Civil Rights Events

Mississippi 1962

James Meredith

 

James Meredith was born June 25, 1933, in Kosciusko, Mississippi. He was one of ten children of Roxy Patterson Meredith and Moses Cap, a poor farmer in Kosciusko. As a young child, Meredith became aware of racism. He would refuse the nickels and dimes that a local white man regularly gave to black children, calling the gifts degrading. More painful was the realization he made as a young man on a trip to visit relatives in Detroit, where he saw blacks and whites sharing the same public facilities. He rode the train home from this brush with integration, and when he arrived in Memphis, the conductor told him to leave the whites-only car. "I cried all the way home," Meredith later recalled, "and vowed to devote myself to changing the degrading conditions of black people." He also had other ambitions and goals. Ever since a childhood visit to a white doctor's office, he had harbored a dream of attending the University of Mississippi, the physician's alma mater.

 

After high school, in 1951, Meredith joined the U.S. Air Force. He rose to the rank of staff sergeant, earned credits toward a college degree, and served in the KOREAN WAR. Following his discharge in 1960, he attended the all-black Jackson State College, but the courses he wanted to take were offered only at the state university. As a 28-year-old, he followed with hopefulness the speeches of President John F. Kennedy, which promised greater enjoyment of opportunity for all U.S. citizens. Change was in the air, and many African Americans were heartened by the portents in Kennedy's 1961 inaugural address. On the same day that Kennedy became president, Meredith applied for admission to the University of Mississippi.

 

The school turned down his application. Mississippi still practiced SEGREGATION, and that meant that no African Americans could attend the all-white university. Even seven years after BROWN V. BOARD OF EDUCATION, southern states resisted complying with the U.S. Supreme Court's decision that compulsory segregation was unconstitutional. Knowing that he had a constitutional right that the state refused to recognize, Meredith turned to the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund. This arm of the civil rights organization, accustomed to fighting segregation cases, extended help to him. Meredith and his attorneys fought some 30 court actions against the state.

 

At last, a federal court ruled that a qualified student could not be denied admission on the ground of race. Meredith had won, but the court order infuriated segregationists. Playing to popular sentiment, Mississippi Governor Ross Barnett promised to stop Meredith. Barnett pressured the state legislature to give him authority over university admissions, a power that usually was exercised by the state college board (James 1-2).

 

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 officials 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." (James Integrates 1).

 

By September of 1962, the situation had escalated to the point where President John F. Kennedy had to get involved. While not overly concerned with civil rights before 1960, JFK had won his election largely thanks to African American support and was quickly taking a greater interest in desegregation. He sent Chief U.S. Marshal J.P. McShane to escort James Meredith into the school. Three times J.P. McShane and a small group of unarmed deputies tried to enroll Meredith at Ole Miss. Three times they were blocked by armed state troopers sent by Ross Barnett (James Enrollment 1).

 

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 (James Integrates 2).

 

In a series of telephone calls in late September 1962 President Kennedy tried to convince Governor Barnett to let James Meredith enter the campus to register for classes. … If Kennedy couldn't sway Barnett with words, he would have to use federal troops, a move that could provoke violence and cost Kennedy precious votes in the South.

 

The stand-off had a Civil War flavor. An old-style Southern Democrat, Ross Barnett declared that Mississippi segregation laws trumped Congress and the U.S. Supreme Court. President Kennedy was also a Democrat, but a young, bred-in-the-bone Yankee from Massachusetts. Having won the presidency by a tiny margin, Kennedy needed the continued loyalty of Southern Democrats. But Barnett's repeated defiance of federal law forced JFK into a risky confrontation.

 

From September 15 to September 30, Bobby Kennedy and Ross Barnett had more than a dozen phone conversations.

