CHAPTER TWELVE

When the Movement Came

My involvement is something I can never forget. It was on a Sunday. Doug Smith and Charles Glenn stopped by the house.… And they came by and told us that there was a movement starting in Hattiesburg.

—Hattiesburg native Daisy Harris Wade, 2001

In March of 1962, two young black men named Hollis Watkins and Curtis Hayes appeared in the Mobile Street District. Both just twenty years old, Watkins and Hayes were the first native Mississippians hired as full-time staff members in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, pronounced “snick”), a young civil rights organization founded in April of 1960. In the evenings, the young men stayed a few miles outside of town at the home of local NAACP leader Vernon Dahmer. During the daytime, they walked through Hattiesburg’s black neighborhoods, “knocking on doors,” said Watkins, and “talking with people” about registering to vote.¹

Watkins remembered black Hattiesburgers as somewhat reluctant, yet also more receptive than people in McComb, where the young men had tried to organize voter applicants the previous year. All black Mississippians, especially those living in McComb, had good reason to fear violent or economic retribution in response to political activity. The punitive activities of the state-sponsored Citizens’ Council and Sovereignty Commission led one white Mississippian to conclude, “Mississippi comes as near to approximating a police state as anything we have yet seen in America.” When Watkins and Hayes were organizing in McComb, several young people were beaten, jailed, and then expelled from school for participating in a sit-in. About a month later, a voter registration activist named Herbert Lee was shot and killed.²

In describing his first impression of Hattiesburg, Watkins remembered that “fear permeated the community.” “But the more I began to meet and talk with people,” he said, “then I saw that the fear did not seem to be as deep as it was in other areas, and especially among people who seemed to have been a little bit more educated … among people who were business people.” According to Watkins, Hattiesburg’s black business leaders and professionals were crucial in helping ignite political activity among members of the local black community. “I think part of it also had to do with especially the business people realizing that their economic stability was not dependent upon the white community,” Watkins recalled nearly five decades later, “but was dependent upon being backed and supported from the black community.”³

Mobile Street in the 1960s. (McCain Library and Archives, University of Southern Mississippi)

Hattiesburg’s black business community peaked in the early 1960s. With a growing population and improving local economy, the Mobile Street District during the 1950s filled with dozens of additional groceries, barbershops, salons, restaurants, cleaners, funeral homes, and hotels. Three generations of entrepreneurs conducted their business in the neighborhood. The oldest businesses, most notably the Smith Drug Store and Lenon Woods’s guesthouse, had been in operation since the mid-1920s. Many in the next generation had gotten their start during the war years. And a younger set, which included more women, operated shops that had opened since the 1950s. A large portion of the younger shop owners had spent their youths in that community, attending local black schools and churches and patronizing shops in the Mobile Street District.4

By 1960, Hattiesburg was home to roughly 11,200 African Americans, most of whom were working class. Although many local families had deep roots, this was not a static population. Hattiesburgers of all races were constantly coming and going. The postwar economic boom combined with the realities of Jim Crow to create a second major wave of black outmigration. Between World War II and 1960, the number of African Americans living in Mississippi declined by about one hundred thousand.⁵

Despite this statewide decline, the total number of African Americans living in Mississippi’s cities actually increased significantly. Urban growth was part of a broader statewide trend that included both black and white residents. Cities and towns simply offered more opportunities and higher pay. Mississippi residents of any demographic—man or woman, black or white—could expect to earn about twice as much annual income if they lived in an urban setting. By 1960, one-third of black Mississippians lived in a town or city.⁶

Black Hattiesburgers were relatively poor compared to many other Americans, but economic conditions in the city’s black community had never been better. In 1960, Hattiesburg’s black population had an unemployment rate below 6 percent and a median family income of $2,431 (just over $20,000 today), the highest of any urban black community in the state. Decades of severe racial discrimination created racially stratified socioeconomic conditions across Hattiesburg, but the city’s black population was generally more prosperous than previous generations in the same community. And most lived in far better conditions than nearly all black Mississippians who still worked in agriculture.⁷

The best jobs for working-class African Americans were available only to men. The Hercules Powder Company, by far the city’s largest employer of black men, offered the highest wages. “We were all poor,” remembered Anthony Harris, the son of a Hercules employee, “but nobody knew we were poor because we sort of had basic things.” “We didn’t always get what we wanted,” Harris said, “but we never went without something that we needed.” The Hercules jobs were actually pretty good. It was fairly common for the wives of Hercules employees not to work outside the home and for their children to finish high school or even college.⁸

Hundreds of other black men worked at Meridian Fertilizer, the municipality of Hattiesburg, or one of the city’s automobile service stations or concrete companies, positions that paid less than Hercules but offered steady wages. Other blue-collar black men held positions such as deliveryman, porter, driver, landscaper, painter, waiter, or butler, historically black jobs that paid very little.⁹

Working-class black women enjoyed far fewer opportunities. Many would have been terrific candidates for jobs at Reliance Manufacturing, the city’s largest employer of women. Reliance was so desperate for female laborers that for years the company operated busses to transport female employees from as far as forty miles away. Meanwhile, thousands of black women with lifetimes of sewing experience lived within blocks of Reliance’s two factories. But local segregation ordinances prevented Reliance from hiring black women. These restrictions protected the best female factory jobs for white women and helped ensure that black women had few opportunities for employment beyond domestic work.¹⁰

In 1960, roughly 75 percent of black women in the Hattiesburg labor force worked in domestic service, one of the few options available to black women as a result of their exclusion from other employment opportunities. This dearth of alternatives conspired to suppress the wages of black women. On average, working black women in Mississippi cities earned only $761 per year (about $6,265 today), roughly 40 percent of the average annual income earned by black men in cities. Because of such limitations, nearly half of Hattiesburg’s adult black women chose not to participate in the labor force. Most of these women lived with their husbands or other relatives and performed household labor that benefitted their own families.¹¹

Local black life continued to revolve around black institutions and community programs, especially churches. The oldest churches in the Mobile Street District remained the most important. Of Hattiesburg’s twenty-four black churches in 1960, St. Paul Methodist, Mt. Carmel Baptist, True Light Baptist, and Zion Chapel A.M.E. still had the largest and most influential congregations. Their physical structures had been remodeled and rebuilt over the years, but the origins of each congregation dated back to at least 1904.¹²

In addition to regular services, marriages, and funerals, local black churches hosted a variety of events—social gatherings, organizational meetings, dinners, concerts, revivals, and dozens of other activities. At times, they were havens from the storm, both literally and figuratively. When the Leaf and Bouie Rivers flooded in the spring of 1961, black churches helped house the approximately four thousand African Americans displaced by the rising waters. “The churches was like the glue,” remembered a young man who grew up attending St. Paul Methodist in the 1950s, “the cement, the foundation, the conscience of our community.”¹³

By 1962, Hammond and Charles Smith had become the preeminent elders at St. Paul Methodist. When a new cornerstone was laid that year, the Smith brothers were the first two names listed on the marble plaque listing the board of trustees. Hammond and Charles, who turned sixty-eight and seventy-one that year, were the last remaining members of their nuclear family still living in Hattiesburg. The fourth-oldest brother, Wendall, had died of unspecified causes in 1954 at the age of fifty-four. Two other brothers, Martin Luther Smith and William Lloyd Garrison Smith, were practicing medicine in Muskegon, Michigan, and Los Angeles. Their sister, Mamie, lived in Clarksdale with her husband. And their mother, Mamie, had died in 1956, the year she would have turned ninety.¹⁴

