FIFTEEN 

MISSISSIPPI VOTER REGISTRATION

IN 1963, MOVEMENT activity cascaded and grew in three states. As the conflict in Albany continued, Bob Moses was organizing an assault on Mississippi. This time he began in the Delta counties in the northwest portion of the state, assembling a staff drawn largely from Mississippi. Unlike Sherrod’s project in Southwest Georgia, Moses’s effort in Mississippi would be all Black.

A 1963 SNCC report said it was “too dangerous for whites to participate in the project in Mississippi—too dangerous for them and too dangerous for the Negroes who would be working with them.”¹ When whites were involved, it was too difficult to secure meeting places or places to live; the presence of whites brought extra attention from law enforcement officials and a community’s white residents, already hostile to the idea of registering Black voters.

Moses wanted young Black Mississippians who “identified with SNCC . . . [and] with each other in terms . . . of being from Mississippi and more or less thinking that their job, and even their life’s work, would be to make some sense out of living in Mississippi.” Unlike older Blacks, younger Mississippians, he believed, “would not be responsible economically to any sector of the white community and . . . would be able to act as free agents.”² He dispatched Hollis Watkins and Curtis Hayes, two McComb students arrested in the fall 1961 Hattiesburg demonstrations and expelled from school. Sam Block, a college student from Cleveland, Mississippi, began a voter registration drive in Greenwood, where he was soon joined by a Rust College graduate, Willie Peacock. Charles McLaurin opened an office in Ruleville, the home of Senator James O. Eastland. By the spring of 1962 there were six offices with twenty field secretaries—only two were not Mississippians—Moses and Charles Cobb, a minister’s son from Springfield, Massachusetts, who had dropped out of Howard University to come south.

In June 1962, Moses took his staff to Highlander Folk School for a week’s retreat. They decided to use the campaigns of two Black ministers in Delta districts to spur interest in registration. Neither candidate was expected to win, and their running at all was such a novelty that whites were not expected to harass them. The campaigns could be used as cover for registration and education work. Moses became the campaign manager for one, and Bevel managed the other.

On the same Saturday that the Albany Movement experienced its false expectation of victory, Moses and Sam Block took twenty-five Blacks to the Leflore County Courthouse in Greenwood; two days later, three white men beat Block on a downtown street. On August 14, while Shady Grove Baptist Church was burning in Lee County, Georgia, a mob attacked the SNCC office in Greenwood. Block and two other workers escaped through an upstairs window. The Greenwood raid triggered a meeting in Clarksdale between Wiley Branton, the director of the Voter Education Project, and registration forces in the state.

THE VOTER EDUCATION PROJECT

In March 1962, the Voter Education Project (VEP) was formally born. It had its origins in talks Robert Kennedy and his aides held in 1961 with civil rights leaders and foundation officials as the Freedom Rides had claimed national and international attention. The administration wanted the civil rights movement out of the headlines, and its energies turned toward activity that would both help the administration and advance the cause of civil rights. Voting rights fit both these criteria; it also had the advantage of being difficult to oppose. Even the most ardent segregationist congressman found it hard to defend denying Black people the right to vote.

Funded with foundation money channeled through the Southern Regional Council, the VEP pretended to be a research project, an investigation into Southern Black voting. If its real purposes were hidden, its sponsorship made them obvious; the national committees of both political parties endorsed it and Attorney General Robert Kennedy personally intervened with Mortimer Kaplan, the commissioner of internal revenue, to obtain its tax exemption.³ The director was attorney Wiley A. Branton, a thirty-eight-year-old lawyer from Pine Bluff, Arkansas, who had been counsel to the Little Rock Nine. His job, ostensibly, was to coordinate the voter registration activities of SNCC, CORE, NAACP, and SCLC. In practice, Branton’s job was to see that the organizations honestly conducted separate voter registration drives in distinct sections of the South, with little actual cooperation among them.

Despite Branton’s fairness, inevitable clashes occurred. One problem was Mississippi itself. Roy Wilkins of the NAACP thought spending money on voter registration there was a mistake; the state was too difficult, and the gains would be too small to justify the danger or the expense of a voter registration drive. If money was to be spent on voting drives, however, he thought it should go to the NAACP. Mississippi was an NAACP state; his organization’s long history and considerable sacrifice there gave him first call on any funds to be spent there. Wilkins also disliked SNCC. He thought the organization was irresponsible and foolishly militant, interested in headlines, while the NAACP did the important, less glamorous work.

