By 1962, there had been a definite shift in the strategy of the Civil Rights Movement, with SNCC representing a more pro-active stance. James Farmer, a leader of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), offered his insight on how this transformation partly came about:
"I was in jail in Mississippi. Bobby Kennedy called a meeting of CORE and SNCC in his office. I could not be there, of course. I was in the clink. But several people from CORE went. And several from SNCC went, just those two because they were the activist groups in the freedom rides. This was the summer of ’61 and at that meeting what Bobby said to them according to the reports, he said, “Why don’t you guys cut out all that shit Freedom Riding and sitting-in shit, and concentrate on voter education.” Says “If you do that I’ll get you a tax exemption.” The SNCC guy almost hit him…. ”Tell us that we concentrate on voter registration when we’re fighting a tiger down there, in Mississippi and Alabama. You’re trying to buy us off.”
As in most Delta communities, initial local support of SNCC came from Greenwood’s young and from the uneducated. Some joined because they were interested in freedom, and others found participation a way of challenging parents or even getting thrown out of school. Soon, country people who were tired of making crops for white plantation owners were joining others from Gee Pee, Gritney and Baptist Town – “in other words, people who thought they had nothing to lose – were quick to join, too.”
Often, those with education or a good job such as teachers, were hesitant to rock the boat, since once a person was tagged as a “Righter,” they were perceived as dangerous by the rest of the community, according to author Endesha Ida Mae "Cat" Holland. In most schools, principals suspended or expelled any students who participated in a demonstration and teachers dare not be involved, unless they worked in secret. Teachers were also forced to sign “loyalty oaths” or they would be fired.
(Years later, Jeanette Cunningham told Holland that her teacher at Stone Street School took a risk by telling students to get up and look out the window during a march so they could watch history while it was being made.)
“Brothers lied to brothers, and daughters lied to mothers. Friends and relatives who betrayed them thought of themselves as protecting their families. Some local blacks even curried favor with the police by tipping them off about SNCC’s movements and plans, often for a ‘reward’ of several dollars.”
Greenwood was not alone in white opposition to the Delta campaign. Ruleville’s mayor, C. M. Dorrough, represented many Delta whites who for all accounts were “unmatched in their belligerence and resistance to change.”
“We gonna see how tight we can make it,” Dorrough warned, after learning of COFO’s plans that would bring voting rights workers into other towns besides Greenwood, including his own.
“Gonna make it just as tight as we can, it’s gonna be rougher, rougher than you think it is.”
On August 29, SNCC field secretary Charles McLaurin accompanied a busload of black plantation workers from Ruleville to the Sunflower County courthouse in Indianola. The plantation workers from Ruleville were allowed to fill out voter registration forms, but none did so to the registrar’s satisfaction and were not allowed to register.
Leaving Indianola, a highway car stopped the bus and fined the driver a hundred dollars for driving a bus with “too much yellow in it,” meaning it too closely resembled a school bus. Clearly, this was harassment, since the same bus was used for years to haul plantation workers back and forth across the county.
By the time Fannie Lou Hamer arrived back to her plantation home, owner B. D. Marlowe was waiting for her, “blazing mad.” If she would not remove her name from the list of people attempting to register, he warned would fire her and her husband, Pap, as well. Mrs. Hamer stated she did not go to Indianola to register for him, but to register for herself and so she was ordered off the plantation.
Less than two weeks later, on September 10, night riders raided Ruleville’s black neighborhood,looking for Mrs. Hamer.
Witnesses saw a black sedan speed into the area along Reden Avenue shortly after midnight. A white man was observed leaning from the car with a shotgun fired at several homes before heading away towards Drew. Two young women, Marylou Burke and Vivan Hilly, were not involved in the movement but were in Ruleville waiting for a bus ride to Jackson. In the wrong place at the wrong time, they were shot at and hit, nevertheless.
Both were taken to a local hospital where Burke was declared in critical condition with a head wound. As COFO people huddled near the intensive-care part of the hospital, C. M. Dorrough, the Ruleville mayor, ordered the arrest of Charlie Cobb, an activist, on suspicion of being the sniper.
“I think y’all shot at those houses,” Dorrough asserted to Cobb. “You were disappointed at the lack of violence here, and you need the publicity to get money from the North.”