Hammond and Charles were less active than in previous years, but remained stalwarts in their community. They were both still working and involved in the W. M. Stringer Grand Lodge and the local black Boy Scout troop. Community leaders for over forty years, the Smith brothers remained prominent local figures. But they were aging. In the postwar era, members of a younger generation emerged as the predominant community leaders.¹⁵

By 1960, Eureka principal N. R. Burger, also a member of St. Paul Methodist, had become the most visible black leader in the Mobile Street District. Throughout the early 1950s, Burger’s role as the city’s leading black educator created an important role for him as a liaison between local black educators and white Hattiesburg officials who were interested in resisting federally mandated school desegregation by improving black schools. Obsessed with the Brown decision, white civic leaders approached Burger in the 1950s for nearly all matters related to local public education. In 1958, Burger was one of the three black educators asked to help dissuade Clyde Kennard from applying to Mississippi Southern College.¹⁶

Burger, who held degrees from Alcorn State and Cornell University, was one of the most respected black educators in the state. Soon after the passage of Brown v. Board of Education, he was one of several black Mississippi leaders invited to meet with the governor about school segregation. Burger never publicly supported or condemned the Brown decision, positioning himself as an apolitical educator who merely wanted to improve black schools by maximizing access to resources. This stance enabled him to convince local white leaders to provide additional funding to support black Hattiesburg schools. “If you proposed something,” Burger explained of working with the white school board in the 1950s, “and you could prove that it was needed, you got it.”¹⁷

Supported by state funds, Hattiesburg between 1949 and 1953 built a new high school and two new elementary schools for African Americans. The black high school—Royal Street High School—opened for the 1950–51 school year, replacing Eureka, which became a junior high school only. Expansion of black schools, which was accompanied by simultaneous improvements to white schools, was long overdue. No new black school had been constructed since the 1920s, a thirty-year gap during which Hattiesburg’s black population quadrupled. In the 1940s alone, enrollment at Eureka nearly doubled.¹⁸

Although the state NAACP routinely criticized Mississippi’s half-hearted school equalization program, black public education did improve in the years after Brown. Between 1954 and 1962, the average salary of black Mississippi public school teachers increased from $1,244 to $3,236. Several municipalities also spent money to renovate or expand black schools. In Hattiesburg, both Eureka Junior High School and Royal Street High School (whose name changed in 1958 to Rowan High School) underwent significant renovations in 1960. Principal Burger oversaw these improvements and served as the public face of black educational initiatives. He even wrote several articles about school improvements that were published in the Hattiesburg American.¹⁹

Even in light of these improvements, Hattiesburg’s black and white public schools remained severely unequal. The local school board was never going to provide resources to black schools without offering even greater resources to white schools. Therefore, building renovations and teacher-salary increases at black schools were always accompanied by better improvements at white schools. Black schools still received less financial support per pupil and substandard supplies, including hand-me-down textbooks from white schools. As late as 1961, Hattiesburg spent an average of $115.96 per year on each white pupil and $61.69 on each black pupil. White residents paid more in taxes, but education was stratified by race, not income. The poorest white student still had an opportunity to attend a better school than the wealthiest black pupil.²⁰

It is also worth noting that black teachers, even with their pay raises, were closely monitored to suppress their academic and political freedoms. Their in-class curriculums were often monitored, and they were subject to termination for belonging to the NAACP or any other civil rights organization. And of course, their lives were also limited by the racial discrimination that affected all African Americans. Principal Burger was allowed to register to vote, but his wife Addie, who taught civics, was not.²¹

Nevertheless, the schools that were built in the 1950s did become important institutions in the black community. Like Eureka in previous eras, these new schools fostered the intellectual and social development of a new generation of students and provided communal gathering spaces for the local black residents. The 1960 renovations at Rowan High School included new chemistry and physics laboratories, a cafeteria, a football stadium, band and music rooms, and a new auditorium. Under the guidance of Principal Burger and community partners like the local Parent Teachers Association, Rowan High School quickly developed into one of the best black high schools in the state. And like Eureka in previous eras, the institution served as an important site for all members of the black community, hosting countless sporting events, meetings, concerts, fundraisers, graduation ceremonies, and lectures.²²

When Hollis Watkins and Curtis Hayes arrived in Hattiesburg, they entered a community with deep institutional roots dating back roughly eighty years. The Mobile Street District was by no means a glamorous place. In fact, one activist from New York City later described the neighborhood as “rundown.” But that community’s wealth lay not in the shimmering new cars and towering skyscrapers that characterized prosperity in other parts of America but rather in the institutions and traditions that had for decades framed local black life. From the Howell Literary Club to the Hattiesburg Negro Business League to the Union Choir Service to Eureka High School, the people of that community had for generations organized to help each other navigate the difficulties of black life in the Jim Crow South. To Watkins and Hayes, these longstanding institutions and social networks would prove indispensable to their efforts to draw local people into a national mass movement. The forces that brought the pair to Hattiesburg in the first place were the result of another interconnected set of processes.²³

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Between 1955 and 1963, Medgar Wiley Evers served as the first NAACP Mississippi field secretary. Born in Decatur, Mississippi, in 1925, the World War II veteran spent most of his career focused on voting rights. This focus predated his employment with the NAACP. Inspired by the 1944 Smith v. Allwright decision that eliminated the white primary, Medgar and his brother Charles first registered to vote near their home town in 1946. Threats of violence prevented the brothers from casting ballots in that year’s election, but Evers remained an active voting rights advocate for the rest of his life.²⁴

After using the GI Bill to graduate from Alcorn State in 1952, Evers was hired by a black physician named T. R. M. Howard to work for the Magnolia Mutual Insurance Company in Mound Bayou, Mississippi. In addition to running Magnolia Mutual, Dr. Howard was the most aggressive black voting rights advocate in the state. The year before hiring Evers, Howard founded a political organization, the Regional Council of Negro Leadership (RCNL), which held annual “Freedom Day” rallies where well-known Northern black political leaders stressed the importance of voter registration to crowds of up to ten thousand people. The organization also investigated incidents of racial violence, organized selective buying campaigns to protest racial discrimination, and worked closely with journalists from several national black media outlets to report race news from Mississippi. Among its members, the RCNL also served as a conduit into the NAACP. Evers first started working with a local NAACP branch within weeks of starting at Magnolia Mutual.²⁵

In 1954, Evers applied to law school at the University of Mississippi. His application was denied. After consulting with representatives from the national NAACP, the young insurance salesman decided against appealing the decision. But the national NAACP officials were so impressed by Evers that they decided to hire the charismatic young black professional as the organization’s first Mississippi field secretary. Medgar and his wife, Myrlie, who was hired as his secretary, opened their first office in Jackson on January 23, 1955.²⁶

The Evers’s duties included investigating incidents of racial violence and discrimination and expanding statewide NAACP membership, a particularly difficult task considering the anti-Brown backlash led by Mississippi’s Citizens’ Councils and the Sovereignty Commission. Between 1955 and 1958, Mississippi’s NAACP membership declined from 4,026 to 1,436. Such a decline was quite typical across the South. Between 1955 and 1958, the NAACP lost nearly fifty thousand members and 246 branches in the South. “It is not the lack of interest,” Medgar reported, “but fear.”²⁷

During these same years, Evers helped investigate and publicize virtually every major race story in Mississippi. In 1955, he played a major role in investigating the famous murder of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till, as well as the murders of black Mississippians George Lee, Clinton Melton, J. E. Evanston, and Timothy Hudson. Evers also produced hundreds of reports detailing financial harassment of NAACP members, voter registration denials, and miscellaneous examples of racial discrimination, including the case of Hattiesburg’s Clyde Kennard. Evers was devastated by the Kennard case. He attended the Kennard trials in Hattiesburg and was at one point cited for contempt of court for an outburst in response to Kennard’s 1960 conviction for stealing chicken feed. Years later, Myrlie Evers called the Clyde Kennard case “one of the long wracking pains of Medgar’s years as Mississippi field secretary.”²⁸

