THIRTEEN 

KENNEDY AND CIVIL RIGHTS, 1961

RICHARD NIXON AND John F. Kennedy had competed with each other as presidential candidates to see who could attract the most votes from Blacks and liberals. Each had some reasonable expectation of winning those votes. As chair of President Eisenhower’s Committee on Federal Contract Compliance, Nixon had won high marks. He was a card-carrying member of the NAACP, had been praised by Martin Luther King for his help in passing the 1957 Civil Rights Act, which created the Civil Rights Commission, and had received thanks from Roy Wilkins for supporting reform of the filibuster rules in the Senate. He had fought for a stronger civil rights plank at the 1960 Republican Convention.

The Democrats matched and passed the Republicans in platform rhetoric. They endorsed the sit-in demonstrations and called for equal access to “voting booths, schoolrooms, jobs, housing, and public facilities” and asked that the attorney general be given the power to file discrimination suits for individuals—the power that conservatives in both parties had refused to keep in the 1957 Civil Rights Act and that Lyndon Johnson had kept out of the Civil Rights Act of 1960. The Democrats also called for a permanent, statutory Fair Employment Practices Commission—a dream of the civil rights community since the Roosevelt presidency and the March on Washington movement.¹

Both parties’ platforms were more liberal than the legislators who represented them in Congress, and both Nixon and Kennedy continued to try to win civil rights points as the campaign continued. Kennedy attacked Nixon for having only brought two successful discrimination actions against contractors in seven years. Nixon countered by saying the Congress should give the committee statutory authority—something to which Kennedy, who needed Southern support, could never agree. And Nixon attacked Kennedy’s running mate, Lyndon Johnson, as “a man who had voted against most of these proposals and a man who opposes them at the present time.”² Kennedy’s telephone call to Coretta Scott King—and his brother Robert’s telephone call to the judge who had sent Martin Luther King to jail—was a grab for Black votes that Nixon would not make; Kennedy won the election.

Once the election was won, civil rights quickly receded as an issue for the new president; civil rights could not be made to disappear, however. The energy and expectation set loose in the South by the sit-ins and then the Freedom Rides was too great to be contained, but the new administration thought it might be redirected away from confrontational activity that inspired worldwide headlines and toward less visible efforts that would help not only Black Southerners but would aid the Kennedy administration politically. At least the Kennedys aimed to try to channel these young activists into areas that would do no harm.

VOTER REGISTRATION

One kind of activity that would fit that prescription—no political harm for the president or embarrassment for the nation and great political gain for his reelection chances—was increased voter registration in the South.

Increased registration and the removal of the barriers to registration and voting had long been a demand of Black Americans. At the end of Reconstruction, slavery had returned to the South in all but name. Intimidation and murder drove many Blacks who had been elected to office away from their posts; others were frightened away from the polls. Beginning in Mississippi in 1890, the Southern states imposed anti-Black codes, including poll taxes, grandfather clauses, white primaries, and literacy tests.

For most of the first half of the twentieth century, progress toward regaining the franchise was slow. In 1927 and in 1944, two Texas cases decided by the Supreme Court weakened the white primary. One of the ways Blacks had been kept out of the political process was by whites operating the primary as a private political club that Blacks could not enter (in most Southern states, till the 1960s, the Democratic Party was in complete control, so the primary was the only election that mattered). As late as 1944, however, Gunnar Myrdal estimated that fewer than 225,000 Blacks, less than 5 percent of the adult Black population, had voted in the South in the previous five years. In 1945, in King v. Chapman, a federal district court struck down Georgia’s white primary; in 1947, South Carolina’s all-white election system met the same fate. By 1947, Southern Black registration had jumped to 775,000, an increase of 500,000.

But the end of the white primary only meant that the next barriers needed to be attacked: the arcane process to register to vote and the poll tax that required a payment before a citizen could vote. In 1939, the income of working Southerners, white and Black, averaged $5.60 a week, less than the amount required for food and shelter. Additionally, the states of Virginia, Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi aggregated poll taxes, requiring a would-be voter to pay for past years when they did not vote before they could cast a ballot in the future.

