Freedom Summer - Bruce W. Watson [96]
Elsewhere in Mississippi, Freedom Day brought problems old and new. Word came to COFO headquarters that two volunteers had been arrested in Canton. Police had confiscated their truck and beaten both men with pistols. The terrified men had to be bailed out as soon as possible. A staffer headed for Canton, while calls for bail money went out to parents in Detroit and central Iowa. Then volunteer Barney Frank, a Harvard grad student and later a Massachusetts congressman, pointed out a bigger concern. The confiscated truck was loaded with registration forms for the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. The forms included the addresses of hundreds of blacks. Anyone finding them would have a long list of targets. COFO had to claim that truck before cops looked in the back. Making several phone calls, Frank learned that the rented truck could not be picked up without the rental agency’s permission. Where was the truck now? What company had rented it? What was their number? At 3:00 p.m., COFO dispatched Frank to Canton in a frantic race to get to National Rent-a-Car and then to the auto yard before it closed.
Across the state, a more familiar fear gripped the project office in Meridian. That morning, four black staffers had ventured into rural Jasper County to investigate rumors of a murder. They had been ordered to check in by phone at 4:00 p.m. The same volunteer who had waited in vain for Mickey Schwerner’s call was waiting again. The hour passed; no call came. Alarm spread through project offices across the state. At 5:00 p.m., calls went out to sheriffs. Half an hour later, COFO called Bob Moses in Vicksburg. Moses had just invited Martin Luther King to Mississippi and was busy preparing his itinerary, but he dropped everything to make his own calls. At 6:03 p.m. Meridian called the state highway patrol. No word. Moses phoned the new FBI office in Jackson. His wife, Dona, called sheriffs in Lauderdale and Jasper counties. Still no word. The sun would be down in an hour. Where were the four men?
7:00 p.m. (2, 4, 7) Republican National Convention
(5) Magilla Gorilla Cartoons
(13) Columbia Seminars: Profs. Jacob C. Hurewitz and Amitai W. Etzioni of Columbia University discuss Israel
In Manhattan that evening, theatergoers could see Barbra Streisand in Funny Girl or Robert Redford in Barefoot in the Park. Carol Channing starred in Hello, Dolly! while Paul Newman drew fans to a play few had heard of. Movie lovers could see Peter Sellers in three different films, including Dr. Strangelove and the second Pink Panther movie. Ronald Reagan was featured in his final film, The Killers, but was playing a larger role in San Francisco. As cochair of the California Republicans for Goldwater, Reagan was welcoming GOP convention delegates to a final evening at the Cow Palace.
Eight months after the Kennedy assassination, Americans remained scarred by those split seconds that had sent the decade careening off course. Three best-selling books were about JFK, and a fourth was his Profiles in Courage. Ships, airports, and a new coin bore the Kennedy name. Sharecroppers’ shacks in Mississippi were not the only American homes to have saintly portraits of the fallen president. Sworn to carry on Kennedy’s legacy, LBJ was heavily favored to win the November election, yet all that week in San Francisco, Republicans fought for the chance to oppose him. Few could remember such a bitter convention. Candidates fired off angry letters. Pinkerton detectives guarded rival