Medgar and Myrlie spent countless hours typing reports, compiling financial data, and dispatching memos to NAACP offices and various sympathizers across the country. During their first three years on the job, Medgar and Myrlie mailed more than seventy-five hundred reports, newsletters, and memos—an average of twenty-one pieces of mail per day over three consecutive years. Despite declining NAACP membership in Mississippi, the Evers’s work helped reinforce the resolve of a core of deeply committed members. As longtime Evers ally Aaron Henry of Clarksdale recalled, “The years from 1956 to 1961, although relatively calm, marked significant advancement for us.”²⁹

Medgar’s most vital activities occurred outside the office. He spent much of the late 1950s driving across Mississippi in his Oldsmobile, armed with a .38 Smith & Wesson Special in the glove compartment. His NAACP mileage reports read 13,372 in 1955, 12,775 in 1956, and 16,622 in 1957. These trips took Medgar to all corners of the state, where he met with small but deeply committed groups of men and women who retained their NAACP membership in spite of the repressive actions of the Citizens’ Councils and Sovereignty Commission.³⁰

Few details of these meetings were ever recorded. Most occurred in private homes, black-owned businesses, or churches. In Hattiesburg, these meetings were held in the back room of the Smith Drug Store. The Smith brothers also helped welcome Evers as a speaker at St. Paul Methodist Church. Evers was encouraged by the nucleus of local leaders who remained committed to the organization. “It is most heartening to see,” he reported to the national NAACP at the end of his first year, “in the face of tremendous difficulty, the increased interest Negroes have shown in our fight for freedom in a state where the word freedom is used mythically as it pertains to the Negro.”³¹

Voting rights comprised the core of that “fight for freedom.” Desegregation, especially in schools, was a highly visible national imperative that sent white Southern segregationists into a frenzy. But most black Mississippi NAACP members were actually far more concerned about gaining access to the ballot. As Hattiesburg police chief Bud Gray reported of a 1958 Hattiesburg NAACP meeting, “the negroes are staying away from the subject of Integration and are only talking about Voting.”³²

Evers wanted to connect local Mississippi leaders not only to the national organization but also to each other. Throughout his time as Mississippi’s NAACP field secretary, Evers helped develop a network of homegrown NAACP leaders across the state. This was essential. “Medgar knew the importance of their communicating with each other,” remembered his close friend and ally Ed King. To cultivate such a network, Evers held rotating regional meetings several times per year across Mississippi. Along with the annual statewide meeting in Jackson, these gatherings drew together courageous NAACP leaders from across the state. More specifically, these events helped develop strong alliances between local NAACP leaders such as Amzie Moore of Cleveland, Aaron Henry of Clarksdale, C. C. Bryant of McComb, and Vernon Dahmer of Hattiesburg. “Those were people,” remembered Ed King, “who sort of had said, ‘when the fullness of time comes I’ll be ready.’ ”³³

The fullness of time came in 1960. A twenty-five-year-old man named Bob Moses arrived that year at the home of Amzie Moore, a longtime Evers ally since their days working with the RCNL in the early 1950s. Bob Moses was not a native Southerner. He came from Harlem, inspired by the wave of sit-ins that originated in Greensboro, North Carolina, in February of 1960 and spread across the South that spring. In less than three months, an estimated fifty thousand black and white protestors had participated in sit-ins and other public demonstrations in direct defiance of racial segregation ordinances.³⁴

Moses was captivated by this massive wave of civil disobedience. “I could feel how they felt just by looking at those pictures,” he explained. A teacher, Moses left New York that summer to work with Martin Luther King Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and SNCC, the national student organization formed in the wake of the sit-in movement.³⁵

After a few slow weeks in Atlanta, Moses became dissatisfied with the tedious pace of office work. He wanted to become more directly involved with grassroots organizing, and he shared this ambition with his mentor Ella Baker, a longtime NAACP leader who played a central role in the formation of SNCC. Sympathetic, Baker and another SNCC activist, Jane Stembridge, suggested that Moses work to expand SNCC’s influence in Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi. With a list of NAACP contacts provided by Baker, the young activist traveled by bus to Deep South cities such as Talladega, Birmingham, New Orleans, Shreveport, Clarksdale, Gulfport, Biloxi, and Cleveland, Mississippi, where he met Amzie Moore. Moses stayed longer with Moore than with anyone else.³⁶

Like most members of Medgar Evers’s Mississippi NAACP network, Amzie Moore was focused on voting rights. He had been politically active since at least 1936, when he first joined the Republican Party. Moore recognized that the sit-ins of 1960 represented an unprecedented form of direct action and became interested in incorporating this momentum into the fight for black voting rights in Mississippi. According to Moses, Moore viewed his arrival as an “opportunity of capturing this sit-in energy.” According to Moore, Moses and the SNCC activists “had more courage than any group of people I’ve ever met.”³⁷

During the time that Moore hosted Moses, the NAACP veteran introduced the young activist to members of his church and a river of allies who passed through his home. Moses later described “a steady stream of people coming in and out of Amzie’s house.” Through these introductions, Moses came to realize that “Amzie was connected throughout the state.” Although Moses could not possibly have fully grasped the deep history and expanse of this Medgar Evers–led NAACP network, it was through these existing NAACP-based relationships that SNCC began to operate in Mississippi the following year.³⁸

Moses left the South to fulfill his teaching duties in New York but returned to Mississippi the following summer. Upon his return, Moore suggested that Moses travel south to work with NAACP leader C. C. Bryant of McComb. While working in McComb, Moses started recruiting local African Americans into SNCC. It was there that he met Hollis Watkins and Curtis Hayes, the most enthusiastic pair of recruits. As word of SNCC’s presence spread, other members of the state NAACP network expressed interest in hosting SNCC activists. Sometime in late 1961 or early 1962, Hattiesburg NAACP leader Vernon Dahmer contacted his NAACP allies in McComb to request that SNCC send workers to Hattiesburg. Watkins and Hayes arrived in Hattiesburg in March of 1962 with $50 to help fund a new voting rights project named the Forrest County Voters League.³⁹

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Watkins and Hayes did not arrive alone. In January of 1960, a pair of FBI agents appeared at the Forrest County courthouse to inquire about local voter registration procedures. By then, former Forrest County circuit clerk Luther Cox (the man known for asking how many bubbles are in a bar of soap) had been replaced by a new registrar, Theron Lynd. The thirty-nine-year-old son of an oil company distributor, Lynd was a graduate of Mississippi State College who had returned to Hattiesburg after graduation to work as an office manager for the same company that employed his father. He first tried to become circuit clerk by running against Cox in 1955, but lost badly. Shortly after Cox died in December of 1958, Lynd won a special election to become the new Forrest County circuit clerk.⁴⁰

Theron Lynd could be a very threatening man. He was enormous. Standing six-foot-three-inches tall and weighing more than 320 pounds, he towered over the desk where people applied to register to vote. Virtually everyone who encountered him mentioned his size. Even the Hattiesburg American in 1959 commented, “Forrest County now has perhaps the biggest circuit clerk in Mississippi” before listing his height and weight.⁴¹

