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Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) Formed in Mississippi
"Criminal Anarchy" in Louisiana (Feb)
Cambridge MD — 1962
Maryland Easternshore Project (Summer)
Cairo IL Protests (SNCC) (June)
Mississippi Voter Registration — Greenwood
James Meredith Integrates Ole Miss (Sept-Oct)
Greenwood Food Blockade (Winter)
Jackson MS, Boycotts (Winter-Spring)
See Voter Registration & Direct-Action in McComb MS for preceding events.
After being released from jail in December of 1961, Bob Moses and the other SNCC organizers analyze the successes and failures of the McComb voter registration campaign. It is clear that racist opposition to Black voting rights in Mississippi is so ferocious, so violent, so widespread, that only by uniting all of the state's civil rights organizations into a coordinated effort is there any chance of success.
Moses and Tom Gaither of CORE circulate a memo proposing formation of a Freedom Movement coalition. The national leaders of the different organizations initially oppose the idea out of fear that they will lose visibility within it, with consequent loss of northern funds. But the local activists and leaders on the ground in Mississippi, those who are closest to the suffering of the people and the necessities of the struggle in that state, insist that success — indeed, survival — require organizational cooperation rather than rivalry.
In February, representatives of SNCC, CORE, and the NAACP form the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO). The name is taken from an earlier coalition effort to support the Freedom Riders. A grant request to fund COFO voter registration activities is submitted to the Voter Education Project (VEP).
In August, a meeting is held in Clarksdale to formalize COFO. Attending are Moses, Jim Forman and a dozen other SNCC workers, Dave Dennis of CORE, James Bevel of SCLC, and others. NAACP leader Aaron Henry is elected President, Rev. R.L.T. Smith is named Treasurer, attorney Carsie Hall becomes Secretary, and Bob Moses is appointed the COFO state-wide Project Director. An agreement is made that CORE will focus its registration efforts in the Mississippi Congressional District centered around Meridian and SNCC will work the other four districts including the Delta region around Greenwood and the Pearl River area around McComb, while SCLC will concentrate on its Citizenship school program throughout the state and the NAACP on the judicial aspects of the struggle.
In September, VEP funds COFO organizing projects in the Mississippi Delta counties of Bolivar, Coahoma, Leflore, and Sunflower where SNCC field secretaries are already working. Over the following year VEP gives more than $50,000 (equal to $340,000 in 2007) to a number of voter registration projects in Mississippi. But against the ferocious resistance of the white power structure little progress is made — less than 4,000 Blacks are added to the Mississippi voter rolls. In mid-1963, VEP stops funding Mississippi projects in favor of states where there is greater potential of success.
See Mississippi Voter Registration — Greenwood for continuation.
For more information:
Books: Mississippi Movement
Web links:
Mississippi Movement & MFDP A Discussion
Council of Federated Organizations
Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party
Mississippi Movement
See Baton Rouge Student Protests for previous events.
In February of 1962, the campus of Southern University is still occupied by the state police and under a political lockdown to suppress CORE-organized student protests. Dion Diamond — Freedom Rider, former Howard University student, and now SNCC field secretary — attempts to meet with the students. As he steps on to campus he is immediately arrested and charged with Trespassing, Disorderly Conduct, and Vagrancy. He is also charged with "Criminal Anarchy" — attempting to overthrow the government of the State of Louisiana — a major felony. Bail is set at $7,000 (equal to $45,000 in 2006).
SNCC Chairman Chuck McDew and white field secretary Bob Zellner visit Dion in jail to bring him reading material: Scottsboro Boys, The Ugly American, and Richard Wright's Eight Men. They too are arrested on charges of "Criminal Anarchy." The local newspaper describes them as two "Communists" carrying "obscene" literature on "race-mixing."
Zellner is put in a cage holding more than 50 white prisoners. The guards make sure that the other inmates know he is a "race-mixer." Day after day, he is beaten and threatened with death while the guards look on. Eventually, Movement lawyers force the jailers to isolate him from the white prisoners. He is placed in "the hole," a dark, sweltering hot, 5x7 steel cubical. McDew and Diamond are in similar adjacent cells.
