“Freedom is not something that anybody can be given. Freedom is something people take, and people are as free as they want to be.”
—James Baldwin
“It’s going to be a long, hot summer.”
Those prophetic words were my concluding quote in a New York Times article in May of 1964, when a reporter interviewed me for a story about our voter registration drive in Quincy. In the article, I complained about the intimidation of local residents through their jobs and the constant, paralyzing police presence.1 That summer—which would become known by civil rights workers throughout the South as “Freedom Summer”—was going to be a deadly one. It was a summer many of us were lucky to survive, and I was no exception.
By the summer of 1964, John and I had a long-distance marriage. In March John had been given a one-year Eleanor Roosevelt Fellowship by the National Association of Human Relations Workers, a position based in Atlanta, and I was still living in Quincy. Assigned to the Voter Education Project of the Southern Regional Council (headed by famous civil rights attorney Wiley Branton), John traveled throughout the South to do field research and send back reports on voting rights for Negroes. Because of John’s relationship with Branton and CORE General Counsel Carl Rachlin, he also ended up acting as backup counsel to local attorneys in Mississippi and North Florida. Sometimes John and I did not see each other for a month at a time, but we had always known that lengthy separations might be a cost of our activism. During that time, the needs of the Movement were much more critical to us than the needs of a young married couple.
“Don’t you get lonely, what with your husband bein’ gone all the time? I could keep you company,” a grinning police officer said to me after pulling in front of my car to stop me on an out-of-the-way dirt road in Gadsden County. This deputy was one of my regular tails—going wherever I went, staying as long as I stayed—so I recognized him right away.
“I know I’m always following you, but I’m not your enemy. I’m your friend,” he said. “Don’t you want some attention? I know women like attention.”
I was very annoyed to be pulled over for such nonsense. This arrogance was common in the South, where some white men were brazen about sexual overtures toward Negro women in a way they would not dare with white women. By contrast, the slightest suspected overture by a Negro man toward a white woman could be deadly for the Negro man. “No, thank you. I can manage fine,” I said curtly. “You do your job if you feel you have to, and I’ll do mine. That’s the only reason I’m here.” And I backed up and drove away. He allowed me to pass, but he followed as usual.
In the voter registration campaign, I knew that whatever resistance we were already meeting was about to get much worse. Since we had received a grant from the Voter Education Project of the Southern Regional Council, we were going to expand our staff in the coming months, and we were going to have a much more visible presence in a wider area. In March, Judy and I had gone to a CORE meeting in New Orleans to train for a larger-scale voting campaign. We met at a motel for Negroes, the Mason Motel, which was willing to host an interracial group. When the day’s programming was over, the organizers suggested several places we might visit in New Orleans.
As Judy told the story that day Tananarive and I interviewed her, she sat in the back seat with a Negro man from Southern University, and I sat in the front seat with the white male CORE field director who was driving. Like me, the white activist was married. The driver and I were speaking casually about issues related to the Movement. Frankly, I had never considered civil rights meetings a place to socialize or “date,” unlike many other activists who got on my nerves because they seemed to always be on the prowl. This was Judy’s first visit to New Orleans, and she was excited to see some of the famed spots she had heard about. We parked the car, she said, and went to nightclub after nightclub, only to be told we could not be admitted. To observers, she said, we appeared to be two interracial couples.
“That’s how we saw New Orleans, by getting kicked out of all these famous places,” Judy said. “One or two o’clock in the morning, we found someplace that would let us come in and sit down. That was my first exposure to New Orleans.”
I don’t have the same memory of having to go from place to place, although it may be possible. My recollection is that we knew which places would admit us, and a group of us simply congregated there. I also thought the white activist’s wife had been with us, although Judy said she was not. What I know for certain is that the white man we spent time with that evening was very talkative, and he was obviously a dedicated worker. His name was Michael Schwerner. He called himself “Mickey.”
Mickey Schwerner was based at the CORE-VEP office in Meridian, Mississippi, and I met him for the first and last time at that gathering in New Orleans as we were all preparing to go back out to our respective bases to fortify our voter registration campaigns. Three months later, on June 21, word came across the CORE grapevine that Mickey and two other workers in Mississippi—a Negro resident named James Chaney and a new summer volunteer named Andrew Goodman—were missing. Given the hostile climate, and despite the skepticism of local law enforcement (who said their disappearance was a hoax), the community of activists had no choice but to assume the worst. We learned that the three activists had driven from Meridian to the small Mississippi farming community of Longdale, near a town called Philadelphia, to investigate several beatings and the burning of a church where Chaney and Schwerner had convinced church leaders to host a Freedom School. The three were driving back to Meridian when they were arrested by local deputies who held them in jail until nightfall and then released them.
