Read Chapter One here,
then go to
www.milkweed.org/4_catalog/4_1_1_1_0126.html
and obtain more information about ordering a copy of the book.
The Children Bob Moses Led
By William Heath
Tom Morton
Summer 1963
In those days I believed that America could be made safe
for democracy, from the grassroots up, with just a little help from me and my
friends. And so I served as a summer soldier to fight for civil rights. We were
neophytes who thought that we could redeem our nation by holding hands and singing
freedom songs. But when you toe the asphalt, stick out your thumb, and become a
hitchhiker of history, currents beyond your control sweep you to destinations
not of your devising. By the time I left the Movement, the world had not
changed much, but at least I had not sat on the sidelines with the lip-service
liberals; rather I had become my own contemporary and acted on my ideals. I had
gone in search of America, and myself. What I found was Mississippi.
During the summer of 1963 I worked at a tennis camp in the
Adirondacks for Jewish kids from Long Island. "We're from Great
Neck," they used to chant, "couldn't be prouder. If you don't believe
us, we'll buy you out!" Each cabin counselor was a college tennis player,
and we spent long afternoons shouting "Racquet back; eye on the
ball!" to our awkward pupils. They practiced hard, whether to satisfy
their own dreams of athletic prowess or to please their parents, but only a few
displayed the skills to excel.
The boy I remember best was a manic perfectionist who
sometimes flipped out when he failed. Mostly he was quiet and kept to himself,
speaking in soft monosyllables and rarely smiling. Asked to make his bed or to
police the grounds for inspection, he did it impeccably: a dime bounced on his
taut sheets and all the gum wrappers were gone. He used to sit on the front
steps of the cabin strumming the same folk tune by the hour, until some
web-footed demon in his fingers slipped up. I found his guitar, back broken,
left for dead in the weeds. Once, during a softball game, when a pitch caught
the inside corner of the plate and I called him out on strikes, he whirled,
white-eyed, and swung for my skull.
Palm Sunday (our
name for parents' weekend) came in mid-July that year. The moms and dads
pontooned up to the dock in their own seaplanes or parked swank machines on the
outfield grass. The rule was no tipping. (Ten spots changed hands on the sly, a
small offering to redeem a boy's second serve or forgive his faults.) That
evening at the intracamp basketball game, the parents protected themselves from
the splinters in the bleachers by sitting on foxes and mink, on Scottish tweed,
ready to praise the least sign of grace in their ungainly offspring. As
referee, my job was to spot infractions. "Two shots," I shouted,
"in the act," raising two fingers and pointing out the culprit, my
camper. When I turned toward the foul line, he suddenly pounced on my back and
clamped my throat with a merciless grip, which I unpried, smiling, while the
parents smiled back: boys will be boys. At the bench he wept and pleaded,
"I didn't do it! I didn't do it!" He left the next day. I said
good-bye to the family: his mother, face salvaged by plastic surgery, her
bouffant living a peroxide life of its own; the father, pudgy and puzzled; and
the son, grinning. I watched them walk down to the dock; their plane skimmed
the lake, gathering speed, and
ascended into heaven.
I couldn't help identifying with that boy who wanted to be
perfect. I didn't have his fits of violence, but I fell into moody brooding and
self-pity when life didn't meet my expectations. I wanted to be a top tennis
player, but I had only made the Hiram team as a sophomore, and the moves I
brought to the game were better suited to basketball: I had quick hands,
covered a lot of court, and my best stroke was a kind of walk-on-air leaping
lunge that resembled a fallaway jump shot more than an overhead smash. At Camp
Idylwold I soon realized that I was out of my league. Most of the other
counselors beat me decisively, and the camp pro, Joe Fishback, demolished me.
No matter how hard I hit the ball, he returned it with ease, and the wonder of
it was, I never saw him run. He seemed to be waiting at the exact spot long
before even my most sharply angled shots arrived. At the end of the match I
slammed my racquet to the ground, and to make my humiliation complete, it
bounced back up and smacked me in the face.
Nothing had gone
the way I wanted that summer. My tennis game improved, but not as much as I had
wished. When my girlfriend, Michelle, arrived unexpectedly, and the whole camp
stood on the hillside cheering as I shouldered my sleeping bag and walked toward
her car, I learned that she had come not because she wanted my body but because
she had decided to go to Africa with the Peace Corps and was bound for
Dartmouth to study Swahili. I'd been jilted before, but never by a continent.