Over subsequent years, Lynd’s physique and bold refusals to register black voters earned him national recognition as a caricature of backwards Southern racism. In 1962, CBS aired a nationally broadcast television special titled “Mississippi and the 15th Amendment” that showed clips of Lynd on the steps of the Forrest County Courthouse and dubbed him “one of the most powerful men in America.” But Lynd’s size was merely an extraneous physical characteristic. There was nothing particularly unique about his refusal to register black voters. Like his predecessor, Theron Lynd was merely one of several hundred Southern registrars who used the guise of literacy tests to disqualify black citizens from voting. Had Lynd not been the circuit clerk, another white person would have held the same office and used the same tactics to deny black voters. And although CBS emphasized his power, in reality, Lynd reported to the Hattiesburg Citizens’ Council and the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, both of which maintained a file on him. Both organizations seemed pleased with his activities. In 1960, the president of the Hattiesburg Citizens’ Council told a Sovereignty Commission investigator that they were “very proud of the way the Circuit Clerk is handling the voter registrations.” But Theron Lynd and his allies ultimately met a challenge they could not overcome.⁴²

The root of that challenge lay in the continuous attempts of black Hattiesburgers to register to vote. African Americans had been trying to register to vote in Hattiesburg for decades. Hammond Smith first tried in 1934. There are few records of other early attempts, but it is implausible that Hammond acted completely alone. Soon after World War II, he and several leading black professionals created an organization named the Committee of One Hundred “to promote Negro registration in Forrest County.” And in 1950, Hammond and his brother Charles were among fifteen local black plaintiffs who filed suit against the Forrest County registrar for voter discrimination in the case Peay et al. v. Cox. Because of the national attention garnered by the case, some local black leaders, including Hammond Smith and Nathaniel Burger, were allowed to register to vote to avoid accusations that all black people were prevented from voting. Most black applicants, however, continued to be denied. A 1955 study of voter registration in Mississippi found that only 16 of 7,406 age-eligible black Hattiesburgers (0.2 percent) were registered to vote.⁴³

But they kept trying. In 1956, Reverend W. D. Ridgeway of True Light Baptist Church attempted to register with seventeen others, all of whom were denied. In 1957, local funeral-home director Rush Lloyd attempted to register, but was denied. That same year, Clyde Kennard was told “no reason” when he asked why he was not allowed to register. The next year, grocer Benjamin Bourn, a plaintiff in Peay et al. v. Cox, was turned away. Reverend John Barnes of the St. Paul Methodist Church estimated that between 1952 and 1959, he tried “to register about four times each year.” In 1959, Barnes was part of a group that recruited a very light-skinned black woman to register as a “test case.” After the light-skinned woman successfully registered to vote, Barnes and thirteen other African American applicants were turned away on the very same day. Reported a Sovereignty Commission investigator in 1960, “Reverend Barnes on East Fifth Street in Hattiesburg has been trying to register pretty regular and Lynd has been trying to keep him from it.”⁴⁴

The courage of these black voter applicants cannot be overstated. Few could have fully imagined the extensive inner workings of Hattiesburg Citizens’ Council and the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, but they all certainly understood the severe consequences that confronted black activists. Black voting rights advocates in other parts of the state had been killed. And the persecution of local figures such as the white newspaper man P. D. East and Clyde Kennard offered concrete examples of the dangers facing black activists. Nevertheless, they persisted with no definitive guarantee of victory or even survival.

The profiles of Hattiesburg’s black voting rights leaders in the 1950s resemble those of earlier generations of community leaders—clergy, business people, and teachers. These leaders did not act alone; their activism was bolstered by all members of the community. No one was ever completely immune to violent or economic reprisals, but business leaders and clergy did enjoy a modicum of financial independence that was made possible by the black women and men who shopped in their stores and populated their congregations. Not everyone was directly supportive, of course. But there were hundreds of unnamed people who helped make their activism possible.⁴⁵

The importance of failed voter registration attempts lay in the ensuing processes of documentation. Every denial of a black voter applicant could be used as evidence to build a case detailing the long, systematic history of discrimination against black voters. In the years after Peay et al. v. Cox in 1950, dozens of rejected black applicants described their inability to register in notarized affidavits and sworn testimonies. This body of evidence continued to expand when Medgar Evers became the Mississippi NAACP field secretary. Whenever black Hattiesburgers were denied the right to vote, Evers arranged for them to complete affidavits that were notarized by local businessman Paul Weston, a longtime community leader who was former president of the Union Choir Service, editor of the 1930s-era black newspaper The Union Messenger, and president of the Negro Civic Welfare Association. Weston is not remembered today as a leader in the struggle for voting rights in Hattiesburg, but as the local black notary, he helped ensure that witnesses could complete authenticated legal testimonies.⁴⁶

In 1957, Evers helped arrange for Reverend W. D. Ridgeway of True Light Baptist to testify in front of a Senate subcommittee on constitutional rights. Two years later, Reverend John Barnes also traveled to Washington, DC, to testify in front of a House judiciary subcommittee on constitutional rights. “Some continue to make attempts to register and will continue to do so,” Barnes insisted, “but we need the Federal Government on this matter.”⁴⁷

Ridgeway and Barnes testified during hearings that led to the passage of the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960, the first two major pieces of federal civil rights legislation passed since Reconstruction. Others who spoke at these hearings included hundreds of advocates and opponents of federal civil rights legislation, including a full range of black and white citizens: Republicans and Democrats, Northerners and Southerners, and lawyers, registrars, and politicians.⁴⁸

The primary issue at play during these hearings was a question over the validity of claims of voter discrimination. Although the Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, ratified in 1870, prohibited racially based voter discrimination and thereby rendered Jim Crow–era voter suppression tactics unconstitutional, the onus to prove such discrimination always fell upon the disfranchised. Despite abnormally low percentages of registered black voters across the South (0.2 percent in Forrest County in 1955), white Southern congressmen relentlessly questioned the legitimacy of African American witnesses to voter discrimination, even among activists who had been attacked—in one case, shot with shotgun pellets—as retribution for voting rights activism. Throughout these proceedings, black Southerners bore the burden of proving what should have been obvious violations to their constitutional rights—which, of course, made them even more vulnerable to violence and harassment at home.⁴⁹

Throughout the legislative process, white Southern politicians successfully limited the scope and effectiveness of the 1957 and 1960 Civil Rights Acts. Contemporaneous commentators and modern historians alike have criticized these acts for failing to include enforcement mechanisms to oversee school desegregation and end voter discrimination. Senate majority leader Lyndon B. Johnson, who was largely responsible for both bills’ compromises and passages, likened the 1957 Civil Rights Act to “half a loaf” of bread and acknowledged the bill was “just a beginning.” NAACP leader Roy Wilkins labeled the act “a small crumb from Congress.” The Chicago Defender called the 1957 Act “crippled,” lamenting that “this legislation proves to be much weaker than we had previously expected.” The Civil Rights Act of 1960 is even less acclaimed. It is not even mentioned in some histories of the civil rights movement and has been characterized by one historian as “at best, the smallest of steps forward—and it may have even have been a step back.” Despite such critiques, however, both acts significantly affected the future of black voting rights in the South.⁵⁰

Because the Civil Rights Act of 1957 was stripped of any ability to enforce school desegregation, the bill focused almost exclusively on voting. The legislation created a Commission on Civil Rights to “investigate allegations in writing under oath or affirmation that certain citizens of the United States are being deprived of their right to vote and have that vote counted by reason of their color, race, religion, or national origin.” It also created a new Civil Rights Division in the United States Department of Justice to be led by a new assistant attorney general for civil rights.⁵¹

The symbolism of the 1957 Civil Rights Act, which was named “Best Achievement of 1957” by the NAACP, was also important. Southern voting rights activists interpreted the measure as a sign that the federal government might actually help enforce the Fifteenth Amendment. As Medgar Evers observed less than a month after its passage, “Denial of the right to register, not the right to vote, could be the first occasion for our calling upon the civil rights commission for aid.” The commission’s actual accomplishments over the ensuing years are debatable, but if nothing else, the law offered some promise of federal intervention for voting rights activists.⁵²