After a month in jail, Dion's bail is raised to $12,000 and the three are arraigned on the "Criminal Anarchy" charge alleging that they:
1961
1963
...with force of arms, in the Parish of East Baton Rouge
feloniously did... advocate in public and in private opposition to the
Government of the State of Louisiana by unlawful means and are members
of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, an organization
which is known to the offenders to advocate, teach and practice
opposition to the Government of the State of Louisiana by unlawful
means. [1]
Eventually, the Southern Conference Education Fund (SCEF) raises the bond money and they are bailed out. After years of legal struggle, the absurd "Criminal Anarchy" charges are dropped, but Dion has to serve 60 days on the original Disorderly Conduct charge.
For more information:
Books: SNCC The New Abolitionists
Web: Louisiana Movement
See Desegregate Route 40 Project for background and previous events.
Cambridge MD is a small industrial town on the Easternshore of Chesapeake Bay. Racism and segregation are far more virulent on the Eastshore than in the urban areas around Baltimore or the western portion of the state, a condition of long historical standing — at the time of the Civil War it was said that the Easternshore was slave-holding Dixie, while the area to the west of Baltimore was practically Pennsylvania.
Cambridge is the capitol of Dorchester County. In 1960 one-third of Cambridge residents are Black, all of whom live in the 2nd Ward which has been represented for six decades by the only Black on the five-member City Council. There are three Blacks on the police force, but they are limited to patrolling the Black neighborhood and are not allowed to arrest whites anywhere. The schools are segregated, with Black schools receiving half as much funding as those attended by whites. All lunch counters, cafes, churches, and entertainment venues are segregated. The local hospital does not admit Blacks who have to travel to Baltimore two hours distant by car (longer by bus). Nor do Black doctors have privileges at the segregated Johns Hopkins hospital.
By 1962, Cambridge has fallen on hard times. The city's major manufacturer, a food-processor, has closed its Cambridge plants and the jobs are gone. For whites, unemployment is over 7%, twice the national average, and Black unemployment is a devastating 29%. Two of the remaining factories, both defense contractors, have a tacit agreement with their white workers and the city council — the companies will not hire Blacks in return for the workers rejecting any attempt at unionization. Under Federal poverty regulations, Dorchester County is in the same category as Appalachia.
By the end of 1961, efforts to desegregate public accomodations along the highways between Washington and the north have largely succeeded. Led by Clarence Logan and other Morgan State College students, Baltimore's Civic Interest Group (CIG) — a SNCC affiliate — begins sit-ins and freedom rides in towns on Maryland's Easternshore.
In January of 1962, CIG/SNCC organizers Reggie Robinson and Bill Hansen arrive in Cambridge. Protests commence in Cambridge with 100 activists marching downtown to desegregate various establishments. Half of the protesters are Cambridge high school students, the other half are students mobilized by CIG from Morgan State and Maryland State Colleges, along with a few white supporters from Johns Hopkins. Some of the demonstrators are arrested. Hostile whites jeer, and in some cases, assault them. Bill Hansen is beaten by a mob and then arrested for "Disorderly Conduct." The Cambridge Mayor blames the violence on "outside agitators," and calls Hansen a "professional integrationist."
More than 300 Black residents attend a mass meeting that night at Waugh Church to show support for the protesters, and in the following days they found the Cambridge Nonviolent Action Committee (CNAC) — pronounced "See-Nack" — to support and continue the protests. Frederick St. Clair and Enez Grubb are elected CNAC co-chairs at a mass rally. A week after the first protests, CIG and CNAC organize a second "freedom ride" into Cambridge, this time including supporters from CORE, SNCC, Northern Student Movement (NSM), Black students from Howard University, Morgan, Lincoln, and Maryland State Colleges, and white students from Swarthmore, Haverford, and Bryn Mawr. Again white vigilantes attack some of the protesters, again Bill Hansen and others are beaten, and again Hanson and others are arrested. White students are beaten more than Blacks.
Penny Patch, a white student from Swarthmore, recalls "Everyone sang, the songs bound us together and made us strong. [The white mob] gathered around us, screaming, waving baseball bats. I was scared. But I also drew enormous strength from the songs we sang." She later goes on to become a full-time SNCC field secretary in Albany Georgia and the Mississippi Delta.
CIG expands the freedom rides and sit-ins to other Eastshore towns such as Chestertown, Princess Ann, Salisbury, and Easton, an effort that evolves into the Maryland Easternshore Project" a summer campaign of CIG/CNAC. Meanwhile, CNAC continues demonstrations in Cambridge, relying on local high school students led by Donna Richardson, Lemuel Chester, Dinez White, and Dwight Cromwell. For a while, Edward Dickerson, a local white student, defies family and community to take part in CNAC protests. His parents kick him out of their home and threaten to commit him to a mental institution.