Two weeks later I received letters from both my parents,
bearing different addresses. "Your mother and I have decided to
separate," my dad wrote, and he added with characteristic elusiveness,
"I can't tell you how much I loved that house. Don't think for a minute I
didn't hate to leave, but it got to a point where I couldn't stand it any
more." I knew that was all he'd ever say, and for a moment I saw the stone
fireplace and oak bookcases he had constructed with his own hands, and I
wondered if he loved those better than he loved me. After years of listening to
Mom's monologues and Dad's silences, I was not surprised. I thought of the
photos of them when they were my age. He was a six-foot-two, well-muscled track
star, and she a bright and patrician lawyer's daughter: an all-American couple
walking arm-in-arm across the Oberlin campus with the world before them.
I had planned to
drive straight back to Ohio as soon as camp closed, but I felt bitter and
betrayed, as if they had staged all this just to hurt my feelings. I have no
home, I thought, I'm on my own. I called my friend Lenny Swift in Washington. I
admired his unflappable cool, his smart remarks at the passing scene; he could
always make me laugh. Lenny had a heart, but he never wore it on his sleeve,
and I found comfort in his caustic wit. He urged me to come to D.C. and join
him for the March on Washington. That sounded like fun to me, especially after
Lenny told me that Bob Dylan and Joan Baez would be singing. On the way, I
decided to stop off in New York to scout out a suitable garret in Greenwich
Village. Like most people my age I was auditioning identities: I saw myself at
the time as something of a dandy, an aristocratic Q flaunting his foppish tail
at the monotonous world of Os. Rather than go to graduate school as my favorite
history professor had urged, I resolved to become a famous writer. I had read
enough Jack Kerouac to assume that the place to find Real Life was with the
hoboes huddled around flaming trash cans and the dark-skinned folk who worked
the fields and sang the blues. I would write about them, the
down-and-out and dispossessed, and when I returned to my hometown
with a best-seller to my credit, a sheaf of rave reviews in my pocket, and an
exotic beauty on my arm, the local yokels would go slackjawed with desire and
Michelle would bite her lip in envy. That was my American Dream, the
I-told-you-so fantasy of a callow know-it-all who was a stranger to himself.
That was before I met Bob Moses.
Bob Moses
McComb and Liberty, Mississippi
August-September 1961
I am Bob Moses. I first came to McComb in August of 1961
with a simple purpose: to break the Solid South by applying pressure at its
strongest point. I sought out the worst part of the most intransigent state,
placed myself on the charity of the black community, located a few brave souls
who would support civil rights workers, and set up a voter registration school.
If enough people could find the courage to go down to the courthouse,
confronting the system designed to oppress them, then blacks all over the South
would take heart, the country would take notice, and maybe, one hundred years
too late, the federal government would take action. Was my effort a success? I
would be reluctant to say that. When I started out, I hoped that no one would
be killed.
A few years
earlier I was headed down a different path. With an M.A. in philosophy from
Harvard and a job teaching mathematics at the prestigious Horace Mann School in
Riverdale, New York, I was a part of what W. E. B. DuBois termed "the
talented tenth"--a black man who could succeed in the white world playing
by white rules. I had had an elitist education since I was eleven, passing a
citywide competitive exam to attend Stuyvesant High School in downtown
Manhattan. President of my senior class, I received an academic scholarship to
Hamilton, where I was one of three black students at the college.
It was at Hamilton, thanks to my French professor, that I
discovered Camus. I read The Rebel and The Plague and began asking hard
political questions: "Can revolution be humane?" "Can the
`victim' overthrow the `executioner' without assuming his office?" For a
time I believed that the only change worth working for was a change of heart,
and so I joined a group of campus Pentecostals who traveled on weekends to
Times Square to testify to the coming of the Kingdom. I considered becoming a
preacher like my grandfather, but my father had his doubts. "That's not
just any job," he said. "You've got to be called."