Then they vanished.2
Before the three Mississippi workers vanished, many civil rights leaders and CORE staff members, including former FAMU professor Richard Haley, had been pressing the U.S. Justice Department for protection for voter registration workers. A month and a half later, after an extensive search, the bodies of the three workers were found. They had been murdered, it was discovered—handed over to their killers by the police.3 (Unfortunately, many younger Americans’ only exposure to this important case came from the film Mississippi Burning, which is so full of distortions that the events are unrecognizable to many of us who were involved in the Movement. In order to be more commercial, the film tells the story from a white point of view, while blacks stand helplessly on the sidelines. This is common in Hollywood films about the civil rights movement. We are so often written out of our own history.)
“That had a very profound effect on me. It scared me,” Judy said, recalling how she spent that night in New Orleans staring at the back and side of Mickey Schwerner’s head, not realizing how soon he would be murdered. “He was a very real person to me, and to think he was dead. He might have been the first person I ever knew who died.”
Many years later, I interviewed Marvin Rich, a longtime member of CORE who served as the organization’s publicity director for many years and, by many accounts, was the man who really kept CORE functioning during trying times. Marvin was in constant contact with me during that era. “When Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner were killed, that was very, very hard on me, because I had been in Meridian, Mississippi, the week before, with Chaney and Schwerner,” recalls seventy-one-year-old Marvin, who is now the program director for the National Coalition Against Censorship in New York. “I remember sitting on the street curb, eating half a sandwich with Jim Chaney—in the black section of town, obviously. The following week I was back in New York, and on Sunday morning I picked up the New York Times, and there’s a little paragraph about a church being burned in Philadelphia, Mississippi. And I picked up the phone, I called the office in Meridian, and I suggested they go over there. For my sanity, they told me they were already there. Well, that’s where they got killed, you know. And I was going to ask them to do something which I would have had to live with the rest of my life.”4
I remember feeling saddened by their disappearance, but I was not surprised. After hearing so many threats myself, it was not difficult to believe that the hatred ran so deeply that civil rights workers would be killed. Not only were the men’s deaths disturbing because we were in the same organization, but also because all civil rights activists were still in the thick of the violent resistance to our cause. Mickey Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman disappeared in June, when Freedom Summer was barely underway. In Mississippi, training sessions for the new college-age summer volunteers from all over the country were still being held, hanging under the cloud of missing workers while horrified parents called and begged their children to come home.
We all knew, without a doubt, it would be a long, hot summer indeed.
Not only had I met Mickey Schwerner myself, but John had represented James Chaney as one of seventy civil rights workers arrested in Meridian, doing petitions of removal for them. In early June, John had also driven Mickey’s wife, Rita Schwerner, from Meridian to a Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) office in Jackson, Mississippi. She needed a ride with John because, John says, at the moment her husband was driving to Ohio to pick up new summer recruits, including a white college student named Andrew Goodman, who had taken part in demonstrations at the World’s Fair. After John left Rita Schwerner in Jackson, he headed to Atlanta to meet me so we could enjoy one of those rare occasions when we could actually spend time together. I had brought Scout with me to John’s apartment in Atlanta, where I was waiting for him with anticipation. John and I hadn’t seen each other in two weeks, and we planned to spend a few quiet days with no interruptions.
Of course, that didn’t last long. It never did. Right away, John got a telephone call from Wiley Branton and was asked to go to St. Augustine because civil rights workers there were in dire need of a lawyer. John was needed to assist the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Dr. Martin Luther King, and 200 other protesters arrested in demonstrations. Dr. King was flying in and out of St. Augustine to help spur ongoing protests, and the tiny Florida tourist town was boiling over with racial problems.
We decided to take Scout with us to St. Augustine in John’s car, and I planned to go back to my base in Gadsden County from there. Soon, the new CORE workers would arrive for our own voter registration campaign, and I needed to prepare.
