"If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come - the readiness is all. Since no man of aught he leaves knows, what is't to leave betimes?"
The summer of 1964 began for me on Broadway, at a production of Hamlet directed by John Gielgud and starring Richard Burton. That same night, I boarded a Greyhound bus for Columbus, Ohio. Why do I punctuate that summer like a Spanish sentence, with an exclamation point at the beginning? Because it represents the world I left when I entered the world of Mississippi, the sophisticated, literate New York I knew by heart, and which I would return to, but never quite the same.
I hadn't planned on going to Mississippi that summer. My original plans were to take the most junior part in a repertory company planning summer theatre on Nantucket. But those plans fell apart at the end of winter, just when the idea of joining the summer project became interesting.
The civil rights movement in Mississippi had first been brought home to me a year earlier, when I was a senior in high school. In March 1963, a former high-school schoolmate — Dave Gelfand, a freshman at Brandeis — got in touch with a friend of mine, Peter Sandman, saying he was going to drive to Greenwood in a station wagon in a week and a half, and could we please assemble some food and clothing for him to take with him. He sent us some information, including copies of The Student Voice, telling the story of sharecroppers expelled from their plantations for trying to register to vote, and of a SNCC field secretary who had been shot by night-riders. It was all reasonably new to me. Peter and I didn't think we could do much — we had a busy week ahead, and our school was in in the middle of its own clothing drive for poor people in Kentucky. But Peter went off to a high-school journalists' conference at Columbia, where he met someone who offered us a mimeograph machine. I was in the city that weekend, too, and we got together at my father's apartment over a bottle of chianti, whipped up a propaganda leaflet, printed it up, took it back to White Plains, gathered ten of our classmates at my house, divided the city into ten districts, and — by the end of a week of mobilizing more than 200 others to help us canvass the county — filled the Gelfands' two-car garage with donated food and clothing. SNCC arranged for a truck to haul it all down to Mississippi. I went back to my studies, and to summer school in Maine after graduation. During the famous March in Washington, I was hitchhiking with another friend through eastern Canada.
Now, as a freshman at Wesleyan University, I applied for the summer project. I was called before a committee for an interview, and they rejected my application. (It wasn't until decades later that I was able to color in this picture: that I wasn't political enough for the Allard Lowenstein contingent trying to control the summer project, and it was Lowenstein's Yale people controlling my interview.) But I wasn't prepared to stop there. The New York leftist literary critic Max Geismar was a friend of my family, and I called on him to try to get me accepted. He succeeded.
Because I was under twenty-one, I needed parental permission to go to Mississippi. I hadn't told either of my parents of my application. I hitchhiked down to White Plains from Wesleyan, and brought the form to my mother.
"I don't want you to go," she said, "but I can't stop you."
"Of course you can stop me," I said. "If you don't sign, I can't go."
"No," she said. "I mean, the way I raised you, I can't stop you."
She signed.
The next step I remember was a meeting at Riverside Church in New York City. I have no idea who else was there — I knew no one — but it was a kind of pre-orientation orientation. I recall now only that someone said that he was not talking about the possibility that one of us might be killed, but the probability that more than one of us would. (This statement becomes important in the light of accusations that we were naive innocents led to our slaughter by cynical SNCC staffers looking for martyrs. If anything, we were over- warned.)
And so I went to Hamlet. And boarded the bus at midnight.
In Columbus, a car from Oxford met me. I carried a typewriter, a backpack, and a hundred dollars in cash. What I remember of Columbus was that it seemed to be filled with barbers' colleges. And so I came to Oxford, and I remember almost as little about Western College for Women, except that it was very green. I must have had at least one roommate, I don't remember who he was.
The loneliness I felt in Oxford was the loneliness I brought with me. I was a white boy who loved Shakespeare and opera, who didn't drive a car, who had grown up hero-worshiping Robert E. Lee. I felt I had very little in common with all the others milling around the Western College campus, and I didn't know anymore how to bridge the difference than I did as a freshman at Wesleyan. It was the experience of those two weeks of intense training and a common political goal that bonded me to these strangers, but, with no more than one or two exceptions, the bonding went no deeper than the experience.
For reasons both personal and political, I was not particularly indulgent of my own feelings during the orientation. The letters I wrote back to White Plains were composed mostly with the intent of explaining and supporting our activities. These letters (and my later ones from Mississippi, in 1964 and 1965) were mimeographed by my mother and distributed to a list of people, including the editor of the local newspaper, who reprinted them as they came in.