 

Historian Bill Doyle, author of American Insurrection: The Battle of Oxford, Mississippi, 1962, says that Ross Barnett knew integration was inevitable, but needed a way to let James Meredith into Ole' Miss without losing face with his white, pro-segregation supporters. "Ross Barnett desperately wanted the Kennedys to flood Mississippi with combat troops because that's the only way Ross Barnett could tell his white segregationist backers, 'Hey I did everything I could, I fought them, but to prevent bloodshed in the end I made a deal,'" Doyle says.

 

On September 27, 1962 Bobby Kennedy and Ross Barnett agreed on an extraordinary plan: James Meredith would arrive at the Ole' Miss campus in Oxford accompanied by at least 25 armed Federal Marshals (at the time, Marshals were Justice Department agents normally used to transport prisoners, not trained for combat). Ross Barnett would make a show of blocking Meredith, but be forced to step aside when the Marshals drew their guns.

 

Robert F. Kennedy: I will send the Marshals that I have available up there in Memphis and there will be about 25 or 30 of them and they will come with Mr. Meredith and they will arrive at wherever the gate is and I will have the head Marshal pull a gun and I will have the rest of them have their hands on their guns and their holsters. And then as I understand it, they will go through and get in and you will make sure that law and order is preserved and that no harm will be done to Mr. McShane and Mr. Meredith.

 

Ross Barnett: Oh, yes.

 

RFK: And then I think you will see that’s accomplished?

 

RB: …  I was under the impression that they were all going to pull their guns. This could be very embarrassing. We got a big crowd here and if one pulls his gun and we all turn it would be very embarrassing. Isn’t it possible to have them all pull their guns?

 

RFK: I hate to have them all draw their guns, as I think it could create harsh feelings. Isn't it sufficient if I have one man draw his gun and the others keep their hands on their holsters?

 

RB: They must all draw their guns. Then they should point their guns at us and then we could step aside. This could be very embarrassing down here for us. It is necessary.

 

By the end of the day, the Mississippi governor and the attorney general decided to scrap their plan because it was too dangerous. A mob had gotten word of Meredith's imminent arrival and had begun to descend on Oxford. Barnett and Kennedy feared the staged showdown would spark a riot.

 

When Bobby Kennedy could not get Governor Barnett to comply with the order of the Supreme Court, President Kennedy stepped in. On September 29 and 30, 1962, JFK had a series of conversations with Governor Barnett. He hoped to manage the crisis by telephone. Their first call took place at 2 p.m. on Friday, September 29.

 

President Kennedy apparently thought Barnett was a pushover. After the call, he turned to his brother and said, "You've been fighting a sofa pillow all week." But JFK was wrong. According to civil rights historian Taylor Branch, Ross Barnett had the president and attorney general wrapped around his finger.

 

“They're never sure whether he's making a fool of them or they're making a fool of him. But they know as the evenings go on, they feel less and less in control, so the suspicion starts to rise that maybe Barnett's making a fool of them."

 

While Barnett and Kennedy were secretly negotiating by phone, radio stations across the South were blaring bulletins about the situation. White racists were grabbing their guns and heading for Oxford.

 

Rather than send army troops to escort Meredith to Ole' Miss, President Kennedy dispatched scores of Federal Marshals to Mississippi - lightly armed men clad awkwardly in suits, ties and gas masks. At the same time, JFK wanted Ross Barnett to assure him that Mississippi patrolmen would help maintain law and order as the threat of a race riot on the university campus in Oxford grew.

 

Despite Governor Barnett's promise [that highway patrolmen would maintain order], he did not maintain order. Though he'd been privately negotiating with the White House, Barnett made a defiant speech at a Saturday night Ole' Miss football game. He was cheered on by some 40,000 fans.

 

The next day, September 30, 1962, hundreds of outraged protestors flooded Oxford to block Meredith's expected arrival. At 12:45 p.m., Bobby Kennedy made an angry call to Barnett. The attorney general warned that if Barnett didn't let Meredith register, President Kennedy would expose their secret telephone negotiations in a televised speech scheduled that evening.