Maryland Governor Tawes asks the legislature to pass an anti-discrimination bill to end segregation in public accomodations throughout the state. But Easternshore legislators weaken the bill by allowing counties to exempt themselves. In other words, Easternshore counties like Dorchester where segregation is widespread can choose to ignore the law. In Cambridge, the police allow white racists to beat nonviolent protesters, and then arrest the demonstrators. The all-white, volunteer Rescue & Fire Company (RFC) is a major civic institution. It runs the swimming pool and skating rink on a segregated, white-only basis, and those facilities become targets of CNAC protests. In retaliation, the RFC threatens to deny ambulance service to Blacks.
Howard University graduate Gloria Richardson is drawn into CNAC by her daughter Donna, one of the main high school activists. Gloria soon becomes CNAC's most prominant leader. Throughout the Southern Freedom Movement, women play significant leadership roles, but men typically hold the prominant positions. That is not the case with CNAC, which is primarily led by women at all levels. In the spring of 1962, Gloria and Yolanda St. Clair are sent by the community to attend a SNCC conference in Atlanta, and CNAC becomes a SNCC affiliate.
By the end of summer, most Cambridge eating facilities are still segregated as are entertainment venues such as the movie theater and skating rink. Protests taper off when school resumes in the fall, and CNAC begins deep organizing down at the grassroots, developing activists and leaders throughout the 2nd Ward, and broadening its base among poor and working class Blacks.
Said one unemployed Black war veteran: "Here if you are a colored person and go looking for a job, they tell you they only want skilled workers. If you have the particular skill, the vacancy suddenly 'has been filled.'" Said another unemployed Black man, "Things for us can't get any worse. We have nothing to lose and maybe something to gain by backing [CNAC]. I don't have anything but time and my life to give to the Movement. I'm willing to give both if necessary."
To the dismay of the traditional upper-class Black elite — long accustomed to being the community leaders — CNAC adds a factory worker and a welfare recipient to its executive committee rather than additional ministers, a move that signals CNAC's committment to the issues and priorities of those at the bottom of the economic ladder. And CNAC rejects the gradualist, conciliatory, approach favored by the Black elite.
See Cambridge MD, Movement — 1963 for subsequent events.
For more information:
Books: Civil War on Race Street: the Civil Rights Movement in Cambridge Maryland
Web: Cambridge MD Movement
See Desegregate Route 40 Project and Cambridge MD — 1962 for previous events.
Maryland does not practice the kind of systematic, state-wide disenfranchisement of Blacks that is typical of the Deep South, but some individual counties and communities, particularly on the Easternshore, do limit Black voting rights. In Chestertown, for example, the town constitution requires voters to own more than $500 worth of property within the municipal limits in order to vote in city elections. Since most residents, regardless of race, are either renters or own homes valued at under $500, less than 250 of the 2,400 residents are eligible to vote for the Mayor who has been in office for close to 30 years. And in many Easternshore communities, Blacks are prevented from fully participating in the political process by social and economic barriers, and by customs of long standing.
The Easternshore Project evolves out of the Civic Interest Group (CIG) freedom rides and sit-ins of 1961-62. Led by Bill Henry of Maryland State College (brother of CIG leader Clifton Henry), and Tom Kennedy a Northern Student Movement (NSM) activist from Swarthmore, the project recruits college students for full-time civil rights work in Easternshore communities during summer vacation from school. While the project is involved in some direct-action against segregation, voter education and registration is its primary focus. Project activists help with local voter registration drives, conduct political education classes, and support community organizing efforts. As such, the Easternshore Project is a forerunner of more famous summer projects in the years to come.
For more information:
Web: Baltimore & Maryland
Cairo (pronounced "Kay-row"), at the southern tip of Illinois where the Ohio flows into the Mississippi, is a segregated "southern" town in a "northern" state. In the summer of '62, the majority of the population is Black, but almost all the businesses are owned by whites.
By 1962, local freedom movements are breaking out in communities all over the south — and the north too. Unnoticed and unreported by the national media, they are the rising tide that will sustain and support the epoch events and victories of the future. Seemingly unimportant — except to those who participate in them, and the local communities that they profoundly affect — these small challenges to the status quo make manifest the spirit of defiance that is taking root in the heart of Black America. One such unreported struggle occurs in Cairo Illinois, and we mention it here as representative of the hundreds of unsung actions taking place during this period.
