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By Root 1677 0

downtown. Joined by Jackson’s local heroes, the black men walked into the hotel, up to the desk—and checked in. A white bellboy took their bags. They ate lunch in the Green Room. “The food was good, the service was good, and the attitude was good,” said a Jackson minister whose home had been shot into just twelve days earlier. Other tests—at the Sun n’ Sand Motel and the King Edward Hotel—also went off without incident. “I think we can see helpful signs that Mississippi will get in step with the nation,” the minister said. The manager of the Sun n’ Sand summed up the grudging attitude of much of Mississippi: “We are just going to abide by the law.”

As a new week began, NAACP leaders set out to tour Mississippi and make more tests. Caught up in the same spirit, SNCC readied staffers to work in the Klan hotbed of McComb. And volunteers prepared for more canvassing and the opening of Freedom Schools across the state. Neither the NAACP, the volunteers, nor those well schooled in Mississippi violence had any notion that the holiday was over.

I’m standin’ at the crossroads

And I believe I’m sinkin’ down.

—Robert Johnson, “Cross Road Blues”

CHAPTER SIX

“The Scars of the System”

Moss Point, Mississippi, a small town along the Singing River near the Gulf of Mexico, had seen its share of turmoil that summer. Volunteers were in town only a few days when a meeting hall was firebombed and several were arrested. With tension rising, blacks and whites were buying guns, and one white was found carrying a grenade. Rumors of black children poisoned by candy had only been rumors, yet Moss Point remained a racial tripwire, taut, edgy, just waiting for something horrible to happen.

“Tonight the sickness struck,” a Moss Point volunteer wrote home on July 6. That Monday evening, three hundred people packed into the Knights of Pythias Hall, its front door still blackened from the Molotov cocktail. Speaking to the crowd, a stocky, bespectacled man was rising to a fever pitch. Lawrence Guyot, beaten along with Fannie Lou Hamer the year before, was furious. Like Greenville, his native Gulf Coast was known for relative tolerance, yet despite steady canvassing, few had come out to register. “What will it take to make you people move?” Guyot shouted. “A rape? A shooting? A murder? What will it take? ” Other speeches followed before Freedom Songs soothed tensions. Meanwhile in nearby Pascagoula, three men crammed into a small car. They barely had room for the rifle.

Back at the Knights Hall, the crowd had arrived at every meeting’s final song. Glowing, ecstatic faces sang together, arms clasped, swaying like lilies in the field. The lone cop on hand, concluding the meeting was over, drove away. Then as a final “We Shall Overcome” filled the hall, the car sped past. Three sharp cracks rang out. Near the window, a black woman crumpled to the floor. A fan toppled, its whirring blades slamming into the concrete like a machine gun firing. In the chaos, one volunteer saw the fallen woman “lying on the ground clutching her stomach. She was so still and looked like a statue with a tranquil smile on her face.” Several men bolted from the hall, hopped in a car, and chased the attackers into a gas station. But one white leveled the rifle, sending blacks scurrying. When police arrived, they arrested the blacks and let everyone else go. At Singing River Hospital, the woman was listed in “good” condition, but the shots sent notice that despite the hope, the singing, the new Civil Rights Act, this was still Mississippi, still the “long, hot summer,” and it was just July.

June had been a blanket, but July was an oven, melting, igniting, engulfing. Timeless patterns governed July in Mississippi. The first was the relentless humidity, the sultry nights never drying the earth before the sun rose again to turn on the steam. The second pattern was the cycle of heat and rain, heat and rain. Both patterns were ingrained in locals who knew when to get chores done, when a blazing sky made a nap seem in order, when thunderheads would hover on the horizon