White Southern politicians also limited the effectiveness of the 1960 Civil Rights Act, resulting in a jumbled piece of legislation that included obscure provisions, ranging from court procedures to the education of children of servicemen, that did not remedy the obvious limitations of the 1957 act. But there was one key component of the 1960 act that has been consistently underappreciated by historians. Title III required all election officials to retain copies of any voting-related records for twenty-two months and deliver copies of these documents to the attorney general of the United States upon request. This clause gave the Department of Justice direct access to the voter registration procedures of white Southern registrars, creating an unprecedented ability to investigate local voting procedures. President Eisenhower signed the Civil Rights Act of 1960 into law on May 6. On August 11, the United States attorney general requested permission to examine voting records in Forrest County, Mississippi.⁵³

Advised by local white attorneys, Theron Lynd requested and was granted an extension to produce voter registration records. When he then refused to turn over records early the next year, the Department of Justice filed suit. Lynd managed to further delay federal access to his voting records with the help of a segregationist district court judge named William Harold Cox, who failed to issue a court order requiring that Lynd share the records. The Department of Justice then appealed this inaction to the United States Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. Based on the strength of the testimonies offered by sixteen local black witnesses, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed Judge Cox’s inaction, ordering Lynd to open his records for inspection and citing him for criminal and civil contempt.⁵⁴

Forrest County was one of nineteen counties in Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Mississippi where the federal government pursued voter discrimination cases between the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1960 and the end of 1962. This was a political fight, but not necessarily a partisan one. When Democratic president John F. Kennedy assumed office in January of 1961, his attorney general, Robert Kennedy, essentially followed the same course of action as Republican president Dwight Eisenhower’s attorney general William P. Rogers. Neither administration was particularly impressive in their support of black civil rights, but each was for various reasons concerned about the inability of black people to vote. In the end, the greatest effect of the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960 was to provide new tools to investigate suspected violations of the Fifteenth Amendment. White Southerners responded with commentaries about states’ rights and defending their way of life, but these blustery political dogmas were merely rhetorical cover for their means of maintaining white supremacy by violating the constitutional rights of African Americans.⁵⁵

Between 1961 and 1965, Lynd’s case followed a long and winding path through the federal court system. Although this lengthy timeline allowed Lynd to deny hundreds more black voters, it also enabled the Department of Justice to continue compiling evidence, especially after gaining access to Forrest County voter registration records that revealed clear patterns of racial discrimination.

Ultimately, the most damning proof of Lynd’s voter discrimination was not the continual denial of black voter applicants but rather the registration of comparably unqualified white voters. Personal interviews and examinations of voter registration records revealed that both Lynd and his predecessor, Luther Cox, had not rejected a single white voter applicant before 1960. In fact, white applicants were registered through an almost entirely different procedure. They were asked to interpret different sections of the state Constitution than African Americans, and they were offered assistance when they struggled. White people could also register with one of Lynd’s staff members, whereas black applicants could only apply through Lynd himself. Some white citizens registered to vote without having to complete any application or literacy test at all. Others passed the literacy test despite the fact that they were completely illiterate. This was discovered through interviews with registered white voters and in registration records where white voters had signed their application by leaving the mark “X.”⁵⁶

Despite the lawsuit, Lynd continued to discriminate. Between February of 1959 and March of 1962, he did not allow a single African American to register to vote. But every denial provided further evidence of voter discrimination. As white Southern registrars like Theron Lynd continued to perform their duty of denying black voters, they also contributed to mounting evidence that Southern counties were violating the Fifteenth Amendment. And therein lay the problem for Theron Lynd.⁵⁷

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Hollis Watkins and Curtis Hayes arrived in Hattiesburg in March of 1962, just days before the Department of Justice filed its appeal in the case of Theron Lynd. Hattiesburg was particularly appealing to SNCC because of the Lynd case, which itself was a consequence of preexisting local black activism and federal inquiries. Years later, when Hattiesburg native and legendary civil rights activist Joyce Ladner was asked, “How does the movement get into Hattiesburg?” she responded, “Mr. Dahmer invited Curtis Hayes and Hollis Watkins to Hattiesburg.”⁵⁸

Watkins and Hayes operated in Hattiesburg between March and September of 1962. In the evenings, they performed chores and slept at Vernon Dahmer’s farm. During the days, they moved through Hattiesburg speaking with members of the black community. Their primary objective was to convince local African Americans to attempt to register to vote. Every effort to register, even if unsuccessful, promised to provide further evidence of the need for federal intervention to protect black voting rights in Forrest County.⁵⁹

To mobilize potential black voters, Watkins and Hayes needed the help of black community leaders. Reports of their initial reception vary widely, but some members of the black community were quite receptive to the pair. Watkins later remembered that Vernon Dahmer provided the names of local NAACP members who might serve as allies. Watkins cited the grocer Benjamin Bourn, an NAACP member and plaintiff in Peay et al. v. Cox, as particularly helpful. Because of these contacts, Watkins remembered, “it was not hard, for example, to get a church to have a voter registration meeting.” The initial meetings were not large. The first attracted only “somewhere between eight and ten people,” Watkins recalled. At these meetings, Watkins and Hayes led “freedom songs,” described the goals of their movement, and trained people how to complete voter registration forms.⁶⁰

All told, between April 18 and August 10, 1962, 103 local African Americans attempted to register to vote. Not all of these attempts should be credited solely to Watkins and Hayes or SNCC, but the young men were certainly instrumental in expanding the number of black Hattiesburgers who tried to register. One unique aspect of their approach was the inclusion of larger numbers of working-class people in addition to traditional black community leaders. Watkins and Hayes wanted to convince any and all African Americans—regardless of their employment, personal history, or social standing—to attempt to register to vote.⁶¹

Of the 103 who attempted, only nine were allowed to register. But every attempt mattered. Each added to the total. Some of the people who were denied later testified against Theron Lynd on behalf of the Department of Justice. And two years later, examples of voter discrimination from Hattiesburg in the spring of 1962 were cited during congressional debates that eventually led to the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. But for black Hattiesburgers, there was also something larger at play.⁶²

During that spring, Watkins and Hayes met a thirty-five-year-old black woman named Victoria Jackson Gray. The granddaughter of a black lumberman who came to Hattiesburg decades earlier, Gray grew up during the 1920s and 1930s in Palmer’s Crossing, the predominantly black community located just outside of town. Among Gray’s strongest memories of those formative years was living in a deeply religious community guided by black business owners who, she recalled, “were committed to education.” She was particularly influenced by her grandfather, who always stressed financial independence and forbade his children from working for white people. Gray left Hattiesburg several times throughout her early life, but she always returned. She spent part of her childhood in Detroit before returning to Hattiesburg, where she attended high school and worked at the laundry in Camp Shelby during World War II. After graduation, Gray briefly attended Wilberforce University in Ohio and then traveled extensively with her military husband. But when the marriage ended in the late 1950s, she again returned to Hattiesburg, where she sold Beauty Queen cosmetic products. “By the time the Movement came along,” Gray said, remembering her meeting of Watkins and Hayes in 1962, she had become “an independent businesswoman.”⁶³

Victoria Gray initially joined the movement in a “supportive role,” according to her, but she quickly became Watkins and Hayes’s most effective local ally. She was a woman who “didn’t intend to be left on the sideline,” Watkins remembered. “She was one of them that [said], ‘hey look, this is where I am, this is what I think, this is what I feel, I am willing to do this.’ ” “If it need to be done,” he explained of her attitude, “I’m going to do it.”⁶⁴