Working with local Cairo student leaders Charles Koen and Jim Peak, activists from SNCC's direct-action wing — John Lewis, Chico Neblett, and Freedom Rider Selyn McCullum — organize protests against segregation in Cairo. SNCC photographer Danny Lyon describes one such action:
It is hard to convey what this demonstration was like except by
contrasting it with what we have been conditioned to expect today.
There was no press, no film cameras, no police, and no reporters. I
had my camera, and I ran along as this brave little group marched
through the sunlit and mostly empty streets of a very small American
town. With the exception of a few young black men, everyone else who
was watching seemed to hate and deride the demonstrators, many of whom
were children. At Cairo's only, and segregated, swimming pool, the
group stopped to pray. Then they stood in the street singing, and when
a blue pickup truck drove down the center of the street straight at
them, a game of chicken ensued as the truck slowed and the
demonstrators moved out of the way, except for one defiant thirteen-
year-old girl, who stood her ground until the truck knocked her down.
[2]
The racism of Cairo's whites is deeply entrenched. In the years that follow there are demonstrations, gun battles, riots, and a decade-long Black boycott of white merchants. In a form of racist civic-suicide, many white-owned businesses close down rather than hire Blacks. Already in economic decline, Cairo sinks deeper into poverty and depression. From a population of 9,000 in 1960, it dwindles to less than 3,600 in the 2000 Census, leaving Cairo a city of abandoned buildings and dead hopes.
For more information:
Books:
Memories
of the Southern Civil Rights Movement
Let My People Go: Cairo, Illinois by
Jan Peterson Roddy. Photos by Preston Ewing Jr. Southern Illinois
University Press, 1996.
Web:
Coverage
of Cairo Movement (Adam Alexander, Unity Point School)
The
Mighty Mississippi ~ Cairo, IL
See Voter Registration & Direct-Action in McComb MS and Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) Formed in Mississippi for preceding events.
When they are released from jail in McComb, SNCC field secretaries resume voter registration work in Mississippi. Bob Moses, Paul & Catherine Brooks, James Bevel & Diane Nash (newly married), and Bernard Lafayette in Jackson; Lester McKinnie in Laurel; Frank Smith in Holly Springs; Curtis Hayes and Hollis Watkins in Hattiesburg, and new field secretaries hired with VEP money in Greeneville, Cleveland, Vicksburg, and Ruleville.
Sam Block, a young Mississippi native, is assigned to Greenwood, capital of Leflore county in the heart of the Mississippi Delta. Cotton is still king in the Delta, hand-labor, plantation-style, and 800,000 bales pass through Greenwood each year. The majority (60%) of Leflore county citizens are Black, but whites own 90% of the land and hold all political offices. Of the 168 hospital beds, 131 are reserved for whites-only.
In Leflore county, almost 100% of whites are registered to vote, compared to just 268 Blacks (2%). In the seven years since the Brown decision, only 40 Blacks have been allowed to register (compared to 1,664 whites). With Blacks a 3 to 2 majority, whites know that Black voter registration threatens their economic and political control. One white voter tells a reporter: "We killed two-month-old indian babies to take this country, and now they want us to give it away to the niggers."
Sam is soon joined by Rust College graduate Willie (Wazir) Peacock, and then Luvaghn Brown, and Lawrence Guyot. Sam Block describes the work:
I canvassed every day and every night until I found about seven or
eight people to carry up to register ... We went up to register and it was
the first time visiting the courthouse in Greenwood, Mississippi, and the
sheriff came up to me and he asked me, he said, "Nigger, where you
from?" I told him, "Well, I'm a native Mississippian." He said,
"Yeh, yeh, I know that, but where you from? ... I know you ain't from
here, cause I know every nigger and his mammy." I said, "Well, you
know all the niggers, do you know any colored people?" He got angry. He
spat in my face and walked. So he came back and turned around and told me,
"I don't want to see you in town any more. The best thing you better do
is pack your clothes and get out and don't never come back no more." I
said, "Well, sheriff, if you don't want to see me here, I think the best
thing for you to do is pack your clothes and leave, get out of town, 'cause
I'm here to stay, I came here to do a job and this is my intention,
I'm going to do this job." [3]
White racists attack the SNCC office, and the SNCC organizers barely escape over the roof tops. The building is trashed, and the frightened landlord evicts them. The fear is so intense that it is months before anyone else in the Black community will rent space intended for voter registration work.
