Freedom Summer - Bruce W. Watson [88]
Some parents had more clout than others. In Whittier, California, Fran O’Brien’s mother could only buy a subscription to the Vicksburg Post and worry. In Amherst, Massachusetts, Jean Williams could merely save letters from “Xtoph” and hope for the best. In Washington, D.C., Holly Tillinghast, having taught in Mississippi, could only fear the worst. But a few parents had pipelines straight to Congress.
One morning in early July, volunteer Steve Bingham awoke in Mileston to find the Mississippi Highway Patrol looking for him. Bingham was the grandson of Hiram Bingham, discoverer of Machu Picchu and later a U.S. senator. The Binghams were one of Connecticut’s most prominent families, but now their youngest son was living with eight other volunteers in a shack on a dirt road in Mississippi, cooking on camp stoves and getting water from a hand pump in the backyard. The Binghams, though backing their son’s decision to go south, were concerned. Shortly after Steve Bingham reached Mississippi, his father contacted Mississippi senator John Stennis, an old family friend. Bingham was not merely concerned about his own son—he wanted all volunteers protected. But Stennis called Governor Paul Johnson, and Steve Bingham soon found himself guarded day and night by highway patrolmen. Bingham only shed his bodyguards with the help of Bob Moses. Knowing patrolmen were as scared of the Klan as everyone else, Moses had Bingham tell the highway patrol that their protection would allow him to work in Klan-ridden Natchez. The bodyguards abandoned Bingham within an hour. Later that summer, when a New Yorker was arrested while driving Allard Lowenstein around Mississippi, cops took one look at the name on his driver’s license—Franklin Delano Roosevelt III—and let him go.
But parents who could only sit and wait refused to sit and wait alone. By mid-July, parent support groups had formed across the country. Boston parents started a letter-writing campaign to the Justice Department. “Sometimes when I lie awake at night,” a mother said at one meeting, “I can’t get the picture of my child, either mutilated or dead, out of my mind.” Long Island parents gave $2,000 to a volunteer driven out of Moss Point in June. Returning to Mississippi, he handed the money over to COFO. And in a scene as removed from Mississippi as any American setting could be, parents began meeting at a lavish poolside home in Beverly Hills.
At 8:00 p.m. on Monday, July 13, the meeting of the Parents Mississippi Emergency Committee, Los Angeles Area, was called to order. Parents in attendance were a diverse lot—a movie director, a janitor’s wife, a minister, a high school teacher, the head of the biology department at the California Institute of Technology—yet their fears were one. “We didn’t really know what we wanted to do when we got together,” one mother said, “except protect them somehow.”
On one wall in the opulent living room, a sheet of cardboard displayed the latest news from Mississippi. That morning’s Los Angeles Times clipping—“Trussed Body Discovered in Louisiana River”—did not ease concerns, nor did a mother’s story from Hattiesburg. Speaking with tight control, she described how her son, David, had been with the rabbi everyone had seen in the papers. David now had a wide strip shaved from his scalp, and seven stitches. He was saving his bloody shirt as a souvenir. Other grim-faced parents shared their children’s letters—“I’m hot, I’m miserable and I can’t get my clothes washed. Would you please let me stay another month? ” Then the group got down to business.
One father suggested a bail fund, and within minutes, parents wrote out checks totaling $2,150. The group then heard from a Bay Area mother whose parents’ group had talked to Mississippians arriving for the Republican National Convention in