The saga of the missing civil rights workers in Mississippi has always overshadowed events in St. Augustine during that summer, which were among some of the most violent in the civil rights movement. The crises in Mississippi and St. Augustine developed nearly simultaneously, and everyone from President Johnson to Attorney General Robert Kennedy to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to Dr. Martin Luther King had their hands full trying to juggle responses to both problems. John was there on behalf of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund in St. Augustine at ground zero, so to speak, working with a Jacksonville attorney named Earl Johnson to free protesters, between visits from lawyers from New York and elsewhere. (In an auxiliary capacity, John helped the NAACP Legal Defense Fund win a case without precedent, Andrew Young v. Farris Bryant, where the United States District Court ordered the state to protect nonviolent protestors. Young later went on to have a career as a statesman; he became a U.S. representative, the ambassador to the United Nations under President Carter, and then the mayor of Atlanta.)
They had their hands full. St. Augustine was ready to explode.
In 1963, there already had been several racially motivated bombings and shootings. Segregationists’ terror campaign had resulted in the self-defense shooting death of an armed white night rider trying to terrorize a Negro neighborhood. Although they had only been trying to defend their homes, four Negro activists were convicted of murder. John had represented those men, but unfortunately they were found guilty, which had been a major disappointment to him. In the wake of that, Dr. Robert Hayling’s house had been riddled with shotgun blasts, and terrorists had set one Negro family’s home afire and another Negro family’s car afire.5 Meanwhile, for months, Dr. Hayling and others had been begging for more support and protection from the NAACP, the SCLC, and state and federal authorities. Instead of helping Dr. Hayling, the NAACP had deemed him too radical and cut him loose. (The NAACP Legal Defense Fund, which was under separate leadership, continued to provide legal aid to Dr. Hayling and others.)
Dr. King’s SCLC stepped in instead. The SCLC was looking for its next big front after the mass marches in Birmingham and the March on Washington, and Dr. King and his forces believed the city held symbolic value. After all, founded in 1565, St. Augustine was the oldest European settlement in the country, and it was planning a widely publicized celebration of its 400th birthday the next year, in 1965.
On the surface, St. Augustine didn’t seem like the sort of place you would expect to erupt in racial violence, but King would later complain to city officials that his organization had never worked in a city “as lawless” as St. Augustine.6 The oceanfront resort town relied heavily on the spending of Northern tourists, who walked the streets in shorts and casual beach clothes, seemingly without a care in the world. Many whites who lived there, as in countless small Southern towns, believed the Negroes in St. Augustine were happy, even though Negroes were segregated, shut out of city jobs, and without government allies or a biracial commission to take their concerns seriously. A central tourist spot and gathering place in St. Augustine’s historic district was the old slave market.
Thanks to Dr. Hayling and his colleagues, who had sought out the SCLC, the city’s segregated policies came under the national spotlight in 1964. In March, answering the SCLC’s call, 200 protesters, including visiting activists like Mrs. Malcolm Peabody (a well-known socialite who was the mother of the governor of Massachussetts), were arrested in various demonstrations. Because of Mrs. Peabody’s presence, the events in St. Augustine received coverage on the Today Show. By May, Dr. Martin Luther King appeared at a mass meeting to give notice that large-scale demonstrations were about to begin in the city, which he called a “small Birmingham.”7
The presence of Dr. King and the out-of-town demonstrators not only enraged the local segregationists in St. Augustine, but they also drew Klan leader J. B. Stoner and other racists from cities outside of Florida. Both sides were gathering troops, and St. Augustine was the battleground. St. Augustine was a miniature stage for the momentum of the national civil rights movement and the violent tactics of its opponents, who were more and more desperate, especially with the imminent passage of the Public Accommodations Act, which would make the integration of restaurants, hotels, and other public facilities the law of the land. Desperation breeds danger.
Because the Klan influence reached so deep in St. Augustine, the city was in turmoil. There were brutal attacks there. By the end of the summer, police officers would attack other police officers they believed were being too hard on white toughs attacking peaceful Negro swimmers at a beach protest; Klan members would riot with the police; a motel proprietor would pour acidic pool solution into his swimming pool to drive away Negro swimmers trying to integrate it; more bombs would be set off; reporters from national news media would be chased and beaten by racist mobs. The sheriff himself, through his bullhorn, would encourage unruly whites to take part in a “march through niggertown.” Even the Florida governor, C. Farris Bryant, would dare a U.S. District Court judge to send him to jail after the governor banned Negroes’ peaceful night marches in St. Augustine, despite the judge’s ruling that Negroes had the right to march and deserved police protection. (In the end, the judge chose not to exercise his right to jail the governor for contempt.) Governor Bryant would also lie outright to Negro leadership and President Johnson, claiming he had formed a biracial commission in St. Augustine when he not only had not done it, but had no intention of doing it.8
Yes, St. Augustine was terrible. The only consolation, as Ralph Abernathy pointed out in his autobiography, And the Walls Came Tumbling Down, is that the timing of the violence in St. Augustine probably helped change the minds of some U.S. congressmen who had been on the fence about the Public Accommodations Act. Even so, businessmen in St. Augustine who agreed to abide by the new integration law soon buckled because of Klan threats and violence.