Here’s how Virginia Durr, an Alabama-born white woman, described attempting to register to vote. The Durrs lived in Alexandria, Virginia, during the Second World War. Clifford Durr was an official of the Roosevelt administration; Virginia Durr had just been elected president of the all-white Northern Virginia PTA. Her new position required that she become a registered voter in Virginia, so she called the county courthouse and asked for the registrar. He lived in the rural countryside. Mrs. Durr obtained directions to his house. “‘Does he have a telephone?’ I asked. ‘No.’ ‘How will I know he’s going to be there?’ ‘You’ll just have to take your chances.’“

She writes:

Now this was during the war, and gasoline was rationed, but I was allowed five gallons to go to the registrar to vote. I drove out an old road and came to an old country farmhouse. I asked the old lady who answered my knock on the door if I could see the registrar. I said I wanted to register to vote. She said he wasn’t there and she didn’t know when he would be back. I waited and waited, but dark came on and I had to go home. I went back a second time and he wasn’t there. The third time, he was in and said he would be delighted to register me. Like most Virginians, he had nice manners.

He said to his wife, “Mamie, where is the poll book?” . . . So she went up in the attic and rustled around for a while, and finally came back with the poll book. . . . The registrar asked me for identification and then he asked me to sign the book.

“Don’t you have a pen?” I asked. “No, don’t you?” “No, I don’t. I have a pencil.” . . . “Well, let’s see if we can find a pen,” I said. So the old lady began looking around, and she finally found an old rusty pen. Then he said, “We don’t have any ink.”

“You don’t have a pen and you don’t have any ink?” . . . I asked his wife if she knew of anything we could use for ink. She said, “Well, I’ve got some Mercurochrome. Let’s mix it up with a little soot and see if we can’t make some ink out of it.” And she did. . . . It made a kind of pale red-blue ink. I signed the book and got my receipt to show I had registered.

Next she had to go to the Fairfax County courthouse to pay her poll taxes. The State of Virginia required two years back poll taxes plus the current year. She paid $4.50 and presented herself at the polls on Election Day. But her name was not on the list; an election official explained to her that she had not paid the interest on the poll taxes. Before she could cast a vote, she had to return to the courthouse and pay twenty-seven cents before her name was inscribed on the registration books.³

Remember, this is the experience of a college-educated, Alabama-born, white woman; think what the experience of an educated Black man or woman or an uneducated Black person might have been.

In 1938, Roosevelt had made some tentative moves toward supporting a federal prohibition on the poll tax, but when white voters in Georgia and South Carolina rejected his candidates in favor of anti–New Deal Democratic incumbents, he backed away. The battle was waged largely by the Civil Rights Committee of the Southern Conference for Human Welfare; Mrs. Durr was an active member. After Smith v. Allwright in 1944 struck down the white primary, white Southern fears made repeal of the poll tax impossible.

Like Roosevelt, Truman mouthed opposition to the poll tax but did little, initially, to achieve repeal. Repeal would not have meant a flood of Black votes; like the white primary, the poll tax was only one of several methods used to keep Blacks from voting. With the white primary gone, however, removal of the poll tax would have allowed the use of these other devices to have been exposed to public examination. The white South could not tolerate this exposure; the rest of the country did not have the courage to insist.

Nevertheless, the registration battle in the South continued. Led largely by the NAACP, but including a variety of other groups as well, spurred by returning veterans, voters’ leagues flourished across the South, and registration drives became regular events in many communities. While adding few names, these efforts made voting—or even attempting to register—an acceptable, even desirable activity in the Black South. By 1954, over one million Southern Blacks were registered, twice as many as in 1946. But in twenty-four majority-Black counties in five Southern states, not a single Black voter was registered.

In the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, over two and one-half million Blacks had migrated from the South, settling fortuitously in areas of the North and West where their votes would be felt the most, in seven states that cast 197 electoral votes. In 1954, Blacks made up more than 5 percent of the electorate in seventy-two congressional districts outside the South. This was enough to tip the balance in sixty-one of these districts. A shift of Black votes from Democrats to Republicans gave the Republicans control of the House of Representatives in 1956. Black votes were important in 1960 too, giving Kennedy the election over Nixon. That lesson was not lost on Kennedy administration officials in early 1961.