Gray helped lead efforts to aid the young voter registration workers. She helped convince her brother to provide an office space in his radio shop on Mobile Street, and she organized what she labeled “a telephone tree” to ensure that at least one person per day prepared a meal for Watkins and Hayes. She also arranged for Watkins and Hayes to speak and hold meetings at her church, and she used her job as a door-to-door saleswoman to recruit additional participants. “As I went from place to place for my business,” she remembered, “I talked about those young people and why it was important for us to support them.”⁶⁵

In 1962, Victoria Gray tried to register to vote on three separate occasions—April 23, June 15, and July 30. She was rebuffed each time by Theron Lynd, but the records and experiences of those failed attempts proved useful the following September when she testified against Lynd as a witness for the United States Department of Justice in the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.⁶⁶

When Watkins and Hayes left Hattiesburg that September, Victoria Gray assumed much of the leadership of the local movement. By that time, Gray had worked extensively with a number of civil rights organizations, including SNCC, the NAACP, and Martin Luther King Jr.’s SCLC. In fact, soon after meeting Watkins and Hayes, Gray traveled to Dorchester, Georgia, to attend an SCLC “Citizenship School,” where she was trained to run civics-based adult education programs. Much has been made of organizational rivalries in the civil rights movement, but these mattered little to people like Victoria Gray. “I didn’t have an organizational affiliation,” she explained. “I just worked with whoever was working.”⁶⁷

Throughout late 1962 and into 1963, a movement escalated in Hattiesburg. The old black churches were central. “Everything came through the churches,” Victoria Gray said. Not all pastors or deacons were interested in civil rights activities; everyone had their reasons. But local movement people pushed many clergy into activism. Whenever a pastor was hesitant, Gray recalled, “the congregation would push the minister” until he let local activists make announcements about civil rights activities. Most who heard the announcements did not heed the call. But slowly over the months, a growing number of people began trickling into the “Freedom House” on Mobile Street to ask about learning how to become a registered voter.⁶⁸

Several factors drew people into the movement. The radical rhetoric and potential for broad societal change inspired many. “When SNCC people came to Hattiesburg, Mississippi,” Victoria Gray remembered, “they represented just one more kind of movement, a way for folks to get a better life.” Voting rights might have provided the spark of the expansion of the local movement, but many who joined this movement began to expand their goals beyond the right to vote. Some even had the audacity to imagine a world without Jim Crow. For them, this was a revolution, an opportunity to escape the system of racial apartheid that had framed their entire lives. For the true believers, this opportunity to pursue freedom was life altering. Victoria Gray used to make a distinction between “people [who] were in the Movement” and “people, who the Movement was in them.” “Once it gets in you,” she explained of joining the movement, “it’s in there forever.”⁶⁹

Others who joined the local movement were inspired by the broader national context of the Southern civil rights movement. “The Race Beat,” as many journalists labeled the media phenomenon of Southern black protest in the 1950s and 1960s, flooded American public life. Major events across the region—the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the desegregation of Little Rock Central High School, the Sit-In Movement of 1960, the Freedom Rides of 1961 and 1962, the desegregation of the University of Mississippi in 1962, and scores of other highly visible events—signified increasing domestic and international support for the civil rights of African Americans. The Mississippi press often overlooked or omitted major stories, but news of civil rights filtered into the consciousness of African Americans in virtually every corner of the South.⁷⁰

Black Hattiesburgers were also inspired by several uniquely local factors. Victoria Gray and Vernon Dahmer were inspirational leaders with strong personalities who helped draw people into the movement. Locals were also aware of the Theron Lynd case, which for years drew front-page coverage in the Hattiesburg American and regular attention in national newspapers such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, and the Chicago Defender. Hattiesburg had never seen such widespread national attention. Of course, local African Americans did not consume all the coverage, but they saw members of the media flooding their town. Reporters were all over the city; CBS filmed the nationally syndicated television special about black voting rights in Hattiesburg. And the Department of Justice sent teams of attorneys into town to interview witnesses. Most importantly, everyday African Americans began to see real results. In 1962, Theron Lynd, facing a court order, actually began allowing some black people to register to vote. Most were still denied, but after decades of disfranchisement by local officials, access to the American democracy had never seemed more within reach.⁷¹

Some activists were drawn into the movement by tragedy. Younger activists such as Joyce Ladner of Palmer’s Crossing cited the famous murder of Emmett Till as a major source of inspiration. Born in the early 1940s, she and her sister Dorie were among what she labeled “the Emmett Till generation,” an entire cohort of young black Southerners who grew up with the image of Till’s lifeless body “etched in my generation’s consciousness,” Ladner explained. Other locals were spurred into action by a number of other injustices, including the plight of their own community member Clyde Kennard. On January 28, 1962, locals gathered at the St. Paul Methodist Church for an NAACP-sponsored Clyde Kennard Day rally. The following year, his tragic death broke the hearts of black people across the United States, especially those in his hometown.⁷²

The most stunning tragedy of all occurred on the night of June 11, 1963, when Medgar Evers was shot and killed in his driveway just hours after President John F. Kennedy called for the legislation that would become the Civil Rights Act of 1964. “When Medgar Evers was killed,” remembered local beautician Peggy Jean Connor, “I was determined to get deeper involved in the struggle.”⁷³

Soon thereafter, Connor walked across the street from her beauty shop on Mobile Street to the movement headquarters in Lenon Woods’s guesthouse. She began attending mass meetings and was soon convinced by Victoria Gray to attend a training in Dorchester, Georgia, where she spent a week learning how to teach citizenship classes. When Connor returned, she began holding citizenship classes at her home church, True Light Baptist.⁷⁴

In July of 1963, Theron Lynd was found guilty of civil contempt and served with an injunction to register forty-three African Americans. Even so, he continued denying most black applicants. Local white supremacists bolstered his brazen refusals with efforts to further suppress the black vote. Anyone who attempted to register to vote faced violent or economic reprisals, especially in the wake of a 1962 state law requiring newspapers to print names of voter registration applicants. But the people in the movement did not stop. Between July and September of 1963, an additional 125 African Americans tried to register to vote. Slowly but inexorably, the movement expanded. By the end of 1963, Connor remembered “having mass meetings every night.”⁷⁵

As the local movement spread and federal pressure on Lynd intensified, SNCC sent additional staff members to Hattiesburg. By the end of 1963, Hattiesburg had become the site of SNCC’s most active project in Mississippi. Black Hattiesburgers and SNCC activists started a movement newspaper named Voice of the Movement that was distributed at local churches and businesses, announcing movement activities and encouraging people to attend. The Hattiesburg movement had for years been smoldering. That January, it exploded.⁷⁶

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On the night of January 21, 1964, hundreds of people gathered at St. Paul Methodist Church. No official attendance records are available, but one attendee described the scene as having “every seat filled, every aisle packed, the doorways jammed.” That night, the audience heard a remarkable lineup of speakers—Ella Baker, John Lewis, Mississippi NAACP president Aaron Henry, and Charles Evers, the older brother of Medgar Evers and his successor as the NAACP’s Mississippi field secretary. Other activists in attendance included Bob Moses, Fannie Lou Hamer, Howard Zinn, James Forman, Amzie Moore, Hollis Watkins, and dozens of lesser known Mississippi activists. Several dozen white ministers from across the United States also sat in the crowd. Most attendees were local black people in the Hattiesburg movement.⁷⁷

The night was electrifying. In “a singing, foot-stomping session,” the lively audience sat together in a sanctuary of hope, chanting, singing, and listening as speaker after speaker reaffirmed the righteousness of their movement. “This is a fire that water won’t put out,” Charles Evers told the crowd. Ella Baker insisted, “We are not fighting for the freedom of the Negro alone but for the freedom of the human spirit.” The meeting lasted well past midnight. Toward the end, locals led calls of “Freedom” echoed by responses of “Now” before the crowd joined together in an affirmational rendition of “We Shall Overcome.” On that January night in 1964, Hattiesburg’s St. Paul Methodist Church was the epicenter of America’s civil rights movement.⁷⁸

Mass meeting at St. Paul Methodist Church, 1964. (McCain Library and Archives, University of Southern Mississippi)

Years later, Hammond Smith spoke briefly about attending civil rights meetings at his home church, but offered few details. Imagine that night from his perspective. Hammond’s family had belonged to St. Paul Methodist since arriving in Hattiesburg over sixty years before, when he was just five years old. He had spent countless hours in that church—he had grown up there—but he had never before seen a night like that.