Sam and Wazir dig in deep, and hold on. They continue organizing in Greenwood without an office. Fear is pervasive among Greenwood Blacks. Fear of being fired. Fear of being evicted. Fear of beatings, bombings, and murder. Fear that the SNCC workers will stir up trouble and violence and then leave. But gradually over time, week by week, month by month, as Sam and Wazir hold on, trust is built and their courage inspires first the young students and then their parents.
Wazir describes what it was like:
Greenwood was so organized — there was not one block that we couldn't have — it was like guerrilla war, we could stop anywhere and duck out of sight, go into somebody's house. At every block in the Black neighborhood. So that's one thing that kept us alive 'cause they would see us at night and the cops would think it was an opportunity to get us, speed up and try to turn around. When they turned around we'd be watching out a window somewhere, see them come back to try to find us. [4]
A new office is finally rented, a church dares to open its doors for a voter registration meeting, and the community begins coming together. Slowly, one by one, two by two, a trickle of Leflore County Blacks begin to take the dangerous journey down to the courthouse to try to register to vote. But in the first six months, only five Blacks of the dozens who try are actually registered.
See Greenwood Food Blockade for continuation.
For more information:
Books: Mississippi Movement
Web:
Mississippi Movement & MFDP A Discussion
Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party
Mississippi Movement
Greenwood MS, Movement
Born in Kosciusko Mississippi of Black and Choctaw ancestry, James Meredith serves 9 years in the Air Force before returning home to attend Jackson State College (a segregated Black college). In January of 1961, he applies for transfer to the University of Mississippi — known as "Ole Miss" — a bastion of white privilege and sacred symbol of southern gentillity and confederate mythos. He is denied admission.
Represented by NAACP attorney Constance Baker Motley, he files suit in Federal court. In 1962 the Fifth Circut Court rules that he is being denied admission because of his race in violation of Brown v Board of Education. The court orders that he be admitted to Ole Miss. Eight long years after the Brown decision, Mississippi is finally told to admit a Black to a white-only school.
Hysteria sweeps across white Mississippi at the thought of a Black man attending Ole Miss. Whipped up by the White Citizens Council and segregationist politicians, strident cries for preservation of "racial integrity," and outrage at the horror of a Black male interacting as a social equal with the "flower of southern womanhood" reverberate across the state. Once again the Confederate ideology of "states rights" to institutionalize racism is proclaimed, as is the doctrine of "interposition" that claims a state has the right to reject any Federal laws or court rulings it disagrees with.
In a TV address to the state, Governor Ross Barnett declares: "There is no case in history where the Caucasian race has survived social integration. We will not drink from the cup of genocide. ... We must either submit to the unlawful dictates of the Federal government or stand up like men and tell them never! ... No school will be integrated in Mississippi while I am your Governor!" The state legislature and local officals across the state (all of them white, of course) echo and intensify his position.
Meredith has no illusions. He later explains: "I was engaged in a war. I considered myself engaged in a war from day one. And my objective was to force the federal government — the Kennedy administration at that time — into a position where they would have to use the United States military force to enforce my rights as a citizen." Looking back years later, Constance Baker Motley put it this way: "People have forgotten about it, but it was, as I say, the last battle of the Civil War, actually fought on this campus that night."
Governor Barnett appoints himself Registrar of Ole Miss. In mid-September Meredith attempts to enroll as mandated by Federal Court order. Barnett refuses to admit him. He tries a 2nd and 3rd time and is refused, and again refused. Cars driven by whites parade through Mississippi towns with confederate flags waving and bumper stickers proclaiming: "The South shall rise again!" Retaliatory violence against Blacks flares across the state as Black men, women, and children are attacked, beaten, and shot at. Armed students are posted at Tougaloo to defend the campus from KKK nightriders. Despite the terror, Blacks are inspired by Meredith's courage and defiance. His struggle to integrate Ole Miss becomes a state-wide confrontation between whites intent on maintaining the old order of racial segregation and Blacks determined to be free and equal citizens.
On the evening of Sunday, September 30, Meredith arrives at the Ole Miss campus in Oxford. He is accompanied by officials of the Department of Justice who intend to enforce his registration the following morning. They are guarded by a hastily assembled team of several hundred Federal Marshals, Border Patrol officers, and prison guards. Referred to collectively as the "Marshals," they are not armed and have only batons and tear gas to protect themselves and Meredith.