ON MAY 15, 1961, the day after the May 14 Mother’s Day bus burning in Anniston, Alabama, and the beatings in Birmingham, NAACP executive director Roy Wilkins met with Attorney General Robert Kennedy and Assistant Attorney General Burke Marshall. Wilkins was there to seek federal protection for the Freedom Riders. Wilkins noted that the attorney general was shocked at the bare-knuckled brutality of the Alabama mobs but was more concerned with the foreign policy ramifications of American racial violence on the president’s upcoming European trip. For the Kennedy brothers, the timing of the Freedom Rider violence could not have been worse. The rides began less than a month after the Bay of Pigs disaster and weeks before the president would meet with Nikita Khrushchev, who would be sure to highlight America’s racial problems. Kennedy took advantage of the meeting with Wilkins to stress the administration’s interest in voter registration. Burke Marshall also began talks with Harold Fleming, former executive director of the Southern Regional Council, about possible funding sources for Southern voter registration drives. He had also met with foundations to plan setting up a privately funded, non-partisan, region-wide voter registration organization that would coordinate the activities of all the civil rights organizations.

On June 16, 1961, representatives of the Freedom Ride Coordinating Committee—SNCC, SCLC, CORE, and the National Student Association—met with Robert Kennedy. The Freedom Rides were counterproductive, Kennedy told them. More could be done for civil rights by registering voters, and he suggested a government-promoted registration drive. The attorney general promised that the government would protect voter registration workers and hinted that protection from the military draft could be arranged too. If they focused on registration, he said, they would receive support and protection; if they persisted with protests, the federal reaction would be very different.⁴

Winning agreement from the NAACP and SCLC was easy; registration was already an important part of these groups’ agenda, although Roy Wilkins was against registration activity in the deep, rural South. He thought it would be unproductive and not worth the effort or money it would consume. He also wanted to make sure the NAACP would not be seen to have abandoned its commitment to integrating Southern schools. Convincing CORE and SNCC would be hard. CORE was at the height of its greatest glory—the Freedom Rides. SNCC was torn between the administration’s offer and continuing its present course—direct action, taking the challenge directly to the resistant white South. Tim Jenkins, the representative to SNCC’s Coordinating Committee from the National Student Association, argued for a shift to voter registration work; Marion Barry and Diane Nash argued for nonviolent direct action. They assumed correctly that voter registration was simply an attempt to take the movement out of the headlines and to aim it toward President Kennedy’s 1964 reelection.

On June 27, Harry Belafonte, a personal and political supporter of the Kennedys, met with SNCC representatives. Some SNCC members left the meeting determined to press the issue of voter registration and convinced that money to support it would be forthcoming.⁵ SNCC had hired its first field secretary in June: Charles Sherrod, a student sit-in leader from Virginia Union and former Freedom Rider. Sherrod and Bob Moses had visited Cleveland, Mississippi, in April. Both were convinced that SNCC should devote its energies to registration work and that a good beginning spot for student volunteers was Cleveland, in the Mississippi Delta. When no housing could be arranged in Cleveland, Moses accepted an invitation from C. C. Bryant, president of the NAACP in McComb, a town of thirteen thousand in the southwest corner of the state.

SNCC’s Coordinating Committee met in Baltimore July 14–16. Charles Jones, a student sit-in leader from Charlotte and a Freedom Rider, recommended that SNCC establish a voter registration project, but the others were still unsure. Part of the uncertainty came from the resignation of executive secretary Ed King, who had left to return to school; there was no one in the Atlanta office to hold things together. Even those who favored voter registration were reluctant to begin fieldwork without strong headquarters support. Jones was asked to put his recommendations forward again at the September meeting, but the balance had already begun to tip in favor of registration over direct action. Moses ended his nebulous affiliation with SCLC and became a volunteer field secretary for SNCC in Mississippi. SNCC sent two students to work with him. Even before SNCC had given its official approval to a voter registration plan, it had taken actions that committed it to registration activity in Mississippi.

On July 28, representatives of the NAACP, SCLC, NSA, Urban League, and SNCC met with the Southern Regional Council and officials of the Taconic Foundation and the Field Foundation in New York. Again the civil rights groups were assured that the Justice Department would protect their workers. The exact nature of this protection was not spelled out and would be a source of controversy, charges of betrayal, and countercharges for years to come.

