Freedom Summer - Bruce W. Watson [75]
A few blocks from the Mississippi River in Greenville, Muriel Tillinghast had spent two weeks upstairs. Other volunteers had entered the office early each morning, left late each evening. Their jocularity amazed Muriel, but their confidence was not contagious. No matter how they tried to get her outside, she refused to leave. All her inherited skills, her years of protest and picketing, had been drowned in fear. Her “Sunday call,” Charlie Cobb, had come back from Neshoba County with chilling tales of late-night searches for the three. Now, the affable Cobb, a poet, writer, and educator, was telling Muriel how safe Greenville was. But Muriel, sure that her skin and her natural hair made her a target, remained upstairs. Alone with her fears each night, she had them reinforced by phone threats—“Just wanted to know if you niggers are going to church this morning.”
Much had happened in Greenville to soothe Muriel’s concerns. Volunteers had marched around a federal building, protesting LBJ’s refusal to send marshals to Mississippi. Greenville police watched but made no arrests. A Greenville jury acquitted a black man of rape charges by a white woman. No one could remember that ever happening in Mississippi. Several high school students, having led sit-ins, were in the office working, joking, easing tensions. And each morning, someone brought in the newspaper.
When Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney disappeared, the Delta Democrat-Times preached tolerance. June 24, 1964: “Today would be a good day for prayer in Mississippi, a sincere prayer that the three missing civil rights workers are not dead. If our prayers are not answered, if murder has been committed, then the rest of the summer could well be pure hell.” And to those who said the three “mixers” had been taught a lesson, Hodding Carter III added, “It may well be a lesson. It may be a lesson that there are people living in this state who can see three men disappear without concern simply because they felt the men were unwelcome.” Upstairs, Muriel read the local news and recognized Greenville as different. But she also heard news from the rest of Mississippi and stayed inside. The office had no refrigerator, so she survived on whatever others could bring her. She lost “a lotta weight.” Finally, she had “an epiphany that I couldn’t register people to vote on the second floor of the office. I had to come out.”
Sometime that Fourth of July weekend, Muriel edged her way down the stairs and stepped into the blinding glare, straight into the face of Mississippi. Step by step, she learned to walk beside her fears. Her first journey took her alongside the COFO building, past the dry cleaners, running her hands along the warm bricks. After a few minutes, she went back inside, but she returned to the street the next day. She visited the mom-and-pop store she had seen only from the second-story window and the juke joints farther down Nelson Street. No one drove by, shouting. No one noticed at all. By the time she began her third week in Mississippi, Muriel was herself again—shaken but ready to be the take-charge activist with the degree from Howard and the street credentials from its Non-Violent Action Group. She thought she was prepared for whatever Mississippi could throw at her. She did not know that in two weeks, Charlie Cobb would leave, putting her in charge of the Greenville project.
The week that opened with the revival of dying buildings closed with events equally unimaginable a month before. In June, it would have been easy to foresee the mob scene in Laurel when blacks tried to eat at a Burger Chef, or the brawl in Greenwood when Silas McGhee tried to integrate the Leflore Theater. But who would have predicted what occurred in Jackson on July 5? That Sunday afternoon, NAACP leaders flew to Mississippi to test the Civil Rights Act. Expecting to be arrested or beaten, they were met by police and escorted to the Heidelberg Hotel