White students surround Meredith's dorm and the registration office. They chant: "Two-four-one-three, we hate Kennedy! Kill the nigger-loving bastards!" Armed Klansmen from around the state flood into Oxford to lynch Meredith. The swarm grows to more than 2,000. Led by former Army Major-General Edwin Walker — who had been forced to retire when he refused to stop distributing racist literature to his soldiers — they attack the Marshals guarding Meredith with bricks, bottles, guns, and fire bombs. The Mississippi state troopers charged with maintaining "law and order" disappear, leaving the Marshals to face the mob alone.
The Marshals desperately try to hold back the lynch mob with tear gas. Half of them are wounded, 30 of them are shot. The crowd lashes out at journalists — they murder French reporter Paul Guihard. A second man is also killed, the circumstances unclear. With tear gas running low and the mob closing in, the Marshals plea for reinforcements. President Kennedy calls up the Mississippi National Guard, but only 67 men of Troop E respond. Led by Captain "Chooky" Falkner (nephew of author William Faulkner) they try to rescue the Marshals and Meredith. They are not enough.
As the battle rages, Kennedy finally — at long last — sends in the Army to restore order. An Army officer later recalled:
"As we were marching up there, they would throw rocks at us and call us nigger lovers. Wanted to know if we were there to put our nigger brother in college. There was a lot of gasoline burning, a lot of automobiles burning on campus. Every concrete bench was broken, being thrown at us. I spent time in Vietnam. I'll take that any time over Ole Miss." [5]
But to appease southern whites, Attorney General Robert Kennedy secretly orders that the units assigned to Ole Miss be re-segregated so that armed Black GIs won't be patrolling the streets of Oxford. 4,000 Black soldiers are humiliated, disarmed, removed from their units, and reassigned to KP and garbage duty. Black soldiers can be sent to fight and die in Vietnam, but they are not allowed to protect Black citizens in Mississippi from mob violence.
With tens of thousands soldiers occupying Oxford, Meredith finally enrolls at Ole Miss, on Monday, October 1st. Protected around the clock by armed guards he endures a year of isolation, discrimination, and hatred from all but a few of his professors and fellow students. Those few who do try to treat him fairly are themselves ostracized. In August of 1963 he graduates with a BA in political science.
Meredith later wrote:
I noticed in the hallway a black janitor and I wondered why he
was standing there. And he had a mop under his arm. And as I passed
him, he turned his body, twisted his body, and touched me with the mop
handle. Now this delivered a message and the message was clear: We
are looking after you while you are here.
[6]
For more information:
Books: James Meredith (Desegregation of Ole Miss ...)
Web: Meredith Desegregation of Ole Miss for web links.
See Mississippi Voter Registration — Greenwood for background and previous events.
As a small, but steady, trickle of Leflore county Blacks continue to show up at the courthouse to register, the White Citizens Council strikes back. For sharecroppers and farm laborers in the Mississippi Delta, winter is the lean time, the hard time. One-third of the population struggles to survive on an income of less than $500 per year (equal to $3300 in 2006). With no work and nothing to eat, they rely on Federal surplus food commodities for survival. The Citizens Council controls Greenwood politics, no politician can win election without their support, and as winter closes in they order the County Board of Supervisors to stop distributing Federal food aid to 22,000 Leflore County citizens — most of them Black, a few poor white or Choctaw indian.
By mid-winter, conditions are desperate. Sam Block and Wazir Peacock write to SNCC headquarters in Atlanta:
Saturday, January 19,1963. ... these people here are in a very, very
bad need for food and clothes. Look at a case like this man, named Mr.
Meeks, who is thirty-seven years old. His wife is thirty-three years old,
and they have eleven children, ages ranging from seventeen down to eight
months. Seven of the children are school age and not a one is attending
school because they have no money, no food, no clothes, and no wood to keep
warm by, and they now want to go register. The house they are living in has
no paper or nothing on the walls and you can look at the ground through the
floor and if you are not careful you will step in one of those holes
and break your leg. [7]
SNCC sends word to its supporters in communities, college campuses, and Friends of SNCC chapters throughout the country — and people respond. Comedian Dick Gregory charters a plane to deliver emergency food supplies to Greenwood to stave off starvation. He becomes a Movement stalwart, raising funds, participating in demonstrations, enduring beatings and arrests in the cause of Freedom.