After the raid on the Greenwood SNCC office, Branton called a meeting in Clarksdale of groups working in Mississippi. James Bevel, now an SCLC staffer, represented his organization. Dave Dennis represented CORE. Aaron Henry and Amzie Moore represented the NAACP, and James Forman, Bob Moses, and his organizers represented SNCC.

Wilkins’s objections might have meant that no VEP money would be spent in Mississippi, but Branton constructed an alternative. He knew that if any work toward registration was to be done, it was the young people of SNCC who would do it. He agreed to set up a front organization, an umbrella like that used in Montgomery and in Albany. This one would be called the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO). Aaron Henry, head of the Mississippi State Conference of NAACP Branches, was chosen president; Moses became director of voter registration. Henry, a long-time NAACP activist, offered his reputation and NAACP associations as cover; Moses brought the activists and organizers from SNCC. Dennis would provide some workers from CORE. SCLC provided a small number of workers; VEP would provide the money.

Wilkins was right about the difficulty of working in Mississippi. As they left the Clarksdale meeting, Forman’s car was stopped, and he was ordered to leave the county. Dave Dennis was arrested for a traffic violation; Sam Block and five others were arrested for loitering—in a moving car—and rearrested with Moses and five others the next day for distributing literature without a permit.

In August 1962, SNCC workers—still called Freedom Riders by local Blacks—came to Sunflower County, the home of Senator James O. East-land, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. A vigorous opponent of civil rights laws, Eastland was the chief reason why so many of the Kennedy appointees to the federal bench were racists. The county’s reputation for racial violence stretched back to a lynching involving the East-land family in Doddsville in 1904. Eastland’s uncle had an argument with a Black man; shots were exchanged, and the uncle was killed. A lynch mob of two hundred whites with two packs of bloodhounds chased the killer and his wife into a swamp, killing two innocent Blacks on the way. The accused were tied to stakes before a mob of one thousand. As the funeral pyre was being prepared, their fingers and ears were cut off and distributed as souvenirs. The man was beaten, and one of his eyes knocked out. According to one newspaper account, a large corkscrew was “bored into the flesh of the man and woman, in the arms, legs and body, and then pulled out, the spirals tearing out big pieces of raw, quivering flesh every time it was withdrawn.” They were then burned to death.⁴

In 1929, an escaped Black prisoner from Parchman penitentiary was captured, chained to a log, and burned to death in Sunflower County. “Now and then,” the Memphis Press-Scimitar reported, “someone would step forward and throw a little gasoline on the blaze. The whole burning took a little more than an hour. The Negro was alive and screaming 40 minutes of that time.”⁵

Senator Eastland had been appointed to the Senate in 1941 to fill a vacancy; he was reelected without difficulty thereafter. A champion red- and race-baiter, he said the 1954 Brown decision aimed at “the mongrelization of the white race.” He had held up Thurgood Marshall’s appointment to a federal judgeship until President Kennedy agreed to nominate W. Harold Cox to the US district court in Mississippi. He told Robert Kennedy, “Tell your brother that if he gives me Harold Cox, I will give him the nigger.”⁶

Mrs. Mary Tucker, a Ruleville Black woman in her late sixties, let some “Freedom Riders” stay in her home. Their days were spent walking from house to house in Ruleville or riding from plantation to plantation, recruiting potential voter applicants. Mrs. Tucker thought about a friend of hers. “I said, ‘Lord, I believe I’ll go out in the country and get Fannie Lou. I want her to come in here and hear this because I believe it would mean something to her.’“⁷

FANNIE LOU TOWNSEND HAMER

Fannie Lou Townsend was born on October 6, 1917, in Montgomery County, Mississippi, the youngest of twenty children. Her birth was a benefit to her family; the plantation owner paid her father fifty dollars for producing a future field hand. In 1919, they moved to Sunflower County, part of a larger internal migration by Mississippi Blacks. While many moved to Chicago, others moved within Mississippi, relocating to the Delta counties to take the places of those who had left.

Sunflower County’s largest town—then and now—was Indianola; the Townsends lived near Ruleville. When she was six years old, Mrs. Hamer remembered, “I was playing beside the road and this plantation owner drove up to me and asked me ‘Could I pick cotton?’ I told him I didn’t know, and he said, ‘Yes, you can. I will give you things that you want from the commissary store,’ and he mentioned things like crackerjacks and sardines. So I picked the 30 pounds of cotton that week, but I found out that actually he was trapping me into beginning the work I was to keep doing and I never did get out of his debt again.”⁸ The next week, she had to pick sixty pounds.

