Freedom Summer - Bruce W. Watson [80]
With the highway patrol in its rearview mirror, the sedan drove slowly into McComb. Given what they had heard of the place, volunteers might have expected to see some redneck backwater out of Tobacco Road. Instead they saw well-kept drugstores and five-and-dimes, pink azaleas bursting from planters on covered sidewalks, and a billboard picture of a beauty queen beneath the words “Home of Miss Mississippi.” McComb was a “railroad town.” Freights rumbled through several times a day, hundreds of men worked for one railroad or another, and twice daily, the City of New Orleans stopped at the old station, taking passengers to or from Chicago. Trains were the only sign of life on a baking Sunday afternoon as SNCC veterans reacquainted themselves with the town they had fled three years earlier. There in back alleys stood the “Colored Only” entrances to restaurants. There were the city hall steps where a mob had beaten several SNCCs in 1961. And there behind them was the highway patrolman, his red light flashing.
Pulling the SNCC car over, the patrolmen took all seven men in for questioning. But to their surprise, they were not beaten, nor arrested. Released, they drove across the railroad tracks and pulled up at a small, tumbledown house in a neighborhood of small, tumbledown houses. No angry whites greeted them. No pickups circled. That evening as the new arrivals ate at a Negro café, two cops entered, walked to the back, glared at one white man, then walked out. The following day, SNCC staff, accompanied by one of the four touring congressmen, met with McComb’s mayor and the Pike County sheriff. The sheriff even promised police protection for the Freedom House. SNCC sent back word to Jackson: “Morale is building.” Bob Moses, however, was not fooled. On Tuesday evening, he visited the Freedom House and begged all those he had just sent there to leave. Something was going to happen, Moses said. Curtis Hayes, whose determination to work in his hometown had convinced Moses to open the house, refused to go. Others said they would depart the next morning. Moses left, and all went to sleep.
The usual incoming distress calls lit up the WATS line in Jackson that Tuesday evening, but at 1:30 a.m., the phone stopped ringing. For the next two hours, the office was eerily quiet. Then the phone rang again. A scratchy voice was on the line. From McComb. “Have just had a bombing . . . wait a minute . . .” Endless moments passed before the man said he would call back. The full report finally came on one of the new CB radios COFO was installing in offices throughout the state.
With a blast heard all over McComb, eight sticks of dynamite had blown in the front of the Freedom House. Curtis Hayes had been sleeping near the front window. The explosion knocked him across the room, knocked him unconscious. He woke up head pounding, ears ringing, arms, legs, and face laced with cuts. Crawling through the wreckage, Hayes met another staffer. “See that, motherfucker,” the man said. “I told you we should get the hell outta here.” A volunteer from Oregon had suffered a concussion. Others sleeping in the house were unhurt. Back in Jackson, staffers worried they had moved into McComb too soon, but another call suggested that the bomb had only strengthened spirits: “Bomb was placed between car and end of house at front of house at left, facing street. Damage on left side. Whole left side completely smashed in—can drive a car thru. Middle, all windows smashed, walls falling down from top. Shattered windows two houses across the street and next door. We are going ahead in the community. Everyone determined. Mass meeting tonight.”
During the second week of July 1964, while children across America relished their freedom from classrooms, three dozen schools opened in Mississippi. Classes met in converted shacks and church basements, beneath trees and on open lawns. Teachers had few textbooks and little