Hammond was not among those asked to speak on that evening. He was a longtime leader of that church but not of this new movement; most of the famous younger activists probably had no idea who he was. To the visitors, he was just another old man in the crowd. But SNCC’s voting goals, however revolutionary they may have seemed in the 1960s, were not new to Hammond. He had been fighting for the right to vote for nearly thirty years, asking for a registration form every year when he paid his taxes and in 1950 joining the lawsuit Peay et al. v. Cox to challenge black disfranchisement in Hattiesburg. Hammond Smith is not typically recognized as one of the leaders of Hattiesburg’s dynamic civil rights movement. But Hammond and his family quite literally helped build that church in which memory and promise now so potently coalesced. Anyone who attended that powerful meeting on the night of January 21, 1964, had only to examine the church cornerstone to see the record of an older generation of community leaders who built the spaces that housed this burgeoning movement that would ultimately help set black people free.79

The next morning, approximately one hundred people arrived at the Forrest County Courthouse for a demonstration they called Freedom Day. Under a steady morning rain, protestors paraded around the courthouse, “singing, clapping and stomping,” read a local report, and carrying signs with messages about voting and freedom. “We are trying to get more people registered to vote,” explained SNCC representative Lawrence Guyot. “The only way this can be done is with federal intervention.”⁸⁰

Theron Lynd sat inside waiting, as small groups of local African Americans entered his office to attempt to register to vote. He resisted, limiting the number of black applicants to four at a time and closing the office for lunch. The protestors took a short break during Lynd’s lunch but returned in the afternoon. Despite Lynd’s delays, thirty-six African Americans applied to vote on that day, the largest number of black voter applicants of any single day to that point in Hattiesburg history.⁸¹

The Hattiesburg American published an editorial titled “Ignore Agitators,” accusing “outsiders” of trying to “provoke city policemen into arresting them, thus obtaining publicity for themselves” and “seeking to steam things up with a demonstration against wrongs that don’t exist.” The local newspaper was particularly bothered by the presence of white ministers who came to Hattiesburg from across the nation, claiming that these clergy seemed “more interested in fighting social and political wrongs, real or imagined, than in preaching the Gospel.” Of course, this was a lie. The violations to black voting rights were both real and obvious.⁸²

The white clergy who participated in the Hattiesburg Freedom Day arrived from cities across the country: New York City; Chicago; Washington, DC; Kansas City; Berkeley, California; Lincoln, Nebraska; Cleveland, Ohio; Boulder, Colorado; Beloit, Wisconsin. Nearly all were Presbyterian, Episcopal, or Jewish. They represented just a small segment of thousands of white American religious leaders drawn into the civil rights movement by the events of 1963, especially the violent protests in Birmingham, Alabama, and the murder of Medgar Evers in Jackson, Mississippi. That June, the National Council of Churches established a Commission on Religion and Race to help facilitate activism among clergy interested in aiding the Southern black freedom struggle. To the chagrin of white Hattiesburg leaders, white clergy from all corners of America remained in town through the end of 1966.⁸³

As Freedom Day demonstrators marched around the courthouse, local police stared on, unsure of how to react. They formed a barrier around the courthouse and ordered marchers to disperse but were essentially powerless to do much else about the demonstration. Journalists and cameras were everywhere. “The front porch and steps of the courthouse bristled with television cameras,” reported the Hattiesburg American. ABC and NBC sent television crews to capture any violent disturbance like those that had occurred in other Southern cities. For a city deeply worried about its image because of a constant pursuit of new employers, violence would have been a tremendous embarrassment. And so the police acted mostly with restraint.⁸⁴

A handful of people were arrested, and one man was beaten in a jail cell, but the day was otherwise free of mass arrests and violence. During the largest public civil rights demonstration to that point in the city’s history, local police stood by in relative passivity. Ironically, in their quest to maintain peace, they inadvertently helped create what one historian has insightfully labeled “the first state-protected civil rights demonstration in the history of Mississippi.” The lack of arrests and violence should not be considered as part of a moderate approach, but rather the response of an otherwise oppressive society forced to abandon traditionally violent tactics by the courage of the oppressed and the gaze of the media.⁸⁵

Pickets around the courthouse lasted through April. Local officials did eventually seek to quell the protests through an injunction and arrests. By April 14, sixty-seven people, including local activists, white ministers, and SNCC workers, were incarcerated. But new activists arrived to take their place. Insiders and outsiders flocked to the Hattiesburg movement. By May, over two hundred white clergy from outside Hattiesburg had participated in the demonstrations. Between January and April, black Hattiesburgers made over five hundred attempts to register to vote.⁸⁶

The black institutions of the Mobile Street District provided infrastructure for the movement. As local activist Raylawni Branch recalled, “During the civil rights time, if it had not been for Mobile Street, there wouldn’t have been a base.” Lenon Woods’s guesthouse served as the headquarters for both SNCC and the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO), an umbrella organization of several Mississippi civil rights groups. The Hattiesburg NAACP operated out of a television repair shop co-owned by J. C. Fairley, president of the Hattiesburg NAACP during the early 1960s, and Glodies Jackson, the brother of Victoria Gray. The Hattiesburg Ministers Project, a subgroup of the National Council of Churches, operated out of an old black grocery store on Mobile Street. Mass meetings took place in local black churches. Planning sessions occurred virtually everywhere—street corners, cafes, beauty shops, and front porches. Visiting activists ate meals and bought newspapers on Mobile Street. They cashed checks and purchased sodas at the Smith Drug Store. “It was all there on Mobile Street,” Branch recalled.⁸⁷

The black school system was the one local black institution that was less involved with movement activities than in earlier community-organizing initiatives. During previous years, virtually all major community organizing involved black educators and local schools. Hundreds of local black students joined the movement, but because of concerns over relationships with the white-controlled school board, the school facilities themselves were largely unavailable for civil rights activities. “I helped when I could under the circumstances,” Principal Burger later offered. Despite this reluctance, few locals were heavily critical of Burger, probably because they sympathized with his difficult position running a public institution or felt that he had contributed to local black life in so many other ways that he deserved some level of immunity.⁸⁸

In July of 1964, the Hattiesburg Freedom Summer opened with an Independence Day picnic at Vernon Dahmer’s farm. The Mississippi Freedom Summer, appropriately dubbed by one historian as “easily the most spectacular and sustained single event in recent civil rights history,” was a statewide protest involving over a thousand mostly white activists from across the United States who arrived in the Magnolia State to join the black freedom struggle. In addition to drawing a great deal of media coverage with their presence, they spent their days in Mississippi canvassing potential black voters and teaching alternative educational institutions known as Freedom Schools. During that summer, Hattiesburg hosted over eighty volunteers, who lived among members of the black community.⁸⁹

