Freedom Summer - Bruce W. Watson [95]
Freedom Summer had opened wounds dating to the Civil War. With Mississippi as its most visible exemplar, the South suddenly seemed fair game for open insult. “Lincoln did this country a great disservice when he forced the South back into the Union,” a California man wrote. “Isn’t there a way to ‘secede’ them NOW?” Southerners rose in righteous defense. “Could you possibly bring yourselves to believe the honest opinion of one average Southerner that you are being acidly unfair to the South and its people in many of your comments?” a woman asked Newsweek. “I do not know any Southerners who want to kill Negroes or would condone such a thing.” In the crossfire, only a few Americans praised the volunteers: “I would say that they are courageous young people who are not afraid to stand up for their convictions,” a Connecticut woman argued. More common were suspicions that, in an election year, altruism was being used for politics as usual. An Indiana man found it “clear that the whole scheme is not to help the Negro people but to agitate and create unrest and strife in the hope of more votes for the liberal, left-wing Democrat leadership.”
The sun had topped its long arc in the Delta sky when word of Freedom Day arrests brought volunteers and SNCC staff pouring into Greenwood. Just after lunch, a third wave of picketers hit the sidewalk. Chief Lary took up his bullhorn. Two minutes to disperse. Police arrested dozens more, dragging, manhandling, leaving some with horrors they would never forget. Volunteer Linda Wetmore will always see the agonized face of Stokely Carmichael. “I turned around just as I was getting on the bus,” Wetmore remembered. “And they took a cattle prod and applied it to his penis. I can see him gritting his teeth, wanting to fight back.” Seconds later, Wetmore and Carmichael were on the bus, joining the new chorus:
Ain’t gonna let Chief Lary
turn me around,
turn me around,
turn me around. . . .
Revving its engine and rolling away, the bus made a left turn, another left, and pulled up behind the courthouse alongside the Yazoo River, still idling past. Overhead, thunderheads filled a blue sky.
Inside, picketers arrested for the first or the umpteenth time came face-to-face with the terror of a Mississippi police station. Arrest may have been novel for a few, but most knew the Greenwood station all too well. Here was the same graying desk sergeant, painstakingly writing their names on a yellow pad. And there were the same smirking cops, giddy at having more “nigger lovers” to torment. The station itself seemed to sneer at them. On one wall was a plaque for meritorious police service, given to “Police Dog Tiger,” the German shepherd who had attacked marchers a year earlier. On another was the FBI poster of Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney, with a mustache drawn on Goodman. Down a dark hallway were the cells where cops could beat blacks, or hand a blackjack to a white inmate to do the job. But Greenwood cops did not always unleash their rage behind bars. A week earlier, a dark-haired officer named Logan had taken out a long knife, then sharpened it while volunteers watched. “Sounds like rubbing up against nigger pussy,” Logan said before poking the blade into one man’s ribs. “Think it’s sharp enough to cut your cock off?” Finally, Logan told another officer, “You’d better get me out of here before I do what I’d like to do.” Before leaving, he aimed his revolver at a black woman and spun the chamber.
And now the time came to be marched into the cells. Another familiar face, the chubby jailer who called volunteers “nigger huggers,” led them through a smelly hallway and up clammy cement stairs. Black women were thrown in one cell, white women in another. Men were segregated downstairs. Crammed into lockups, the prisoners gripped the bars, sang, and called out to each other. An hour later, when Greenwood police rounded up more picketers in a drenching downpour, the day’s arrest total came to 111. But on the courthouse steps, blacks kept filing into the registrar’s office.
Greenwood’s Freedom Day resulted