The pacifism of
the Society of Friends also impressed me. One summer I attended an American
Friends Service Committee international work camp in France, where I met people
who had been part of the Resistance during the Nazi occupation. The following
summer I went to Japan, where I helped build wooden steps up a slippery
hillside for the children of a nearby mental hospital. Before I flew home, a
Zen Buddhist monk invited me to spend a week at his home. Through my travels
and study I learned to think before I spoke and to mean what I said, but I
wasn't the serious brooder people took me for. What I loved best about the
Quakers was their folk dancing and hootenannies. Back in my room I listened to
Odetta, and out on a date I would strut down Amsterdam Avenue whistling show
tunes.
In the fall of
1956 I began graduate work in philosophy at Harvard. I was convinced that the
analytic method, with its insistence on clarity and precision, represented a
significant advance in thought. Previous philosophers had relied on metaphor
and rhetoric to make muddy water appear deep. I sat in the back of the class
during Paul Tillich's lectures, shaking my head and muttering, "It's all
poetry." More to my taste was Wittgenstein's axiom: "Whereof one
cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." If philosophy could streamline
its language and define its terms, then it could attain the accuracy of
mathematics with its postulates and proofs. Before long, however, I tired of
thinking about thinking and the meaning of meaning. In that remote realm of
tautologies, indexes, and
absurds, I was in danger
of forgetting that the meaning of life was no abstract speculation but my
immediate and concrete concern. I returned to Camus's dictum "I rebel,
therefore we exist" and to Lao-tse, who taught that the way to wisdom
consists in living one life well--starting small, a step at a time, with what
is near, with what is at hand.
Then in the
spring of 1958 my forty-three-year-old mother died of cancer; my father was so
distraught he had to be hospitalized at Bellevue for several months. I dropped
out of Harvard, accepted a job teaching math at Horace Mann High School, and
moved back to Harlem to look after him. My father and I had always been close;
we used to have long talks about what America denied and offered. Like many of
his generation, he had been hamstrung by the depression. Intelligent,
articulate, and handsome, he sacrificed his talents for the sake of his family,
accepting a low-paying job as a security guard at Harlem's 369th Division
Armory. He and my mother scrimped and saved to ensure that my brothers and I
would get ahead. The stress and strain took their toll: my mother once suffered
a minor breakdown, and my father would sometimes slip into fantasies that his
name was not Gregory Moses but Gary Cooper--a man brave enough, in spite of his
cowardly town, to stand up for what was right.
My only civil rights activity at that time was to
participate in the Youth March for Integrated Schools that Bayard Rustin
sponsored in Washington. Then, one day in February 1960, I saw a picture in the
New York Times of the sit-ins that had just begun in Greensboro, North
Carolina: a row of neatly dressed black students sat at a Woolworth's lunch
counter, while a crowd of white toughs in duck-tails and sleeveless T-shirts
waved a Confederate flag and shouted at their backs. Some of the students tried
to read books, others stared calmly at the camera. I was struck to the core by
the determination on their faces. They weren't cowed, and they weren't
apathetic--they meant to finish what they had begun. Here was something that
could be done. I simply had to get involved.
Over spring
break, I visited my father's brother, a teacher at Hampton Institute in
Virginia. One day I saw some students picketing stores in Newport News. I
slipped into the line of march and suddenly felt a great release. All my life I
had repressed my resentments and played it cool. Now the sense of affirmation
and the surge of energy that came from this mere gesture at protesting were
exhilarating. I had had a taste of action and wanted more. That evening I went
to a mass meeting where Reverend Wyatt Tee Walker of the Southern Christian
Leadership Conference spoke. He talked about the need to collect money to
defend the Reverend Martin Luther King from legal harassment, mentioning that
Bayard Rustin was directing a fund drive in New York.
When I got back
to Harlem, I volunteered my services to the Committee to Defend Martin Luther
King, and so every day after school, I devoted time to organizing a Harry
Belafonte fundraising rally at the armory where my father worked. But I didn't
feel right licking envelopes while others were putting their lives on the line.
I confided my discontent to Bayard Rustin, whose advice I respected.
"Go down to
Atlanta, Bob," he told me. "I'll write to Ella Baker to tell her
you're coming. She and Martin will find something for you to do."
As soon as my
teaching duties were over for the summer, I packed my bags and took a bus
headed south.
