Freedom Summer - Bruce W. Watson [89]
Ten days of naked violence had taken their toll. On July 15, thirty-four Freedom Summer workers were arrested. In the Delta’s “tough town” of Drew, two dozen were crammed into a stinking, twenty-by-twenty-foot cement jail, sweating, swatting mosquitoes, and singing themselves hoarse. Across Mississippi, volunteers were struggling to keep their spirits afloat. Since coming south, they had seen three men disappear, a hundred or more arrested, several churches burned, men beaten, women insulted and degraded. Some must have wondered whether coming to Mississippi had been a mistake. Others saw their faith in America turn to bitterness. “Where is the USA?” one wrote. “It is a violation of FEDERAL LAW to harass voter registration workers.” Another lashed out with resentment that would soon become a signature sentiment of the 1960s. Noting the rank injustice condoned by the “decent middle-class,” he shot back, “Crap on your middle class, on your decency, mister Churches man. Get out of your god-damned new rented car. Get out of your pressed, proper clothes. Get out of your unoffensive, shit-eating smile and crewcut. Come join us who are sleeping on the floor.”
Midway through the third week in July, Fred Winn’s father came home, took off his tie, poured a drink, and sat down to read a letter postmarked Shaw, Mississippi. Because Fred’s handyman skills were needed in the bone-poor Delta town, the mustachioed carpenter had been transferred to Shaw, where he was “running my rear end off.” Though his eyes had been opened by the suffering of blacks in Ruleville, Fred was still naive enough to be appalled by the deeper squalor of Shaw. There he met children with bellies swollen by hunger and visited fetid shacks tilted and sinking into the soil. Sharecroppers in Shaw had given up hope, but whites seemed determined to drive them still harder. “Dad,” Fred wrote home, “the peoples’ way of thinking down here is absolutely stupid and un-American.”
Fred was in Shaw only a few days when he met the Bolivar County sheriff. A thin, dapper plantation owner and Citizens’ Council member, Sheriff Charlie Capps considered the volunteers “dirty” and “unclean.” “To me, their motives are unspeakable,” the sheriff said. But Capps, neither a bully nor a Klansman, had no desire for publicity or federal marshals, and he knew a murder could bring both to his county. “What happened in Neshoba might have happened in any county in Mississippi,” he remembered. To keep the peace, the sheriff deputized three dozen fellow World War II veterans. “We were a small town and we weren’t used to Yankees, certainly not that kind,” Capps said. “But I learned in the army that when you have massive fire-power, there’s not much gonna happen.” Calling Fred Winn and other volunteers into his office, Capps advised them to go home where they belonged. Local whites, he said, hated them with a fury no sheriff could contain. Then, seeing the volunteers would not leave, the sheriff said he would do his best “to keep a lid on things.” Yet as Fred’s father read his son’s letter, he sensed the lid boiling over.
On Saturday night, July 11, volunteers had been relaxing in Shaw’s spruced-up community center, due to open that Monday. As blacks and whites talked, sang, and shared a watermelon, a local Negro boy rushed in. Stuttering, trembling, the boy said he’d just been offered $400 to blow up the building. Instantly, all lights were shut off. Everyone fled to the back office and sat in the muggy darkness. Earlier they had joked that with nothing whatsoever to do in Shaw, they were the white people’s “show” that Saturday