With money he obtained from the Field Foundation, Tim Jenkins gathered SNCC’s leadership together for a three-week seminar in Nashville beginning July 30 titled “Understanding the Nature of Social Change.” Jenkins said, “We made a calculated attempt to pull the best people out of the movement and give them a solid academic approach to understanding the movement. What we needed now was information, not inspiration.”⁶ Teacher-consultants for the three-week seminar were the Justice Department’s John Doar and scholars Kenneth Clark, E. Harland Randolph, E. Franklin Frazier, C. Eric Lincoln, Rayford Logan, and Herbert Hill. For Jenkins, the meeting was intended to conquer the students’ “lack of comprehension of the institutional world and the way in which their programs had to plug in and manipulate those forces in the institutional world in order to succeed.” Jenkins also wanted the SNCC activists to see there were sympathetic forces in the Justice Department.⁷

At a SNCC staff meeting in August, James Forman, visiting the new organization, argued that “voter registration in the deep South is direct action.” Any voter registration activity in the resistant South would provoke retaliation from whites and “create more exposure, more consciousness.”⁸ At that meeting, Ella Baker proposed that SNCC adopt two divisions—a direct action wing, led by Diane Nash, and a voter registration division, headed by Charles Jones. This was a crucial decision for SNCC and the movement—they had weathered their first internal debate. By supporting a voter registration division, they had also approved the creation of a cadre of locally based, full-time, grassroots organizers. If successful, this would be the first time many indigenous activists in many parts of the deepest South would have day-to-day organizational assistance.

In September, the objections of SNCC members who opposed having a strong organizational hand in control of the office were overcome. The Coordinating Committee agreed to hire James Forman.

JAMES RUFUS FORMAN

James Forman was born in Chicago in 1928 but spent most of his youth on his grandmother’s farm in Mississippi. After serving four years in the air force, he entered the University of Southern California in September 1952. He transferred to Chicago’s Roosevelt University in September 1954 and was elected student body president. He graduated from Roosevelt in 1957. In 1958, Forman covered the integration of Central High School in Little Rock as a reporter for the Chicago Defender. He had written an unpublished novel about an interracial corps of students who had created a nonviolent movement for social change.

In 1960, while teaching school in Chicago, he became active in the Emergency Relief Committee (ERC), an affiliate of the Chicago CORE chapter. The ERC gathered and distributed food and clothing to Black residents of Fayette County, Tennessee, who were victims of white harassment, including eviction, because of their voter registration activity. Forman visited Monroe, North Carolina, where Monroe NAACP president Robert Williams was engaged in meeting Ku Klux Klan attacks with armed self-defense. Forman was arrested in Monroe and sentenced to six months for inciting to riot. He went to Atlanta to work for SNCC, and in September 1961 he became its executive director.

In the early days, I dropped by SNCC’s office and found Forman sweeping the floor. I thought he was the janitor. He immediately began to ask me what I could do. Before I knew it, I had become the publicity director of the organization, editor of the newsletter, and the person who wrote the press releases. Because Forman made me do it. He had a compelling personality.

IN SEPTEMBER 1961, CORE, like SNCC, approved Deep South voter registration work with some reluctance. SNCC and CORE were leery of involvement in Democratic Party politics; they saw themselves primarily as direct action groups, not political organizers. Each also feared folding its organizational identity into a coordinated effort with less militant groups.

While SNCC was debating its future course and changing its operations, and the Kennedy administration was building the organizational structure and arranging the financing that would serve its purposes, other civil rights organizations were making personnel and organizational changes that would prepare them for greater future demands.

SEPTIMA POINSETTE CLARK

In March 1961, SCLC hired Septima Poinsette Clark. Born in 1898, Clark was the daughter of Henry Poinsette, who had been born a slave to the family that developed the poinsettia, and Victoria Warren Anderson. Her mother had grown up in Haiti and boasted of having never been a slave, telling her daughter, “I never gave a white woman a drink of water.” Clark began teaching on John’s Island, off Charleston, South Carolina’s coast, after finishing the twelfth grade at Avery Normal Institute 1916. “In that two-teacher school,” she said, “we had 132 children. . . . Across the road from where I worked was a white schoolhouse [with] three children attending that with one teacher. That teacher received $85 a month for her teaching and living. . . . [At our school] I was the teaching principal so I got $35 and the assistant $25 [with 132 children] . . . [compared] to the one teacher who made $85 for three children.”⁹ She stayed on John’s Island for three years, becoming a crusader for equal salaries and a leader in the fight to win the right for Black teachers to teach in Charleston’s public schools.

