catfish fried in huge kettles. Many wondered who was hosting the picnic. A rugged man in a pith helmet seemed in charge, tending the catfish, talking with everyone, but he looked white, and what white Mississippian would host a SNCC gathering? Questioning revealed that this was Vernon Dahmer. A gentle, ruddy-faced farmer white enough to “pass” yet proud of his black ancestry, Dahmer had housed the first SNCCs to work in Hattiesburg. Now he welcomed volunteers, including a group of teachers just arrived from a final training in Memphis. Everyone at the picnic had a great time until a pickup with a rifle rack passed. Dahmer and his son, on leave from the marines, went into the house and came out with rifles. The pickup passed again but drove on. The picnic continued until dusk, when volunteers scurried home before another night fell.
In Cleveland, Mississippi, the man to see—on the Fourth and throughout the summer—was still Amzie Moore. Standing over six feet tall, with a thick neck and bald head,