John gave St. Augustine almost constant attention throughout June and July, living in Jacksonville and driving the thirty miles back and forth each day. Even if he had found acceptable accommodations in St. Augustine, he did not believe it would be safe for him to live there.
It was not safe for Dr. King, either.
In St. Augustine that June, while John and I both happened to be there, Dr. King had a moment of truth. Although he rarely spent the night in the tense city, one day he learned that a Negro hotel had been bombed, and that the bomb had been intended for him. Shakily, Dr. King assembled his SCLC colleagues around him for a press conference in reaction to the assassination attempt. We were standing in the blazing summer sun under the shade of a tree outside Dr. Hayling’s office, all of our faces grim.
Recently, when Tananarive asked John to remember that day, his voice became thin and he had to pause several times because of his tears. “All of the lieutenants were there, Andrew Young and C.T. Vivian, and Hosea Williams, and they were in a protective circle around Dr. King,” John said. “And I could look at Dr. King’s eyes. It was different from being scared. It was like his eyes were saying I’m a dead man. It wasn’t just him; the rest of the people, too. They seemed to say, You’re dead, King. We love you. We all knew he was going to the hill with the cross. You could feel that his destiny was clear, and that he might as well be dead.”
At that same press conference, I was standing behind Dr. King with Scout on a very short leash, and Dr. King made a sudden movement backward. Scout had always been a mean dog, which is why I kept his leash so short, but Scout was in an especially bad mood that day because of the heat, and Dr. King had come too close. Suddenly, Scout lunged and snapped his sharp teeth, missing Dr. King by an inch. A few people gasped as Dr. King jerked out of Scout’s reach.
To Dr. King, I’m sure, my German shepherd looked exactly like countless other vicious police dogs he and other marchers had faced in Birmingham. After Scout lunged at him, Dr. King did not laugh it off. He hardly composed himself.
I’ll always remember that look on his face.
At the beginning of July, I rushed off to attend a conference in Kansas City. Once again, luckily, I had the chance to see John, who was there on behalf of the Voter Education Project of the Southern Regional Council. By then, it had been a month since we had seen each other in St. Augustine. Believe it or not, because our finances were so limited, for the first nights we stayed in Kansas City I slept in the room with other women activists while John stayed in a room with male activists. After the conference ended, John and I spent an extra day there and shared a room so we could be together on July 5, 1964. We knew it would be a long time before we would be together again, so we enjoyed at least one night as man and wife. Later, our night together would take on much greater significance.
As soon as the meeting ended in Kansas City, I was back in Gadsden County to begin the arduous task of welcoming and training new workers we had hired from around the country to help us with the expanded voter project, which we now called the North Florida Citizen Education Project. The newcomers were all college students, half of them were white, and most of them had at least some previous civil rights experience. These were idealistic college students answering the call for civil rights workers in the massive voter registration campaigns underway in the South, and they had applied to work with CORE. The arrival of new workers brought my staff to fifteen, and between them they would cover ten counties that summer. For pay, each of them would earn $25 a week. As project director, I was paid all of $70 a week.
As difficult a time as I’d had finding a place to stay when I was virtually alone in Gadsden County, I now had a much larger challenge ahead of me: Workers would need families to house them in every single county we had targeted, and the workers were to be assigned in interracial pairs, which would make people more reluctant to accept them as house-guests. We also needed a larger space for our regular staff meetings, to prepare meals, and to house the workers. I’d been at my wits’ end trying to locate a space for us.
As luck would have it, I had met Vivian Kelly, an elementary-school teacher in Quincy, who came to hear me speak about voter registration during one of my early appearances at Arnett Chapel AME Church. One of her neighbors had complained that the church was involved in “some mess,” vowing not to go. But Mrs. Kelly wanted to know what “mess” her friend was talking about, so she went to hear me speak, and she says she was struck by my sense of resolve. She also liked the fact that I was from Gadsden County and had come home to make a difference in my own community. Mrs. Kelly is a tall, queenly woman with rich, mahogany-colored skin, and although I did not know her at the time, she knew of me; she’d been one of Mother’s classmates as a child, and my biological father was her cousin, so we were related.