The large Townsend family managed to put money aside; Mr. Townsend bought three mules, two cows, farm implements, and a car. While they were away one night, local whites poisoned the animals, and the family was reduced to the sharecropping system again.

Mrs. Townsend was protective of her children, once attacking a white man who had slapped her youngest boy. The Townsends earned extra money by “scrapping cotton,” or picking fields clean. Mrs. Townsend would help kill hogs and be rewarded with the intestines, feet, and head, but sometimes the family had little more to eat than bread and onions. Young Fannie Lou noticed the discrepancy between the life her family led and that of the whites whose land they worked. She asked, “Mother, how come we are not white? Because white people have clothes, they can have food to eat, and we work all the time and we don’t have anything.”

“She said, ‘I don’t ever want to hear you say that again, honey.’ . . . She said, ‘You respect yourself as a little child, a little black child. And as you grow older, respect yourself as a black woman. Then one day, other people will respect you.’“⁹

When Fannie Lou was eight, she learned about a white mob that had come to get a Black man who had shot back at a white man, killing him. “I ain’t never heard of no one white man going to get a Negro,” she later recalled.

They’re the most cowardly people I ever heard of. The mob came to get Mr. Pullum, but he was waiting for them and every time a white man would peep out, he busted him. Before they finally got him, he’d killed 13 and wounded 26. The way they finally got him was to pour gasoline on the water of the bayou and set it afire. When it burned to the hollowed-out stump, he crawled out. . . . They dragged him by his heels on the back of a car and paraded about with that man for all the Negroes to see. They cut his ear off and for the longest time it was kept in a jar of alcohol in a showcase in a store window in Drew.¹⁰

She left school after the sixth grade to help support her family but took advantage of the whites’ homes she lived in to continue reading. Her father died in 1939; an accident with an axe began to take her mother’s eyesight. As older brothers and sisters left home to find a better life, she stayed home to care for her mother, who died in 1961.

In 1944, at the age of twenty-seven, she married thirty-two-year-old Perry Hamer, known as Pap. They lived in a small house on the Mar-low Plantation with running cold water and a broken indoor toilet. Mrs. Hamer remembered not minding the broken toilet until one day she worked for a white family and was told that a second bathroom didn’t have to be cleaned too well. “It’s just Old Honey’s,” she was told. Old Honey was the dog. “I just couldn’t get over that dog having a bathroom when [the white man] wouldn’t even have the toilet fixed for us. But then, Negroes in Mississippi are treated worse than dogs.”¹¹

The plantation routine followed the cotton season. Planted in April, it had to be chopped—or weeded—from May onward. “You get up before sunrise and go in the kitchen and get some breakfast. You fixes what you had, and about sun-up we were in the fields, choppin’ cotton.” There would be a respite at the end of August; then picking began. To get a five-hundred-pound bale, fifteen hundred pounds had to be picked; the seeds, removed during ginning, added to the weight. “We picked from Monday morning until Saturday night,” a plantation worker remembered.¹²

In 1961, Mrs. Hamer entered a hospital to have a small uterine tumor removed. Without her knowledge or consent, the doctor performed a hysterectomy. “I went to the doctor who did that to me and I asked him, ‘Why? Why had he done that to me?’ He didn’t have to say nothing—and he didn’t.”¹³

In August 1962, Mary Tucker called on Fannie Lou Hamer. “‘Fannie Lou, I want you to come to my home.’ She said, ‘What for, Tuck?’ I said, ‘I want you to come to a meeting. We’re having a civil rights meeting . . . We’re learning how to register to vote so you can be a citizen.’“¹⁴ Mrs. Hamer went to her first civil rights meeting at Williams Chapel Church in Ruleville; James Bevel was the main speaker. James Forman told the small gathering that each one of them had the right to register to vote.

“It made so much sense to me because right then, you see,” Mrs. Hamer said later, “the man who was our night policeman here in Ruleville was a brother to J. W. Milam, which was one of the guys helped to lynched this kid Emmett Till. . . . Then they asked who would go down there Friday and try to become a registered voter. I was one of the persons that held up my hand.”¹⁵

Two weeks before, SNCC worker Charles McLaurin had taken three elderly Black women to Ruleville to register to vote. “I learned then,” he said, “that a faithful few are better than an uncertain ten.” They found the clerk’s office locked.