* * * * *
LEFLORE COUNTY WHITES running the federal Surplus Food Program began withholding food as punishment for increased civil rights activities; food was being held back in other Delta counties as well. Hardliners on the county’s Board of Supervisors were determined to halt distribution of all federal food commodities to the county’s poor – of which 98 percent were black.
“To the traditional segregationist arsenal of intimidation, economic reprisal, beatings, lynching, and legal brutality, Leflore County appeared ready to add genocide. Leflore County whites, it seemed, would starve black children to death before they would allow their parents to vote.”
Most poor people, black and white, were dependent on commodities for the cheese, flour, milk, rice, beans and canned meats, critical in feeding families in Greenwood and outlying districts. The county’s decision meant that more than twenty-two thousand farm and sharecropping families would be affected – families that had relied on the commodities to make it from one cotton harvesting season to the next.
The scope of potential starvation and malnutrition did not draw attention outside of Mississippi – a news article appeared in the Jackson Press that discounted the decision as a “simple debate over regional welfare practices.”
Others declared the black families were “freeloaders” who wanted “something for nothing.” In the same year, Mississippi drew some $750 million in U. S. government funds, with millions of federal dollars going into the Delta as agricultural subsidies to cotton farmers.
There were predictions of wholesale starvation in the Delta. Mothers about to give birth were particularly concerned about the consequences. Fannie Lou Hamer pointed out it was the labor and sweat of blacks that had “made them white folks creamy rich,” and concluded: “There’s so much hate. Only God has kept the Negro sane.”
The Ku Klux Klan and the Citizens Council, working to halt any more blacks from registering to vote, pressured the county officials into stopping food distribution and locking up the commodities, in the first place.
This practice continued in the Delta as late as 1966, according to Sovereignty Commission records and oral histories. Yet, Sovereignty Commission records show continued attempts by white leaders to “prove” there was no starvation in the Delta.
As starvation worsened and word of the food cabal moved outside of Mississippi, two black students from Michigan State University, Ivanhoe Donaldson and Ben Taylor, tried to bring a pickup truck filled with food and clothing into Greenwood in December of 1962, challenging the Leflore County supervisors “strike” against federal assistance to poor people.
Coahoma County officers said the truck’s medical supplies – bandages and aspirin – were dangerous contraband and arrested the Michigan visitors. Police impounded the truck and locked the two in the city jail. The Michigan men were terrified and after several days were finally able to slip a note to Aaron Henry, who arranged for their bail.
They were lucky. Six months earlier, attorney Bill Higgs was arrested in Coahoma County for driving an integrated vehicle. While in his cell, Higgs ran into an “overlooked” black Freedom Rider from California who was languishing in the Clarksdale jail.
Law student Dewey Peterson had been arrested during the summer of 1961 as he tried to integrate the city’s bus depot. He was held incommunicado in Clarksdale for nearly a year before Higgs found him, by chance. The black Mississippi attorney was able to get Peterson bailed out.
The county’s attempt to use starvation against blacks unexpectedly helped COFO and SNCC become entrenched in the area, attracting more supporters among local blacks, particularly after November, when a black child died of starvation.
Justice Department lawyers and reporters came in and toured the county, urged to do so by COFO, to find “shocking health conditions and dire shortages of milk and other staples in black homes.”
In a letter that Moses wrote to a friend back home, he told of finishing a bowl of soup and seeing a “black, leathery hand reach over from behind him and fumble for a remnant of the meal.”
National interest was aided by Harry Belafonte, who responded with a relief concert in New York City, and Dick Gregory, who chartered a plane to personally deliver emergency rations to Greenwood.
Recognition from the outside brought new optimism among SNCC workers, who worked longer days at bigger risks. Milton Hancock, a black Greenwood cab driver who hauled around freedom workers for free, was stopped by a deputy on a traffic violation and told to get out of town – “You know what happened to Emmett Till!” he was warned.
A few months later, SNCC gave out four tons of food in just one day – a record. Then four black-owned businesses in Greenwood were firebombed. Sam Block, giving a press conference on the smoldering ruins, was arrested and charged with “inciting a riot.” Five days later, one hundred workers and supporters marched on Greenwood City Hall in protest.
This was a bold demonstration, for the times, stunning both white and black communities. But the police chief was out of town, and the march dispersed, according to Holland.
(Excerpt from "Where Rebels Roost, Mississippi Civil Rights Revisited," by Susan Klopfer.)
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