The Southern
Christian Leadership Conference office wasn't much: a small room, three women,
three desks, three telephones. They were in the midst of a voter registration
project and wanted me to do the same boring tasks I had done in New York. I
soon found myself talking a lot to Jane Stembridge, a short, peppy blond with
piercing blue eyes, a fiery spirit, and a crazy haystack of unruly hair. She
was a southern girl, a minister's daughter, who had left Union Theological
Seminary to become the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee's first
executive secretary, a job she carried out with dispatch from her
desk stuck in a corner of the SCLC office. We spent animated
afternoons discussing Kant's categorical imperative, Tillich's ultimate
concern, Sartre's terrible
freedom, and Camus's
authentic versus inauthentic existence. More pressing were our debates about
the civil rights tactics of Martin Luther King and the
SCLC, which we called
"Slick." They were in the process of replacing Ella Baker with Wyatt
Tee Walker--part of a larger plan to promote Dr. King as the leader and
spokesman of the black revolt. Jane and I thought the whole approach was too
hero-worshipping, media-centered, preacher-dominated, and authoritarian. We
agreed with Ella Baker, the midwife of SNCC, which we called "Snick,"
who had very definite ideas about organizing. She believed that the Movement
ought to seek out the small farmers, sharecroppers, and plantation workers and
start building at the grassroots instead of posturing in front of cameras. Jane
suggested that I should make a field trip to the Deep South to recruit students
for an upcoming SNCC conference in October. I would pay my own way and see for
myself what conditions were like.
At this time I
wasn't even on the SNCC staff. In fact, several of the SNCC people in Atlanta
eyed me with suspicion. Who was this soft-spoken guy in horn-rimmed glasses
with a Harvard degree? Why would someone so well educated (and with that name!)
just happen to show up from New York? Was he an FBI spy? A Communist agent
provocateur? Although I never tried to impose my views, from the start I made
it clear that I thought the Movement in America was part of a larger world
picture. Ella Baker, whose impact on all of us was enormous, argued that what
we were after was much more than equal access to greasy burgers at the
five-and-dime. That didn't stop me, however, from joining any picket line I
saw. I marched for hours with Julian Bond and the other Atlanta University
students in front of a local A&P that served mostly blacks but refused to
hire even one. Another time I was arrested while picketing for the Southern
Conference Educational Fund.
"How did you
get involved with the SCEF?" Julian asked.
"I heard
about it at a lecture."
"On
what?"
"Ramifications of Goedel's Theorem."
"Oh," he
said, raising one eyebrow.
As a result of my arrest, Martin Luther King summoned me
to his study at Ebenezer Baptist Church. I knew that some people in SNCC had
been expressing doubts about me to King; he wanted to see for himself. Face to
face, I felt less in the presence of a national symbol than of a troubled man a
few inche shorter than I was and a few years older. After some painful silences
and a smattering of small talk, King finally said, "We have to be careful.
The FBI thinks the whole Civil Rights Movement is a Communist plot. I'd advise
against picketing with the SCEF."
I didn't like his
advice, but I took it. Then I changed the subject. Could I move my operations
for the SCLC over to the Butler Street YMCA where I was staying? "Of
course, of course," King answered, and we parted on that cordial note of
agreement.
When Ella Baker
heard about my visit to Ebenezer, she was upset.
"Why, Martin himself is friends with Anne and Carl Braden and
several of the other SCEF people. What right does he have to tell you to stay
away from them?"
"It doesn't
matter," I said. "I'm heading south in a few days anyway." "Well, I wish I could join you. Wyatt
Walker just evicted Jane from the SCLC office, and I'm being sent to New York.
When you get to Mississippi, make sure you talk to Amzie Moore. Before I leave
I'll give you his address, and I'm going to give those snooty Atlanta students
a piece of my mind about the dangers of red-baiting. I won't have that. When
I've finished with them, they won't say another word against you, Robert."
The next day
Julian came by and apologized. I told him about my plan to tour the South.
"So `Moses' is finally going to Mississippi," he said, inspecting my
face for signs of insanity. "I wish you luck."
One day in late
August I knocked on the door to Amzie Moore's house in Cleveland, Mississippi.