In 1919, she returned to Charleston to teach at Avery Institute and began to work with the NAACP. She went door-to-door, circulating petitions for Black teachers. Over ten thousand were collected, and in 1920 the South Carolina legislature permitted Black teachers in public schools. “We had been victorious,” she said later, “in this my first effort to establish for Negro citizens what I sincerely believed to be their God given right.”¹⁰

As a young girl, she remembered being filled with racial pride when she saw ships from Marcus Garvey’s Black Star Line docking in Charleston Harbor. Later, in 1937, while a student at Atlanta University, she took a course from Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois, who influenced her lifelong commitment to document the events of her struggle. In 1920, she married a seaman and settled in Columbia, South Carolina, where she lived until 1947, receiving a BA from Benedict College and an MA from Hampton Institute.

It was in Columbia that she began her work in adult education, working in a program at Camp Jackson to educate illiterate Black soldiers. She also became involved in a lawsuit to equalize teachers’ pay—Thurgood Marshall argued her case, which was won in 1945. She taught in Charleston’s public schools from 1947 until 1956; she was active with the YWCA and local civil rights efforts and attended workshops at Highlander Folk School.

In 1956, in the racist anti-NAACP hysteria that swept South Carolina and the rest of the South in the wake of the 1954 Brown decision, her NAACP membership cost her her job. In April 1956, South Carolina passed a law stipulating that no city or state employee could be affiliated with a civil rights organization. Refusing to hide her NAACP membership—she was fifty-eight years old—she not only lost her job of forty years but also her retirement benefits. In 1976, Republican governor James Edward wrote to tell her she had been unjustly fired and was entitled to her pension.¹¹

Unable to find work in South Carolina, she joined the staff of the Highlander Folk School as director of education and brought Esau Jenkins, a farmer and bus driver, to Highlander. He had attended Highlander workshops as early as 1954 and had asked Highlander’s cofounder and director, Myles Horton, to help him teach illiterate Sea Island Blacks to read and write enough to register to vote.¹²

With Bernice Robinson, a beautician and NAACP activist as teacher, they set up an adult night school on John’s Island in January 1957 with fourteen illiterate students; three months later, eight of them passed their final exam, the South Carolina voter’s test. Other schools, soon known as Citizenship Schools, were established on other Sea Islands, following the formula that had proven so successful on John’s Island. There would be no “professional” teachers trained in education; instead, anyone who could read and write and recruit students could teach. Of equal importance, no whites would be allowed to teach. Horton thought whites would dominate the schools by force of habit, reinforcing white supremacy. Teachers were paid thirty dollars a month.

Trained teachers had followed a “See Jane run” curriculum, foreign to most of the students. Robinson would begin by asking students why they wanted to learn to read; for many, it was a chance to read the Bible or write their sons in the military or read the letters written back to them. For some, it was to fill out money orders. Robinson began teaching how to do these simple tasks. Robinson and Septima Clark devised a handbook—a sample question was “Ten students were arrested in the sit-in movement and were fined $75 apiece. How much fine was paid?”¹³

Soon the demand for schools and training teachers became too great a task for Robinson; teacher training was moved to Highlander. The staff at Highlander had always thought of the school as an initiator—not an administrator—of programs and wanted someone else to take over the Citizenship Schools program. Ella Baker had visited the school in 1959 and reported back to SCLC on her meeting with Septima Clark. By 1961, with Highlander near extinction after raids by the State of Tennessee, SCLC took over the Citizenship Schools program. Clark and Robinson joined the SCLC staff, and a young minister named Andrew Young was hired as director.

By 1963, it was estimated that the Citizenship Schools had held four hundred sessions attended by sixty-five thousand students who, in turn, had taught twenty-six thousand to read and write well enough to register to vote. After the schools were transferred to SCLC, an estimated seven hundred teachers and fifty thousand new voters were traced to the Citizenship Schools by 1963.¹⁴ But the schools did more than teach people how to become voters; they also taught them how to become leaders in their communities.