Like many people who had grown up in Gadsden County, Mrs. Kelly had worked in the tobacco fields as a child, making fifty cents a day toting and stringing tobacco leaves. She’d attended school in Midway through the ninth grade, then come to Quincy to finish her high school education, scrubbing floors to earn her room and board at a woman’s home because her parents were too poor to pay for it. Her father borrowed fifty dollars from a farmer, enabling her to go to Florida A&M, and she didn’t stop there. She completed her master’s degree when she was in her late twenties, even though she was the mother of four sons and had been widowed in 1955 when her husband was killed in a car accident.
Despite being a single mother, and despite the pervasive fear that drove many Negroes away from activism, Mrs. Kelly decided to get involved. Her personal problems with whites had been limited to having white children in school buses throw orange peels at her and the other Negro students who were forced to walk to school when she was a girl, but she’d grown up hearing many of the same horrific stories my mother had heard in Gadsden County. She knew about the physician, Dr. W. S. Stevens, who had been beaten and tied to a tree in the 1940s because he tried to register people to vote. (He was the same physician who’d built a small hospital for Negroes, although the white establishment never allowed it to operate. His son, Charles Stevens, also became a physician.) When she was eleven or twelve, Mrs. Kelly had met a woman named Miss Bowie, who traveled from home to home to demonstrate how to preserve vegetables and meat. Miss Bowie had also found a man willing to donate an acre of his land to build a sorely needed park for Negro children. Miss Bowie had also talked about voter registration, and when word of that spread, racists burned the woman’s house down. After constant harassment, Miss Bowie left town, like so many other Negroes who tried to make a difference. In fact, Mrs. Kelly remembers a succession of Negro physicians who tried to set up practices in Gadsden County, but always left after four or five months. “They told me that the white people would tell them that they had to leave. They never could stay here,” she says.9
By the time our voter registration drive came to Quincy, Mrs. Kelly was fed up. She was ready to help us despite her friends’ warnings, no matter what the consequences. She’d bought her house in 1956, a few years earlier, Mrs. Kelly recalled at the age of seventy-seven during an interview in 1996, and a friend told her, “ ‘Child, you going to be bothered with that mess? And then how’re you going to pay for your house?’ But something within me said, ‘How can they take your house or your job?’ ”
Although Mrs. Kelly didn’t have much room in her home because of her sons, she offered space to civil rights workers when it was needed. She also suggested we should speak to another educator, Witt Campbell, who was part of the Good Shepherds, a civic organization that originally had been founded as a group of pallbearers right after the turn of the century. Mrs. Kelly was the group’s secretary.
Witt Campbell, too, was a godsend. He was the principal at Stevens Elementary School, and he shared Mrs. Kelly’s bold sensibility. He was eager to assist us. As it happened, the Good Shepherds had recently purchased a property that had formerly been a little store, which they used as their meeting hall. Nestled right behind it, only visible at a certain angle from the street, was a tiny house that was not currently in use. With a kitchen and several bedrooms, the house was perfect for us. A few members of the Good Shepherds objected when Mr. Campbell suggested allowing us to use the house, much to his disappointment, but he stood his ground.
“We always said if we’re not going to do it and they are going to do it, at least we can support them. That is the philosophy we had behind it. That’s the way I thought about it, and many of the others, too,” said Mr. Campbell, who became a pastor in later years.
The little house on Fourth Street became ours, and we dubbed it the “Freedom House.”
Now we were ready for the trainees. Preparing for the larger campaign was very much like having troops in boot camp. Several local workers and attorneys participated with me in the orientation session, which was held at the Freedom House. If anyone had thought arriving in the South for the voter registration project would be like a summer camp, they were dispelled of that notion right from the start. The mood we set was businesslike and very serious. We began with the history of CORE and the basics of nonviolent philosophy: No matter what, the new workers were told, we were to be nonviolent. I knew it would take only one case of a CORE worker involved in a violent incident to unravel years of hard work and undermine the civil rights effort. Our foes could not wait to discredit us.