 

The attorney general's threat worked. Barnett knew that if his segregationist supporters learned he had made a covert deal with the Kennedys, his political career would be over. So, to keep the secret, Barnett agreed to the Kennedy plan: get Meredith safely lodged on campus that evening so he could register for classes Monday morning.

 

On Sunday, September 30, 1962 at 6 p.m., James Meredith was escorted onto the University of Mississippi campus in Oxford by a convoy of Federal Marshals. While he got settled in one of the school dorms, more than 2,500 angry students and outside agitators swarmed around the main campus building, the Lyceum. President Kennedy was informed of Meredith's arrival and went on national television that night to announce this apparent victory and explain that it had been achieved without the use of federal soldiers. He reminded viewers that, "Americans are free, in short, to disagree with the law but not to disobey it." Kennedy continued: "For in a government of laws and not of men, no man, however prominent or powerful, and no mob, however unruly or boisterous, is entitled to defy a court of law" (John 1-6).

 

White students surround Meredith's dorm and the registration office. They chant: "Two-four-one-three, we hate Kennedy! Kill the nigger-loving bastards!" Determined to lynch Meredith, armed Klansmen from around the state and as far away as Selma and Birmingham Alabama swarm into Oxford. The crowd, a volatile mixture of KKK, students, and townsmen, grows to more than 2,000. The mob is led by former Army Major-General Edwin Walker, who had been forced to retire when he refused to stop distributing racist hate literature to his soldiers. They attack the Marshals guarding Meredith with bricks, bottles, guns, and fire bombs. Mississippi state troopers charged with maintaining "law and order" disappear, leaving the Marshals to face the horde 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 [a local jukebox repairman] is also killed under circumstances that remain unclear to this day. With tear gas running low and the raging horde closing in, the Marshals plea for reinforcements. President Kennedy calls up Troop E of the Mississippi National Guard, but only 67 men 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 United States Army to restore order. An 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.”

 

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. Some 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 (James Integrates 3-5).

 

Though President Kennedy and Governor Barnett talked several more times, the rioting in Oxford forced both men to do what they wanted most to avoid: Barnett had to step aside without his valiant last stand, and Kennedy had to storm Mississippi with U.S. Army troops. (John 6-7).

 

Being for integration meant being on the wrong side of the powerful White Citizens' Councils, the Ku Klux Klan and the State Sovereignty Commission, a spy agency.

 

White professors on campus who supported Meredith's admission faced intimidation. Marleah Kaufman Hobbs' husband, a political science professor, got death threats. She was a fine arts grad student at the time. Now 89 years old, she remembers when the riots broke out.

 

"That night the cracking of the guns, the planes flying overhead bringing in more National Guard — we didn't sleep at all that night. It was the changing of the world," she says.

 

Bishop Duncan Gray Jr., then an Episcopal priest in Oxford, tried to squelch a mob that had gathered atop a Confederate monument on campus.

 

"Of course, they grabbed me and pulled me down. I'd been hit a few times before, but that's when I took the roughest beating," says Gray, who is white.

 

Gray says the night forever changed the dynamics in Mississippi's struggle to preserve white supremacy.

 

"It was a horrible thing, and I'm sorry we had to go through that, but it certainly marked a very definite turning point. And maybe a learning experience for some people," he says. "I think even the ardent segregationists didn't want to see violence like that again" (Elliott 1-2).

 

The French journalist Paul Guihard, on assignment for the London Daily Sketch … was found dead behind the Lyceum building with a gunshot wound to the back. One hundred-sixty US Marshals, one-third of the group, were injured in the melee, and 40 soldiers and National Guardsmen were wounded.

 

On Monday morning, October 1, 1962, Meredith walked across the battered campus and registered for classes.

 

The US government fined Barnett $10,000 and sentenced him to jail for contempt, but the charges were later dismissed by the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals.

 

Many students harassed Meredith during his two semesters on campus but others accepted him.