ANDREW JACKSON YOUNG

Andrew Jackson Young was born in New Orleans on March 12, 1932. Young’s grandfather was a successful businessman in Franklin, Louisiana, who owned a drugstore and a saloon; his father was a New Orleans dentist and his mother, a Sunday school teacher. Young entered the first grade at four and graduated from private Gilbert Academy in 1947. After attending Dillard University for a year, he entered Howard University in Washington and graduated at nineteen in 1951 with a major in biology. That same year, Young decided to become a missionary in Africa and enrolled in Hartford Seminary in Connecticut. There he was exposed to Gandhi for the first time. Sent to a summer pastorate at the Congregational church in Marion, Alabama, in 1952, he met Jean Childs, a graduate of Marion’s Lincoln School. They married in May 1954. They had made plans to go to Angola as missionaries in 1954, but when the Portuguese began expelling foreign missionaries, charging that they were making the natives restless, they settled on pastoring two small rural churches in Thomasville and Beachton, Georgia. In Thomasville, Young worked with the Thomasville County Business and Civic League on voter registration campaigns. Because Coretta Scott King was also a Marion native, the Youngs had occasionally stopped in Montgomery to visit the Kings.

In late 1957, Andrew Young accepted a job in New York as associate director of the Department of Youth of the National Council of Churches, the only nonwhite staff member. In late 1961, he became Director of a Voter Registration project of the United Church of Christ, funded by the Field Foundation. The Field grant was to have gone to SCLC, but they had no tax exemption, a legal necessity for receiving tax-exempt foundation funds, so the United Church of Christ served as a conduit for the money. Young would direct the Citizenship Schools, teaching Southern Blacks how to teach others to read and therefore pass the literacy test Southern states used to keep Black registration low. He would be paid by the Field Foundation.¹⁵ Dorothy Cotton, an SCLC staffer brought to Atlanta from Petersburg, Virginia, by Wyatt Tee Walker, would recruit students, and Septima Clark and Bernice Robinson would teach.

DAVE DENNIS

In the fall of 1961, CORE hired Dave Dennis as their Mississippi voter registration director. Dennis had grown up as the son of sharecroppers in Omega, Louisiana, and attended Southern University in Baton Rouge, where he had led sit-ins. He had been a Freedom Rider and a veteran of the New Orleans CORE chapter, which was deeply steeped in nonviolence.¹⁶

THE ADDITION OF new personnel at SNCC, SCLC, and CORE meant that a new group of activists was poised to attack segregation at ballot boxes in the most resistant and violent part of the South. At SNCC and CORE, most new workers were veterans of the Freedom Rides. Most had spent a month in Parchman state penitentiary, using their stay, like the Rock Hill “jail, no bail” protesters had done before them, to learn about each other and argue whether radical Christianity and radical nonviolence were compatible with or antagonistic to the process of larger social change. Many of the Freedom Riders had attended the three-week-long seminar in Nashville and had received a quick education in how the American social order worked and where its weak spots and pressure points were. All of them had argued long and hard—in prison and out—about the course they were about to take. They were no longer students, tied to campus and home. They were independent activists, tied together less by organizational history than by common experience, daring to try to organize a rural, isolated community in Southwest Mississippi, away from the spotlight and protective publicity of the sit-ins and Freedom Rides.

SNCC IN MCCOMB, MISSISSIPPI

Robert Moses arrived in McComb, Mississippi in July 1961 and began lining up housing for the student volunteers he expected even before he became a member of the SNCC staff. When John Hardy and Reginald Robinson joined him, they opened a voter registration school to teach Black residents of McComb how to take and pass Mississippi’s registration test. Their first few students were unable to pass, but residents of nearby counties—Amite and Walthall—asked that schools be set up for them. Amite County had one registered Black voter out of twenty-five hundred eligible Blacks; Walthall County had none. Two hundred of Pike County’s eight thousand eligible Blacks were registered. Moses knew that resistance in the two more rural counties would be greater but accepted the invitation. SNCC had to demonstrate it was willing to go anywhere if it was to gain the confidence of local people.

On August 15, 1961, Moses took three Black applicants to the Amite County Courthouse in Liberty. While driving away, he was arrested by police and charged with interfering with their duties. He placed several calls to the Justice Department, deliberately speaking loudly, to protest this harassment, but was convicted, given a ninety-day suspended sentence, and fined five dollars; he spent two days in jail before the NAACP posted an appeal bond.¹⁷ While Moses was in jail, nearly a dozen Freedom Riders and SNCC members had come to town, including Ruby Doris Smith, Charles Sherrod, Marion Barry, and Charles Jones. They began recruiting high school students to help in door-to-door canvassing.