I also told the newcomers that they had come to work, not to socialize. I heard later that some of the workers did not take me seriously on this point, because they apparently had sexual relationships with other CORE workers or community members without my knowledge. Some of them were enjoying the novelty of meeting men or women of another race, but since interracial socializing was such an explosive taboo in the South, I warned them that this kind of behavior would not be tolerated. I also said I would not tolerate people who randomly broke certain laws, such as those against speeding and smoking marijuana. Once, I was riding in a car with a white worker who lit up a marijuana cigarette right in front of me! I told her she’d better get rid of it and never do that again. Even while I was working so hard to change laws that I considered unjust, I have always believed that laws are very important, and I never broke any laws lightly. If we ignored drug and traffic laws like common criminals, it would greatly undermine our effectiveness. Later, I sent some volunteers home when they broke the rules.
Rubin Kenon later told me he considered me “bossy,” but I can only emphasize that I knew these young people’s lives were my responsibility. I hadn’t needed the disappearance of Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner to tell me that we were in a life or death situation, and we had to behave that way.
The CORE staff had to follow very strict guidelines about procedure as they worked. I didn’t want anyone to have to work alone; where possible, they worked in same-sex interracial pairs, with two people per county. Lawyers instructed them that if they were arrested, they should not resist, but they should let the police know that they understood there was a new law stating that an attorney should be present during questioning. We gave them telephone numbers for CORE’s general counsel in New York, Carl Rachlin; for NAACP Defense Fund lawyers Earl Johnson and Charles Wilson; and for the Lawyer’s Constitutional Defense Committee in St. Augustine. If workers were leaving one location to go to another, they had to call headquarters to report their whereabouts. We also supplied numbers for offices of the FBI, because if anyone took longer than expected to reach their destination, or we did not receive a call, we would immediately report them missing to the FBI.
I regret that I can’t remember the names of all the courageous young people who came to Florida to work that summer, but some of the people in our group were FAMU students Doris Rutledge, Sidney Daniels, and Ira Simmons (all of whom had been involved in previous civil rights activities). The white workers included Judy Benninger, a former military man named Scott McVoy from Gainesville, a student named Stu Wechsler, a student from the Northeast named Eleanor Lerner, and a University of Florida student named Mike Geison. Later in the summer and fall, other volunteers would arrive to help us out. One was James “Jim” Harmeling (the twin brother of Dan Harmeling, the white student from the University of Florida who had been arrested with Judy at the Tallahassee theater demonstration), and others included FAMU students Johnny Watson (who would one day teach math at my daughters’ high school in Miami) and Linda Dixie from Quincy, as well as a high school student from Madison County named David Dukes.
Of course, we expected to be arrested, so we needed lawyers. Our lawyers came to Quincy to work in shifts, depending on how much time they had to volunteer. John coordinated the paper trail for the next attorneys’ shifts, so they could hit the ground running. Our lawyers that summer included Jeff Greenup and James W. Lamberton from New York and Dave Halperin from Chicago.
After the orientation, some of the workers admitted that our warnings frightened them. Still others were frightened by experiences they had already had in the field and shocked at the level of hostility directed toward them. My attitude was It’s better for them if they’re frightened. The more careful they were, I reasoned, the less likely we were to suffer any tragedies like the one that was playing out in Neshoba County, Mississippi, where the three workers were missing.
If any of my workers thought I was being paranoid, they learned better by our next staff meeting, on an afternoon in mid-July. While we were all gathered at the Freedom House, trading stories and making plans, we suddenly heard a loud popping sound right outside. A front window shattered, and Scout began barking in the backyard. “Get down!” I shouted, and we all lunged to crouch behind the sofa and under the table. There were several more gunshots, and then we heard the sound of a car speeding off.
Freedom Summer was officially underway in Gadsden County.