When the assignments were made to the different projects, I was assigned to Vicksburg. But I was uncomfortable with the director of that project, and volunteered for the southwest. I did this after talking with the one person I had become most friendly with in Oxford — Jimmy Travis. (There is an irony here. The year before, working on the leaflet over that bottle of chianti in New York City, I had read the account of Jimmy's shooting and had said to Peter, "I'll do everything I can up here, but I'll be goddamned if you catch me going down there!") The only other person I remember being friendly with was the sister of another volunteer — I was never quite sure what she was doing in Oxford, I think maybe she lived there — Mary Volk. David Gelfand was a volunteer, but we were never close friends. There was one other Wesleyan student in the group, John Suter. I liked and respected John, but didn't know him very well except as someone who liked Gershwin and Wagner. In general, I felt pretty much alone that first week.
And then into the second week. While most of the volunteers went to their projects, those of us who had volunteered for the southwest were held back by Bob Moses, ostensibly for more training, but mostly because he was reluctant to send us into what was considered the most volatile and dangerous part of Mississippi.
"The first group left Oxford, Ohio, last Saturday and entered the state without incident," I wrote in a letter dated June 25 but written both before and after the excursion to Washington. "The entire state is now being worked except for the southwest. Bob felt it wise to hold us back until the reactions in the rest of the state were known. We decided to use our time in a two-day intensive lobby of Washington, and on Monday and Tuesday we stormed congressional and senatorial offices. Tuesday morning we met with John Doar and Burke Marshall of the Justice Department and presented our demands: Enforcement of sections 241, 242 of Title 18 of the Criminal Code; federal marshals with every project; and out-of-state F. B. I. investigators to be used in civil rights cases. We were generally - and rudely - refused. Tuesday afternoon we held a press conference. . ."
Steve Bingham appointed himself our spokesman at the press conference, because his grandfather (I think) was a representative. But it was Len Edwards' father, Congressman Don Edwards , who gave us his office and his staff for that occasion. (I don't think Len was with us, but he might have been.)
One of the other volunteers, Mario Savio, spoke with a distinct stutter. But, at the press conference, when [deleted] was pontificating in a particular windbaggy, self-important way, Mario grabbed the microphone from him and delivered an eloquent, fluent speech, the gist of which drew a connection between economic interests in the north and southern politics, in which he claimed that Harvard University owned a controlling interest in Mississippi Power and Light and could, if it used its influence, bring segregation down. In retrospect, this was a foreshadowing of Mario's taking over the microphone at Sproul Hall the following October, raising an impatient, articulate radical voice against the liberal Establishment wing of what was, for us, the White Power Structure.
" . . . and drove back to Oxford that night. We arrived on Wednesday to a particularly tense campus: The second orientation people were shocked by the developments in Phildelphia, and seemed more naove than the group the week before.
"That afternoon we conferred with Bob, and decided to move out with this group into training areas in Mississippi before going into the southwest. Natchez people will work in Columbus for a while, McComb people in Holly Springs, and Amite (pronounced ay-MITT) people in Holmes County. Before we get into our own areas, we intend to give ourselves extensive and intensive survival training. . . ."
Funny how memory works: Before I re-read this letter, it was stuck in my memory that we made our D. C. dash because of the disappearance of Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner. But the letter implies that we had made this decision before the disappearance was generally known — they were last heard from on Sunday — and it explains why I have no direct memory of hearing the news of their fate at Oxford: I wasn't there when the news sank in. But, when we came back, there was already no assumption other than that the three were dead.
Bob begged us to reconsider our own commitment. In the midst of one long "soul-session" discussion, he sent us away for hours to rethink for ourselves what we were getting into. Certainly I was afraid (most concretely, not of death, which was as abstract to my nineteen-year old understanding as any other concept; nor of pain — because our training had already taught me the distinction between pain and injury — but of castration) and yet I remember thinking quite consciously that, having made one commitment — to join the Mississippi project in the first place — there was no reason to qualify or trim that commitment. I think only one of us backed out, but, in the end, very few of us got to the southwest in 1964. From Holly Springs I was seconded to the Panola County project, which needed people because of its special status under a federal court order.
What's missing from this account is the high rhetoric of racial justice and Freedom Now. While I was sensible of the politics and the responsibility that brought me into the Movement, I learned the rhetoric in Oxford along with nonviolence training, the role-playing, the socio-political and anthropological studies and the music that were thrown at us twenty-four hours a day and that were so crucial in binding white and black strangers into a Movement. But these have been written about eloquently, and can be heard and seen in documentaries and the more general historical record. If I had to specify, though, what I learned most during those intensive two weeks, it was one skill taught as part of the training in door-to-door canvasing. I learned how to listen. This may sound simple, but it transformed my life. If nothing else, it was one step in letting others into my own consciousness, and it was a step to learning how to love. The insecure, arrogant boy who had entered Wesleyan University less than a year before ("The reason colleges are called storehouses of learning," Dean Balch had told us at our matriculation, "is because freshmen enter with so much, and seniors leave with so little.") left for Mississippi with practice in what I needed to grow up in any society.
Copyright © Jim Kates, 2004
Copyright © 2004
Last Modified: June 16, 2004.
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