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By Root 1699 0

night, but no one felt like joking anymore. Volunteer Len Edwards called his father, a California congressman. Don Edwards had been in the FBI and had just returned from Mississippi. He told his son he would call the bureau and get someone out there. Fred Winn phoned the San Francisco Chronicle, but the night desk was not interested. As minutes inched by, Shaw, Mississippi, began to seem like some lonely outpost on the edge of civilization. From inside the shadowy, sweltering office, volunteers could hear bullfrogs bellowing, crickets pulsing. Headlights slid across dingy office walls. Seated on sticky floors or rickety chairs, volunteers wondered if Shaw might soon be the Delta’s McComb, with bombs blasting in the night. Then, as stars and a sliver of a moon came out, lookouts ventured outside.

One man climbed onto the roof. Scanning the dark cotton fields in one direction, Shaw’s lamplit quarters in the other, he spotted two police cars and six helmeted cops, their cigarettes glowing in the dark. The cops talked and joked while cars passed, heading for the Freedom House. From any vehicle might come a bomb, a flaming bottle, a shotgun blast. The wait continued. At 10:00 p.m., men still inside the Freedom House decided “the girls” should be evacuated. Over protest from a Radcliffe student who said women needed no special treatment, “the girls” held hands and walked to a nearby home where a plump, grizzled black man sat on the porch, a double-barreled shotgun in his lap.

Toward 11:00 p.m., lightning flashed on the western horizon. One slowly ticking hour later the storm was upon them, whipping trees, drowning conversations with thunder and finally ending the Saturday night show in Shaw. Cars and cops headed home and so did volunteers, walking in the warm and drenching night. The FBI came at 1:30 a.m.

In his posh San Francisco home, Fred Winn’s father thought again of World War II as he read an angry description of “our night of terror” written by another volunteer.

I was and am furious. Here are youths who would be the glory of any nation, and they waited for a bomb to blow them out of this hostile land. . . . And this is in the land of the free. Here where millions have come seeking streets paved with gold, there have lived millions on streets drowned in mud. . . . Here in the beautiful land of the purple mountain’s majesty, we sat and waited for the bombers.

I was born by the river in a little tent

And just like the river, I’ve been running ever since

It’s been a long time coming

But I know a change is gonna come.

—Sam Cooke

INTERLUDE

“Another So-Called ‘Freedom Day’”

7:00 a.m. (2) News; Weather

(4) Today: Hugh Downs

(7) Ann Sothern (re-run)

7:30 a.m. (5) Meaning of Communism

(7) Gale Storm (re-run)

8:00 a.m. (2) Captain Kangaroo

(5) Sandy Becker

(7) Courageous Cat and Minute Mouse

On Thursday, July 16, at 9:00 a.m., three black teenagers were joking on their way to summer school on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Walking through the posh neighborhood, they passed a building superintendent hosing down the sidewalk. By accident or perhaps by design, the man sprayed the teens. Some would later say he shouted, “I’m going to wash the black off of you.” The teens chased the man inside and came out, laughing. Just then, an off-duty cop stepped out of a TV repair shop. Showing his badge, the cop ordered the boys to disperse. What happened next depends on whom one chooses to believe. The cop swore one teen came at him with a knife. Other onlookers said there was no knife, that the youth in question was not that kind of kid. The cop pulled his gun and fired. James Powell slumped to the pavement, dead. Within minutes, black kids were taunting police.

“Come on, shoot another nigger!”

“This is worse than Mississippi!”

The confrontation continued till noon. That Saturday night, a CORE rally in support of Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney erupted in a protest of police brutality. And after simmering for two days, Harlem burned. Before the summer was over, urban riots would scar Rochester, Jersey City,