Judy Benninger was very much affected by the violent environment that summer and described her feelings in an essay she wrote later that year:
Night has begun in Quincy, Florida. A car drives down the street. Is it really possible that I can tell the difference between a car driven by a white man and a car driven by a Negro? At night in Quincy, many learn to do this. If it is a Negro car, ears return to television. If white and slowing down, those sitting in front of the curtained window cringe within.… 3 A.M. and I hear a shot. Sleep and I struggle, and Pat hears, “My God, Pat, they are shooting at us now.” And she, “Child, how can I sleep if you’re going to be talking all night?” In the morning we will look for the holes in the screen.10
Police responses to attacks at the Freedom House were slow, or nonexistent. I read a newspaper story where the police chief, J. W. Haire, smiled and told a reporter that the police followed us so much for our “protection,”11 and yet when we truly needed protection, police were hard to find. Once, we were literally pinned inside the Freedom House for nearly twenty-four hours, and Judy Benninger recalled that ordeal in beautiful detail during our 1990 interview: “As the sun went down, I could hear some black teenagers walking down the street, humming ‘We Shall Overcome.’ Then, as it got really dark, these people in pickup trucks were circling more than usual. I remember Jim Harmeling went out and hid behind a bush by the road, armed with a flashlight and pencil and paper, and his job was to take their license plate numbers. And Scott McVoy was out there, too, and the night riders must have seen the flashlight, so they stopped. Scott was an ex-Marine. These guys were both white. They were pretty good about their nonviolence. Anyway, these guys with rifles came toward Scott and Jim. And Scott had been trained to take the rifle away from someone in hand-to-hand combat. He just could have grabbed his rifle and hit that guy, but he didn’t. Finally, one of the guys just took his rifle and hit Scott across the head so badly that his face was just laid all open. He had to have stitches. That was the first thing. I got on the phone immediately. I called the mayor, I called the city police, I called the FBI. About an hour later, someone came by and started shooting into the Freedom House. And nobody came. The police didn’t come. The FBI didn’t come. No one came. And there we were.
“That night, we slept in the back of the house. We took all of our mattresses—the men were all sleeping on the floor in the living room—and their suitcases, and they piled them up as high as they could across the front of the house, and went to sleep on the floor. The next morning we got up and saw two things that, to me, were so typical of what was so meaningful about the civil rights movement: We found bullet holes all across the front of the house. We also found two huge pots of collard greens. And that couple next door came out of their house, a man and a wife, and the man stood there with a shotgun. It was such a wonderful feeling, not only the physical protection and the terrible danger they were putting themselves in, but also that support in bringing us food. We had really brought this down on their community.”
The Negro man who lived next door to the Freedom House, a distant relative of mine through marriage named Arthur Jones, often appeared on his porch with his shotgun, looking for our attackers. “You all may be nonviolent, but I’m not. I have a family to protect,” Mr. Jones told us. To his credit, despite his worries for his wife, Modieste, and their six children, Mr. Jones never complained about our presence next door to him. He was another unsung soldier, and he and his wife live in the same house to this day.
Can you imagine having no police response to an ongoing shooting attack in an otherwise quiet residential neighborhood? That’s why it’s so hypocritical for police to claim they were trying to “protect” us during those days, and I think even some of our own out-of-town attorneys thought we were exaggerating about the threat, until they happened to be present during an attack. Like any foot soldiers in battle, we grew accustomed to working while under seige. The words to one of the freedom songs we distributed to our workers described it very well: “We are Soldiers in the Army. / We’ve got to fight although we have to cry. / We’ve got to hold up the freedom banner. / We’ve got to hold it up until we die.”
Someone might get killed, but no one’s bullets were going to stop us.
Voter registration in the rural South wasn’t as simple as going to churches, homes, bars, and fishing holes to encourage people to vote. Especially since our workers were sometimes sent out in interracial pairs, many prospective voters were nervous about being seen talking to us. Many doors were slammed in our faces, and we had to learn patience. Sometimes, the same person who slammed the door in your face today might welcome you tomorrow if you came by yourself, without a white companion.
Another obstacle was the living arrangements of the poorer Negroes. These were tenant farmers who lived in virtual shacks set far back on much larger, white-owned farms. We usually had to wait until sundown to talk to them, since they were working in the fields during daylight hours. Then we had to tread carefully, because most white farmers did not welcome us.
Vivian Kelly recalls that she and a white worker, Stu Wechsler—on a rare occasion when a black woman and a white man were paired, or vice versa—were approaching the homes of some Negro tenant farmers on a farm in Midway when suddenly she saw the white owner set his two large dogs on them. Barking angrily, the dogs charged. Mrs. Kelly and Stu turned and began to run. “Stu ran and lost his shoe. He had some tennis shoes on,” Mrs. Kelly recalls. “That was one of my most frightening experiences, because, see, I’m afraid of dogs.” (Luckily, the dogs didn’t catch them.) Stu wasn’t so lucky another time, when he arrived on the farm property of a Gadsden County commissioner with several other male civil rights workers to approach field hands. Stu was badly beaten that day, charged with trespassing, and sent to jail.12
Reaching the voters was only the first problem. Because daily survival was more crucial than book learning for the poor, many of the Negroes were illiterate. They could not read the ballots, and we had workshops to show people sample ballots, illustrating where the candidates’ name would be placed. We never encouraged anyone to vote for a Democrat or a Republican, but we wanted them to know where to find their party’s box.