On August 29, after another registration attempt, Moses was attacked and beaten by Billy Jack Caston, the sheriff’s cousin. Moses pressed charges against Caston, something no Black person had ever done. The sheriff advised him to leave town before the innocent verdict came in.

On September 5, Moses and SNCC worker and Freedom Rider Travis Britt took four Blacks to the registrar’s office in Liberty. A white man beat Britt, and they left town with no one added to the voters’ list.

On September 7 John Hardy took two people to the Tylertown registrar’s office. The registrar ordered Hardy—at gunpoint—to leave his office and then hit Hardy on his head with the pistol. The sheriff, instead of arresting the registrar for assault, arrested Hardy for disorderly conduct.¹⁸ The charge, we joked, was striking the registrar’s pistol with his head.

In the first instance of promised federal protection, the Justice Department moved to block Hardy’s prosecution, which was set for September 22. Not only were they challenging the right of a state to bring criminal prosecutions under its own law; they were supporting the testimony of a Black man against a white elected official. The case was heard before the first judge appointed by President Kennedy in the South. Federal judge Harold Cox, who later called Blacks “baboons” from the bench, refused to grant an injunction, and the Justice Department appealed to a three-judge panel from the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. There the two judges appointed by President Eisenhower supported an injunction against the state’s prosecution of Hardy; the Democratic appointee voted no.¹⁹

On September 24, John Doar met with Bob Moses and McComb farmer E. W. Steptoe. They told Doar that Herbert Lee, a nearby Black farmer, feared reprisals from local whites—especially from state representative E. H. Hurst, the father-in-law of the man who had beaten Moses. Lee had used his car to drive registration workers around and had attended registration classes. Doar tried to see him, but he was away. When Doar returned to his office in Washington the next day—September 25—he received a message that Representative Hurst had shot and killed Herbert Lee at a cotton gin in Liberty.

Hurst had approached Lee’s truck with a gun in his hand. Lee told Hurst he wouldn’t talk until the gun was put up. Hurst put the gun away, and Lee stepped out of his truck. Hurst ran around the front and shot Lee in the head. The body lay on the ground for two hours in the dirt. Two eyewitnesses reported that Lee had menaced Hurst with a tire iron; a coroner’s jury ruled the killing justifiable homicide later that day.

One of the witnesses was Louis Allen. He later told Moses he had lied at the inquest. On February 23, 1963, I met Louis Allen at E. W. Steptoe’s farm; Allen repeated to me that he had lied for fear of his life. Less than a year later, on January 31, 1964, Louis Allen was assassinated in his driveway. No one was ever arrested.²⁰

While Moses had occupied himself with voter registration, some of the other SNCC workers—James Bevel, Marion Barry, Charles Sherrod, Charles Jones, and Diane Nash—had been conducting workshops in nonviolence for McComb’s teenagers, who were tired of the unexciting, dusty work of door-to-door canvassing for voters among the fearful Black population. Barry encouraged them to demonstrate against the white-only library; on August 26 two students, Curtis Hayes and Hollis Watkins, were arrested at a Woolworth’s store. A few days later, three students—including sixteen-year-old Brenda Travis—were arrested for sitting-in at the Greyhound bus station lunch counter. On October 4, the principal of McComb’s Black high school, Burglund High, refused to admit two of the students—over one hundred walked out to protest his refusal and the killing of Herbert Lee. Led by Moses, Charles McDew, and SNCC’s first white field secretary, Bob Zellner, they paused for prayers in front of the city hall, where a mob attacked them; the SNCC workers and 119 students were arrested.