On August 31, 1962, Mrs. Hamer and seventeen others went to Indianola in a rented bus to register to vote. Once there, McLaurin said, the people milled about; the courthouse was a symbol of white power and a source of Black fear. All were hesitant about entering it. “Then this one little stocky lady just stepped off the bus and went right on up to the courthouse and into the circuit clerk’s office. I didn’t know this was Fannie Lou Hamer.”¹⁶

Mrs. Hamer remembered that first trip: “It was so many people down there, you know, white people, and some of them looked like the Beverly Hillbillies . . . but they wasn’t kidding down there; they had on, you know, cowboy hats and they had guns, they had dogs.”

Applicants had to fill out a long questionnaire, including listing their employer’s name, and interpret a section of the state constitution. The registrar asked Mrs. Hamer to interpret Section 16 of the constitution. It dealt, she said later, “with facto laws and I knowed as much about a facto law as a horse knows about Christmas Day.”¹⁷ She failed the test.

On the way back to Ruleville, the bus was stopped and the driver arrested; the bus was too yellow and, according to the officer, could be mistaken for a school bus. The stranded passengers were “restless and afraid.” McLaurin remembered: “In the midst of all this grumbling about the problems, a voice, a song, a church song just kind of smoothly came out of the group. ‘Down By The Riverside.’ Or ‘Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around.’ ‘This Little Light of Mine.’ And that voice was Fannie Lou Hamer, and it seemed to calm everybody on the bus.”¹⁸ They scraped together the money for the driver’s fine and were finally allowed to return home.

When Mrs. Hamer returned to the Marlow Plantation where she had lived for eighteen years, the owner had already been there, asking for her, and had told Pap Hamer she had gone to Indianola to register. “We ain’t gonna have that now,” he said. He told Pap Hamer she would have to take her name off the registration book if she wanted to stay on his plantation. Since she had failed the test, her name wasn’t there. When her husband asked what she was going to do, Mrs. Hamer replied, “I didn’t go down there to register for Mr. Marlow. I went down to register for myself.”¹⁹ She repeated this to Mr. Marlow. The next morning, she left and moved in with Mrs. Tucker and, for safety, later moved in with friends in Tallahatchie County.

Bob Moses asked Charles McLaurin to find the woman who had tried to register to vote, sung on the bus, and been evicted from her home. He finally found her. McLaurin told her Moses had asked her to join the movement. He wanted her to become a part of the SNCC staff, to go to Tougaloo College, and then to a meeting of Mississippi registration workers in Nashville. “And she said, ‘I’ll be ready in a minute.’“²⁰

Another person who was ready was Hartman Turnbow. I remember him. Dressed like the farmer he was, in coveralls, boots, and an old hat, Mr. Turnbow carried a briefcase. When he opened the briefcase, there was nothing in it but an automatic.

In April 1963, Mr. Turnbow went with a group of other Black farmers in Holmes County, Mississippi, to try to register to vote. When the sheriff asked “Who’ll be the first?,” no one moved. Then Mr. Turnbow said, “Me, Hartman Turnbow, I came here to die to vote. I’m the first.”²¹ Four days later, the Klan firebombed his home and fired multiple shots into the living room. Mr. Turnbow fired back. Then the sheriff charged him with arson, accusing him of setting fire to his own uninsured home.

SNCC’s projects in Southwest Georgia experienced a wave of terror, including arson and night-rider shootings in August and September 1962. At the same time, violence increased in Mississippi. On September 11, night riders fired into two of the three homes that provided shelter for SNCC volunteers in Ruleville; two young girls were wounded, one of them seriously.

The two-state violence prompted an unusually strong statement of condemnation from President Kennedy on September 13. In response to a press conference question, he said: “I don’t know any more outrageous action which I’ve seen occur in this country than the burning of a church—two churches—because of the effort, made by Negroes, to be registered to vote.” He called the Ruleville shootings “cowardly as well as outrageous.”²²

“I commend those who are making the effort to register every citizen. They deserve the protection of the United States government, the protection of the states. . . . And if it requires extra legislation, and extra force, we shall do that.”²³

Three nights later, the I Hope Baptist Church in Terrell County, Georgia, was burned; the arsonists were arrested on the spot, drinking beer. Four more Georgia churches were burned within two weeks.

The president’s rhetoric had not been able to stop church burnings— and the president’s Justice Department was becoming more timid rather than more aggressive in its pursuit of voting rights. It faced the hostility of segregationist federal judges, many of them Kennedy appointees. In September, Burke Marshall admitted the difficulties they faced and warned a delegation of civil rights leaders that they could not expect “protection guarantees” for registration workers, despite the president’s statement and the department’s earlier promises to civil rights groups.