Michigan State students Ivanhoe Donaldson and Ben Taylor drive a truckload of food, clothing, and medicine 1,000 miles down into the Mississippi Delta over the Christmas holidays. The local cops are tipped off — perhaps by some Federal agency — and the two are busted in Clarksdale MS for "possesion of narcotics." The supposed "narcotics" are actually just aspirin and vitamins. They are held on $15,000 bail (equal to almost $100,000 in 2006). After 11 days in jail, a nation-wide protest gets them released, but the food, clothing, and medicine are confiscated and disappear. Ivanhoe is not intimidated, in the following months he delivers a dozen truckloads of food into embattled Greenwood and goes on to become a SNCC field secretary.
Meanwhile, the Kennedy administration and U.S. Department of Justice do nothing effective to protect the voting rights of Black citizens. With legal support provided by Dr. King, SNCC sues Attorney General Robert Kennedy and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover in January of 1963 demanding that they enforce existing Federal voting rights laws. Rather than performing their Constitutionally-required duty to protect the rights of all citizens, government lawyers quash the suit.
But violence, intimidation, beatings, arrests, and Federal dereliction, all fail to halt the growing movement. And the food blockade backfires. Says Bob Moses:
"Whenever we were able to get a little something to give to a hungry family, we also talked about how they ought to register. The food was ...identified in the minds of everyone as food for those who want to be free, and the minimum requirement for freedom is identified as registration to vote. [8]
See Marching for Freedom in Greenwood for continuation.
For more information:
Books: Mississippi Movement
Web links:
Mississippi Movement & MFDP A Discussion
Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party
Mississippi Movement
Greenwood MS, Movement
Jackson is Mississippi's capitol and most significant urban area. In 1960, 40% of its 150,000 residents are Black, and Blacks are a clear majority in the surrounding rural areas of Hinds, Madison, and Rankin counties. Jackson is totally segregated, Blacks are restricted to the lowest-paid menial jobs in the public and private sectors. Jackson is White Citizens Council stronghold and the Council dominates the local political scene, Mayor Allen Thompson is a rabid segregationist, as are the Governor and state legislators. A miasma of fear lays heavy over the Black community, ruthless police butality is common, and Klan terrorists lurk in the shadows ready to strike down anyone who challenges the racial order.
In early 1962, SNCC organizers try to register voters in Jackson, but make little headway against the grip of fear. They move into the Mississippi Delta region around Greenwood where there is more hope of success. This leaves the NAACP as the only civil rights organization with an ongoing presence in Jackson. But the Jackson NAACP is largely moribund, most of its Youth Councils are dormant, and only the heroic efforts of NAACP State Field Director Medgar Evers keeps the organization barely alive.
The NAACP's national leadership shun direct-action protests in favor of lawsuits in Federal Court, but unlike Alabama where Federal Judge Frank Johnson often rules in favor of civil rights, Mississippi Federal Judge Harold Cox (appointed by President Kenndy) is an ardent segregationist. He almost always rules against the NAACP, forcing them to appeal each case to the Federal Fifth Circut Court in New Orleans, a process that slows and limits progress.
The national NAACP also emphasizes voter registration, but unlike SNCC who work with the masses of Black sharecroppers, maids, and laborers, the NAACP concentrates their efforts on the small Black elite — ministers, professionals, teachers, business owners. But in Mississippi the Black elite are vulnerable to the economic terrorism of the White Citizens Coucil, and — with some notable exceptions — in 1962 most of them are still unwilling to risk attempting to register.
Back in the fall of 1961, Tougaloo student Colia Lidell (later Colia Lafayette) and Tougaloo teacher Hunter Bear (John Salter) began reactivating and rebuilding the North Jackson NAACP Youth Council (NJYC). By early 1962 it has slowly begun to make headway against the palpable fear. Along with a few high school students such as NJYC President Pearlena Lewis, Lewis Lidell (Colia's brother), and Cleveland Donald, they hold on and dig in deep.
When school resumes in the fall of 1962, they are joined by Tougaloo student Betty Anne Poole, expelled Jackson State students Dorie and Joyce Ladner who have transferred to Tougaloo, and white exchange students Karin Kunstler and Joan Trumpauer. The NJYC continues slow but steady growth, moving their meetings from living rooms to the attic of Virden Grove church. Made up mainly of high school and Tougaloo students, and school dropouts, with young professor Hunter Bear as their "adult" advisor, they begin distribution of North Jackson Action a mimeographed newsletter.