They were released on bond, the students charged with disturbing the peace, the SNCC workers with contributing to the delinquency of a minor. Brenda Travis, who was on probation, spent six months in a juvenile detention center. On October 31, they were sentenced to terms of four to six months, if they also had a sit-in arrest, in jail. While in jail, Moses wrote a letter that was later reprinted over and over—it was a message to supporters that, despite beatings and harassment, the movement would continue:

We are smuggling this note from the drunk tank of the county jail in Magnolia, Mississippi. Twelve of us are here, sprawled out along the concrete bunker; Curtis Hayes, Hollis Watkins, Ike Lewis and Robert Talbert, four veterans of the bunker, are sitting up talking—mostly about girls. . . . Later on, Hollis will lead out with a clear tenor into a freedom song. Talbert and Lewis will supply jokes, and McDew will discourse on the history of the black man and the Jew. . . . To Judge Brumfield, we are cold calculators, leading sheep to the slaughter. . . . This is Mississippi, the middle of the iceberg. . . . This is a tremor in the middle of the iceberg—from a stone that the builders rejected.²¹

Jail officials brought tour groups from Magnolia to look at the twelve “communists.” When a young girl asked McDew to “say something in Communist,” he said, “Kiss mir tuchus.”

When they were released from jail after thirty-seven days on December 6, Moses found a dispirited community. Although McComb’s Black adults had rallied to the defense of their arrested children, the threats, beatings, jailings, and Herbert Lee’s death had taken their toll. Their meeting place at the Masonic Temple was closed to them; someone just missed John Hardy with a shotgun blast into his bedroom. No one would come to registration classes. With Hardy, Curtis Hayes, and Hollis Watkins, Moses left McComb for Amzie Moore’s house in the Delta. SNCC’s first attempt at establishing a voter registration project in Mississippi was over.

The McComb experience helped to further shape SNCC from the coordinating committee it had intended to be into a staff-directed organization. The student-directed sit-in movement SNCC had been formed to coordinate was in decline, but SNCC, despite the McComb defeat, was on the ascendancy. The direct actionists had learned a valuable lesson in McComb: voter registration was direct action in small-town Mississippi. The split between the “direct action” and “voter registration” wings became meaningless. In the future, SNCC’s direction would be determined by actions taken and work done, not by titles and divisions. McComb helped to refine SNCC’s organizing techniques. Dependence on local leadership coupled with militancy might not have succeeded in McComb, but it could be tried again elsewhere with greater success.

The addition of Bob Zellner to SNCC’s staff made it interracial, but Zellner’s presence meant more than that. He was hired with a grant to SNCC from the Southern Conference Education Fund (SCEF), an interracial organization formed in the 1930s. Like many interracial organizations, SCEF was a target of Southern red-baiters, especially after a field secretary, Carl Braden, refused to answer questions before the House Un-American Activities Committee and was sentenced to a year in prison for contempt of Congress. Braden and his wife, Anne, developed close ties with SNCC. SCEF’s newspaper, the Southern Patriot, printed articles about SNCC’s efforts and philosophy when the mainstream press and other liberal organizations ignored them. And the Bradens understood—more than most whites—the proper role of whites in a Black-led movement. Southern Blacks, she said, did not “want the participation of white people if they are to be a drag on [the] movement” or if including whites meant “the old pattern that has often prevailed even in liberal interracial organizations— that of white domination.”²² SNCC’s easy acceptance of Anne and Carl Braden, who were persona non grata to every other civil rights organization, marked the beginning of a political openness in SNCC that distinguished it from the rest of the civil rights pack.

The SCEF grant was to be used to hire a white student to recruit on white campuses; John Robert Zellner was the student hired. Born in southern Alabama, the son of a Methodist preacher, he attended high school in Mobile and Huntingdon College in Montgomery. He became interested in the protest movement through a class assignment—he met Black students involved in protests and saw a workshop in nonviolence at a Black church. This activity drew him to the attention of school authorities and Alabama’s attorney general, MacDonald Gallion, who had served the unconscious John Lewis with an injunction after the Freedom Riders were beaten in Montgomery. Calling them into his office, Attorney General Gallion told Zellner and his schoolmates they were in danger of associating with Communists. “Are there Communists in Alabama?” they asked. “No,” said the attorney general, there were none there, but they did pass through.

The McComb project brought SNCC face to face with the flimsiness of the promises made months earlier by Robert Kennedy when he encouraged a turn toward voter registration. Protection had been offered to keep the state from prosecuting John Hardy, but none was forthcoming for Herbert Lee. SNCC could not count on the federal government for protection for their voting rights work and the white violence that would ensue.

McComb had been a detour before SNCC’s entry into Albany.