The local movement had been escalating for years, but the protests that rocked Hattiesburg in the summer of 1964 challenged Jim Crow in unprecedented fashion. That summer, an estimated three thousand local black citizens—roughly one-third of the city’s black population—participated in the movement. All summer long, black Hattiesburgers congregated with white volunteers on dusty street corners, wooden porches, and cracked sidewalks, talking politics and holding impromptu planning sessions. The activists worked every day, organizing protests and meetings, canvassing potential voters, drafting memos, and teaching Freedom Schools. It was a transformative experience for all. Neither the white volunteers nor their black hosts had ever lived in such interracial conditions. In some cases, a summer volunteer was the first white person to ever set foot in a black host’s home. In the evenings, they ate supper together and shared stories from their hometowns. On hot weekend nights, they crammed into the small homes and smoky rock-and-roll clubs of the black community to play cards, listen to music, and dance, taking brief respites from the otherwise pensive and dangerous moments that filled their summer. The activists were threatened regularly by indignant local white residents. Some were attacked; several had their cars shot at.⁹⁰

Freedom Schools were perhaps the most inspirational feature of Hattiesburg’s Freedom Summer. Before classes even started, 575 students preregistered to attend one of the six Freedom Schools held in local black churches. Most who attended the Freedom Schools were black youths between the ages of five and eighteen, but a few older folks also came. On opening day, one of the first arrivals was an eighty-two-year-old black man. When someone asked him why he was there, he explained that he wanted to “learn more in order to register to vote.”⁹¹

Freedom Schools were profoundly liberating for black youths who had grown up in Jim Crow. In Freedom School, young black students studied African American history, read black magazines such as Ebony and Jet, and learned about the civil rights movement. Those lessons helped the students connect their own struggles to a rich tradition of African American resistance and to black heroes of the past. Ninth-grader John Wesley compared his evolving vision of freedom to the life of Frederick Douglass. “Freedom is more than a big bunch of words,” he wrote. “Freedom meant so much to Frederick Douglass that he was beaten for it. He believed that every Negro should be free.” For many students, attending Freedom School was a transformative experience that altered their expectations for the future. As fifteen-year-old Albert Evans asserted, “Today I am the world’s footstool but tomorrow I hope to be one of its leaders. By attending freedom school this summer I am preparing for that tomorrow.”⁹²

Many of the black youths who arrived for Freedom School could not wait to share their voices. Almost immediately, they organized student newspapers and filled them with essays, poems, and stories that offered scathing testimonies of life in Jim Crow Mississippi. A thirteen-year-old boy named Larry wrote about the frustration of not being able to sit in downtown restaurants. Ten-year-old Mattie Jean Wilson told a story about her brother’s fight with a bus driver over sitting in the back of the bus. Another young girl wrote a fictional story about a ten-year-old black boy who was pulled from his house and lynched for staring too long at a white girl. An eleven-year-old student named Lynette York wrote a letter to Mississippi governor Paul B. Johnson Jr. explaining that she was going to Freedom School because she wanted “to be a first-class citizen.” Lynette just wanted a fair opportunity in life, the chance, as she put it, to one day “be a part of history.”⁹³

Over the ensuing six weeks, an estimated one thousand black students attended the Hattiesburg Freedom Schools, dwarfing all attendance expectations. The students came to the churches in droves, filling those hallowed spaces to the rafters with an unbridled sense of hope. So many students came that the schools ran out of space, forcing administrators to cut off registration. But the black youths of Hattiesburg would not hear of it. They went back to their neighborhoods and told their friends about Freedom School, promising to unlock side doors and open basement windows to allow more pupils to sneak in.⁹⁴

Across Hattiesburg, hundreds of black youths spent much of their summers in those classrooms, singing, growing, and dreaming. In Freedom School, the cruel lessons of Jim Crow were replaced with remarkable possibilities for the future. They translated lessons into social activism, conducting their own sit-ins, producing movement newspapers, attending mass meetings, and encouraging their elders to attempt to register to vote. Nine-year-old Glenda Funchess, now a local civil rights attorney, remembers Freedom School as “training for us to go to the next level, whether it was integrating the public library, integrating the zoo, integrating the public schools.”⁹⁵

About a week after the Freedom Schools opened, a group of five civil rights activists—two black women and three white men—were walking through one of Hattiesburg’s black neighborhoods when an ivory-colored pickup truck with no license plates began to follow them. The women lived in town, but none of the white men had been in Hattiesburg long. Two of the white men were college students from Oberlin College and Stanford University who were in town just for the summer. The third white man was Arthur Lelyveld, a fifty-one-year-old rabbi from Cleveland, Ohio, who had been in Hattiesburg for only three days. At approximately 11:30 in the morning, the group was taking a break from canvassing voters when the pickup truck started creeping behind.⁹⁶

After trailing the activists for about two blocks, the truck slowed to a stop. Two white men jumped from the truck’s cabin and charged toward the activists. An older man brandishing a tire iron reached Lelyveld first. The older man raised the metal rod into the air and crashed it onto the upper right side of Lelyveld’s face, opening a large gash just above the rabbi’s eye. Blood spurted from the wound, splattering over Lelyveld’s face and shirt. A younger man from the truck arrived an instant later and struck the Oberlin student over the back of the head with a thin piece of steel, opening a nasty wound on the activist’s skull. The attacker then turned to the Stanford student, knocking him to the ground and punching and kicking him. When a notepad fell from the volunteer’s pocket, the attacker ripped out a sheet of paper, crumbled it into a tight ball, and tried to shove the wad of paper into the young man’s mouth, all the while screaming, “Eat this … you nigger lover!”⁹⁷

After the attackers sped off, the victims collected themselves and began hobbling toward the nearby Morning Star Baptist Church, a hub for movement people. Someone covered the gash over Lelyveld’s eye with a cotton gauze pad, and the Cleveland rabbi took a seat on a metal-lattice bench. Bloody and stunned, he sat still, looking off into the distance and trying to explain what happened while friends helped clean the other men’s wounds and debated what to do next.⁹⁸

A photographer from New York City named Herbert Randall was walking nearby. Just the day before, Randall had been joking with Rabbi Lelyveld. Explaining his mission for that summer, the photographer playfully told the rabbi, “If you go out and you get your butt beat, I will come down there and photograph you and … that’s really good publicity. This will go all over the world and that will help.” The pair was supposed to go out together the following morning, but the rabbi had left early. When Randall heard the commotion at Morning Star, he rushed over to find Rabbi Lelyveld sitting with his arms draped over the back of the bench and “bleeding profusely.” Dazed and soaked in blood, the rabbi looked up at Randall and said softly, “Go ahead, photographer. Take the picture.”⁹⁹

Herbert Randall’s photograph of the bleeding Rabbi Arthur Lelyveld was sold to United Press International and reprinted in newspapers across the country. Accounts of the attack appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, and dozens of smaller newspapers across the nation. The attention helped pressure local officials into working with the FBI to investigate the attack. Eventually, the white assailants from the ivory-colored truck were identified and arrested. Those men probably had no idea that their attack would generate such widespread publicity in a world that existed outside their own. Nor did they know that Rabbi Lelyveld’s son Joseph was a reporter for the New York Times who would write follow-up stories for days. Those attackers were acting in accordance with a long tradition of violence in southern Mississippi. Racially related violence was as old as Hattiesburg itself. But by the summer of 1964, the old tactics were losing their edge. Even the most brutal methods of racial control had the potential to actually strengthen the resolve and effectiveness of people in the movement. Like many locals, the attackers were probably stunned when they were each convicted of assault and fined $500 and received ninety-day suspended jail sentences. The end of Jim Crow was washing over them like a tidal wave. And there was simply nothing they could do.¹⁰⁰