He was an NAACP organizer who had been working to change things in the Delta
ever since he came home from World War II. The floodlights that radiated out
from his brick house and the rifle he held on his lap as we talked testified to
how precarious his position was. But he was dug in like a tree by the water and
determined to defend himself. A strong, broad-shouldered man who looked like he
could handle himself in a fight, Amzie made me welcome immediately, and for a
week, we reconnoitered the area and discussed strategy. We went from shack to
shack, and he showed me scenes that I'll never forget: children
with swollen ankles, bloated bellies, and suppurating sores; children whose one
meal a day was grits and gravy; children who didn't know the taste of milk,
meat, fruits, or vegetables; children who drank contaminated water from a
distant well, slept five in a bed, and didn't have the energy to brush the
flies from their faces. We were in the Delta, but it might as well have been
Haiti.
"What can be
done?" he asked me simply.
I mentioned the
sit-ins and demonstrations going on elsewhere.
"No. No. That won't work here. They'd squash that
like a bug and nothin' more would be heard. It's the politicians who control
things in this state. If you can hurt them, things will change. The key is the
vote."
Amzie convinced
me that the best tactic was not to attack segregation head-on, but to focus
exclusively on voter registration. Unlike the other NAACP leaders I had met, he
was enthusiastic about bringing in SNCC workers and recruiting local students
to help.
"It's the young
people who are gonna carry this thing through," he said. "The adults
are too afraid. But if the students show enough courage and
commitment, they'll back them up."
Amzie showed me a booklet put out by the Southern Regional
Council that outlined the voting situation. Mississippi, as usual, was the
worst: although 40 percent of the state was black, only 5 percent of those
eligible were registered, and most didn't dare vote. We taped a map of
Mississippi on the wall and hauled out Amzie's old Underwood. He extemporized
on life in the Delta while I typed up a rough draft of a voter registration
project to present to SNCC. A few years earlier, Amzie and a Catholic priest in
Mound Bayou--Father John Lebouvre--had set up a voting school in his church.
That would be our model. We would run off copies of the state constitution, and
SNCC workers would teach the local people how to register. We knew we faced a
tough, dangerous job, but my eyes gleamed with the vision of thousands of black
people descending on local courthouses and gaining control of the Delta.
"Don't get starry-eyed," Amzie would caution. "Things are gonna
get real ugly round here before they get pretty. I've seen how mean these
whites folks can be."
At the conference
in October, Amzie Moore outlined our voter registration proposal. SNCC, which
could never resist a dare or a challenge, was impressed with Amzie's
presentation and decided to go ahead. I was named director of a voter
registration project to start the following summer.
I taught one more year at Horace Mann, saving as much
money as I could for what was ahead. Each night I read up on the South, studied
the Mississippi constitution and maps of the state, planned, meditated, and
then, before going to bed, listened to Odetta sing "I'm Going Back to the
Red Clay Country."
When summer came,
I returned to Mississippi, but it looked like the project wouldn't get off the
ground. SNCC was in disarray over the question of whether voter registration
wasn't a diversion from "direct action" demonstrations against
segregation; Amzie was swamped with personal problems. Then a letter came from
Curtis Bryant in McComb. He had read about SNCC's voter registration plans in
Jet and wanted us to set up a project in Pike County.
"White
folks around here are really upset about these Freedom Riders," Amzie
said. "Maybe things down there won't be so tight."
So one day in
early August I moved my base of operations to McComb, a tough railroad town in
the southwestern part of the state.
Bryant, a
brusque, energetic man with a high-pitched voice and a warm handshake, was one
of the stalwarts of the Movement. He ran a barbershop in front of his house in
Baertown, a small black community the city fathers had deliberately zoned
outside the town limits. He also operated a loading crane for the Illinois
Central, whose tracks, along with the Gulf, Western&Ohio, cut right through
the heart of McComb. On the west side of town were paved streets; a few blocks
of retail stores, and the white suburbs, spread out under a canopy of shade
trees and embroidered with flowers. On the east, Burgland, the all-black town
with its shabby stores, ramshackle houses, and dirt roads. The general air of
grinding poverty was broken by the occasional brick house of somebody who
worked for the railroad.