Then, after all of that, if someone finally did decide they would take the step of registering to vote, we often had to provide transportation. We rented cars for our project, but we suffered so much vandalism and so many acts of violence in those cars that the rental companies stopped renting to us. Because registrar J. Love Hutchinson also ran the Gadsden County Times newspaper, voter registration in Gadsden County was at the Times office, a part of the white establishment most Negroes would never consider venturing to on their own. It was open only one day a week, on Mondays, and then, of course, the potential Negro voters faced the surveillance of nearby police or other intimidation. Mrs. Kelly recalls being so afraid that she was shaking the day she registered to vote there. She tried to put her hand on her hip, but it slipped because she was trembling so much. One county literally tried to close its books rather than register the growing number of Negro voters.
Every day brought a new struggle.
To Doris Rutledge, working in Florida was a compromise, because she’d originally hoped to do voter registration work that summer in Mississippi. Her mother was very relieved when she ended up in Florida, Doris says, but she was still far from safe. Doris was paired with a white woman named Eleanor Lerner, and they were both assigned to the small Florida town of Live Oak, in Suwannee County. Doris and Eleanor ran into a problem after their first day together. Residents from various counties had written to us to express interest in housing registration workers, and a local Negro schoolteacher had volunteered his home to Doris and Eleanor. They spent only one night there. In the morning, as they were dressing and preparing for another day in the field, they heard a knock at their door. Sheepishly, their host told them that he was getting harassed because Eleanor was white, so he asked them to leave.
He helped them find another candidate, a woman from his church. She agreed that Doris and Eleanor could move in with her. For the first couple of days, everything was fine. Then, another problem arose. “We noticed that she didn’t go to work one day, and so we said, ‘Well, that’s her day off,’ ” Doris recalls. But by the next day, when the woman stayed at home again, they realized something was wrong. “The lady tried not to tell us she had been fired.”
After that, a local eighty-five-year-old minister, Rev. Jenkins (Doris cannot remember his first name), offered his house instead. Rev. Jenkins was very strong-minded, and he not only owned his home, but also much of the property on that particular street, so he felt he could offer the workers more protection. After some time, someone actually posted a “Wanted: Dead or Alive” poster in Live Oak, bearing Doris’s name and photo. Sure enough, at one point, someone fired a gun at Doris while she was standing in front of Rev. Jenkins’s house. She recognized the man who’d fired the shot, so she called the FBI and reported him. She remembers a dismissive FBI agent telling her, “Well, it might have been blanks, you know.”
“Yeah, and we might have been dead,” Doris said.
The dangers and indignities were clear, but the rewards were much greater for us. On July 27, registration fever swept through Gadsden County on an unplanned Freedom Day. When the registrar’s office opened at 9:00 A.M., twenty Negroes had already lined up to register, and there was a constant line all day long. In one day, 350 Negroes registered, which was more than during the entire month of January, when our project was new. Because the sun was so hot, we provided beach umbrellas, cold water, and soft drinks to cool people off as they waited. The line was quite a sight. Even when the office closed, there were still seventy-five Negroes waiting. The growing crowds of registering Negroes in Gadsden County brought our total countrywide number to 1,900.13
The greatest joy came for us at 2:45 P.M., when two CORE workers arrived in a car from Chattahoochee, which was twenty-six miles away. The workers opened the passenger-side door and carried out a very elderly Negro woman, who told us she was 109 years old. “I was born a slave,” she announced. “It’s ’bout time I registered to vote.”
The woman’s name was Mrs. Pearlie Williams, and she had allowed herself to be driven into Quincy with strangers because she wanted to vote in her first election. When she arrived in her black Sunday dress with her hair pinned up, wearing a CORE button on her lapel, she buoyed all of our spirits. Mrs. Williams could remember slavery, and she had come to register. We had reached her.
Mrs. Williams told us there were other people in Chattahoochee who wanted to register, including her ninety-year-old daughter, but they were afraid.
“They say if I come back alive, they’ll come register too,” she said.
Frail Pearlie Williams was like Harriet Tubman that day, leading her people to freedom.