In early October, Jackson hosts the annual state fair, a major harvest festival. It is completely segregated, the first week is for "whites only," followed by 3 days for "colored." The NJYC calls on Blacks to boycott the "second-hand fair." Any public demonstration, such as picketing, will result in immediate arrest and there is no money for bail. And anyone caught distributing boycott leaflets will also be jailed. Like resistance fighters in occupied territory, the word has to be spread secretly, through clandestine meetings and covertly passing flyers from hand to hand. A telephone tree is organized and sympathizers are asked to call their friends. October 15 is the first day of the "Negro Fair." The boycott is 90% effective, Black fair goers are few and far between to the financial discomfort of white vendors and concessionaires.
Buoyed by the success of the fair boycott, the NJYC and the revived Tougaloo NAACP chapter begin organizing a Christmas boycott of Jackson's downtown merchants (all white, of course). They adopt four key demands:
Medgar Evers tries to negotiate with the merchants but they refuse to meet with him. The boycott targets 150 white stores including all the "downtown" stores. The plan is to start with a small group of pickets whose inevitable arrest will dramatize the boycott, and then follow up with a campus meeting to mobilize support. Despite pleas by Medgar — who is NAACP state Field Director — the national NAACP leadership is unwilling to provide any bail funds. But enough bond money for six protesters is contributed by the Southern Conference Education Fund (SCEF), NY attorney Victor Rabinowitz, and Dr. King's Gandhi Fund.
On Saturday December 12, the first civil rights demonstration in Jackson since the Freedom Rides takes place on Capitol Street, the main drag of the downtown shopping district. Led by Hunter Bear, the six pickets raise their signs and a swarm of 50 cops immediately arrest them, including Hunter's wife Eldri, and Tougaloo students Betty Poole and Ronald Mitchell.
The mass meeting is held on the Tougaloo campus that night and the next day the NJYC and Tougaloo students begin clandestinely distributing leaflets through Jackson's Black neighborhoods and to Blacks in Hinds, Madison, Rankin, and Yazoo counties — 15,000 by the end of December. The telephone tree is activated, speakers are assigned to address church meetings, and "undercover agents" (Black students posing as shoppers) patrol Capitol Street quietly informing out-of-area Black shoppers about the boycott.
Enough bail money is raised for a second team of pickets — Tougaloo students Dorie Ladner and Charles Bracey — to be busted on Capitol Street on December 21. That night, Klan nightriders fire into Hunter Bear's home narrowly missing his baby daughter. Armed guards are posted on the Tougaloo campus.
NY attorney William Kunstler (father of Tougaloo exchange student Karin Kunstler), Gandhi Fund lawyer Clarence Jones, and local Jackson attorney Jess Brown devise a new legal strategy. Pointing out the obvious fact that civil rights demonstrators cannot possibly receive a fair trial in segregated state courts that only allow whites to serve on juries, they petition to have the picket cases transferred to Federal Court under an old Reconstruction Era statute. The racist Federal Judge Harold Cox denies their petition and they appeal his ruling to the Fifth Circut in New Orleans. While the case is working its way through the judicial system, the pickets are free on bail and their trials are postponed. The removal petition eventually succeeds, setting a precedent for transferring civil rights cases from all over the South to Federal Court where they enter a legal limbo and are never brought to trial.
The Christmas boycott is surprisingly effective, honored by roughly 60% of the Black population. And once the pressure of providing Christmas gifts to children is past, the boycott gains strength as it continues into 1963. In tacit admission of the economic harship being suffered by the white merchants, the City waives the annual property taxes for businesses being boycotted. But despite their economic losses, the white business owners refuse to negotiate with Blacks or make any changes in segregation. And the White Citizens Council stands ready to forclose mortgages, stop supplies, and mobilize a white boycott against any merchant who wavers in steadfast support of segregation.
See Jackson Sit-in & Protests for continuation.
For more information:
Book: Jackson, Mississippi: An American Chronicle of Struggle and
Schism
Web: Jackson Movement for web links.
1. SNCC The New Abolitionists
2. Memories of the Southern Civil Rights Movement
3. The Making of Black Revolutionaries
4. "Selma & the March to Montgomery — A Discussion"
5. "Mississippi and Meredith remember" CNN ~ October 1, 2002
6. Three Years in Mississippi
7. SNCC The New Abolitionists
8. In Struggle, SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960's
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