Bryant took me in
and introduced me to as many people as he could. "This is my friend, Bob
Moses," he'd say. "He's here to help us, so I want you to help
him." Ernest Nobles, who ran the local laundry, said he'd keep me looking
good; Aylene Quin promised food at her restaurant; Mama Cotton provided
housing; and Webb Owens, "Supercool Daddy," volunteered to go
door-to-door with me to raise money for the Freedom School.
At first, children stopped playing hopscotch and huddled
together as I walked by "He's a Freedom Rider," they whispered. Their
wary parents would pass me on the road without meeting my eyes, but I could
feel their stares and questions jabbing into my back. Many were frightened; I
meant nothing but trouble. I would tell them, "Get ready, the Movement is
coming your way," but that wasn't anything they wanted to hear. One man
stooped down behind the tomato plants in his garden to avoid me. Another time,
a little girl came to the front door and said, "Mama say she not
here."
It was hard work,
but a few listened. I would take out a registration form and ask, "Have
you ever filled one of these out?" They would shake their heads and look
uneasy. Voting was white folks' business. "Would you like to sit down now
and try?" I would encourage them to imagine themselves at the county
courthouse in Magnolia actually answering the twenty-one questions,
interpreting a section of the Mississippi Constitution, and stating in a
paragraph the duties and obligations of citizenship. Whether they passed or not
was at the discretion of the registrar, whose job was to see that they didn't.
People listened
and gave what they could--a nickle, a dime, a quarter--to support a handful of
SNCC workers. Soon I was joined by John Hardy, Reggie Robinson, Travis Britt,
and a few others who had been in jail in Jackson for taking part in the Freedom
Rides. Also, several of the local students got involved. One in particular,
Brenda Travis, always brighteyed and brimming with questions, would sit on a
family's porch talking to them for hours if necessary until they were convinced
of the need to register. Thanks to Curtis Bryant, who, in addition to being
head of the local NAACP, a deacon in his church, a Sunday school teacher, and a
scoutmaster, was also a high official in the Freemasons, we were able to set up
a Freedom School in the Masonic Hall over the Burgland grocery store. Saint
Paul's Methodist Church, across the street, agreed to let us hold meetings
there too.
One day in early
August I was at the Freedom School preparing for class when a slim,
serious-faced young man, who was about twenty, came in. He scrutinized me with
wide-eyed intensity.
"Are you
Martin Luther King?"
"No. I'm Bob
Moses. Why did you think I was King?"
"I heard
talk about some big secret thing goin' on, so I come to see for myself "
"Where are
you from?"
"Summit."
"What's your
name?"
"Hollis
Watkins."
"Are you in
school?"
"No. But I
got plans.
"I've got
plans too. "
I told him about the voter registration project, and even
though I wasn't Martin Luther King, he wanted to help. His friend Curtis Hayes
would help too. They began to recruit. People relate to them as the sons of
local farmers who dressed and acted in down-home ways. I soon learned to scrap
my suit and tie for boots, bib overalls, and a chambray shirt; the other SNCC
workers did the same. Those of us from the North learned to slow down to the
rhythms of the South.
The people
flocked to our school. When we explained the power of the vote, they squirmed
in their chairs and glanced at each other. One heavyset woman up front fanned
herself harder every time I mentioned the word freedom. Within a few days we
sent several students to the Pike County courthouse in Magnolia. When they
learned that they had passed, we held a party that lasted long into the night.
It seemed for the moment as if everything would be easy. Then the local paper,
the Enterprise-Journal, ran an article on what we were trying to do. Whites
became alarmed. The next day, the registrar rejected our students, and that
evening one of them, in an incident apparently unrelated to voter registration,
was shot at. As the news spread, I noted the panic in people's eyes; they saw a
connection. Fewer and fewer came to the Freedom School.
Meanwhile,
farmers in nearby Amite and Walthall counties heard about SNCC and asked if we
could help them, too. As dangerous as McComb was, the surrounding areas, with
long histories of violence, were much worse. In Amite only one black was
registered; in Walthall, none. If we had serious difficulties in McComb, what
chance did we have in those places? But I knew that if we turned down the
farmers, we would lose the trust and destroy the hope of the people. If we
shied away from the toughest areas, everyone would know we could be
intimidated, and the fragile project would fall apart. We decided that John
Hardy should take on Walthall while I went into Amite, a name that meant
"friendship" in French and "trouble" to me.
© 1996 William
Heath