 

According to first-person accounts chronicled in Nadine Cohodas’ book The Band Played Dixie (1997), students living in Meredith’s dorm bounced basketballs on the floor just above his room through all hours of the night. Other students ostracized him: when Meredith walked into the cafeteria for meals, the students eating would turn their backs. If Meredith sat at a table with other students, all of whom were white, the students would immediately get up and go to another table (Denise 1-2).

 

Hunter Bear wrote: Meredith had a terrible time up there. Medgar [Evers] was on the phone constantly bolstering him. I was sitting in Medgar's office while he was doing that. Meredith was befriended by a few courageous white people on the campus, — notably Jim Silver of the History Department, who later became a very good friend of ours and wrote the book Mississippi, the Closed Society. (Interview 19).

 

When Meredith graduated from Ole Miss in August 1963 (with a BA in political science), he wore a segregationist's "Never" button upside down on his black gown.

 

He 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’" (James Integrates 6). 

 

Works cited:

 

Denise, Carletta.  “October 1, 1962: James Meredith Enters The University Of Mississippi.”  Black Then: Discovering Our History.  October 1, 2018.  Web.  https://blackthen.com/%E2%80%8Boctober-1-1962-james-meredith-enters-the-university-of-mississippi/

 

Elliott, Debbie.  “Integrating Ole Miss: A Transformative, Deadly Riot.”  NPR.  October 1, 2012.  Web.  https://www.npr.org/2012/10/01/161573289/integrating-ole-miss-a-transformative-deadly-riot

 

“Interview: Hunter Bear (John Salter).”  Veterans of the Civil Rights Movement.  Web.  https://www.crmvet.org/nars/hunteri.htm

“James Howard Meredith - Further Readings.”  University of Mississippi Free Legal Encyclopedia.  Web.  http://law.jrank.org/pages/8541/Meredith-James-Howard.html

 

“James Meredith Integrates 'Ole Miss (Sept-Oct).”  Civil Rights Movement History 1962.  Web.  https://www.crmvet.org/tim/timhis62.htm#1962jackson

 

“James Meredith's Enrollment in Ole Miss: Riot & Reaction.”  Study.com.  Web.  https://study.com/academy/lesson/james-merediths-enrollment-in-ole-miss-riot-reaction.html

 

“John F. Kennedy: The Mississippi Crisis.”  American Public Media.  Web.  http://americanradioworks.publicradio.org/features/prestapes/a5.html



Civil Rights Events

Mississippi 1962

Diane Nash Defies Court Sentence

 

By 1962 the Freedom Movement fight against segregation is slowly grinding to a halt. Two years of sit-ins have managed to desegregate some public facilities in some college-towns of the Mid- and Upper-South, and after the Freedom Rides all bus terminals serving interstate commerce are now no longer segregated — in theory. But across the region most public facilities remain segregated by local law and the very few Afro-Americans who dare sit at the front of a bus still face both vigilante violence and likely arrest on trumped up charges of "disorderly conduct" or "disturbing the peace." And by 1962 most student integration campaigns in the Deep South have been crushed by intensified police repression and Klan terrorism. In Albany Georgia, for example, public facilities are still segregated despite a powerful SNCC-organized movement with deep support in the Afro-American community and mass marches led by Dr. King resulting in over 750 arrests.

 

It is 100 years since the Civil War (or the "War of Northern Aggression" as some southern politicians refer to it). The years 1960 to 1965 mark the centennial of that war. On the national level, Centennial programs and ceremonies are conducted with maximum deference to the sensitivities of southern whites and little mention of slavery as the conflict's defining issue. Nor is there much acknowledgement of Black suffering under ante- bellum slavery, or Reconstruction, or the realities of ongoing segregation and denial of basic human rights in the current-day South of the 1960s. And in the South itself, commemorations glorify the "lost cause," exalt the sanctity and purity of white womanhood, and praise the "southern way of life" and its defenders such as the White Citizens Councils and the Ku Klux Klan.

 

During the 1960 presidential campaign, John F. Kennedy assured Afro-American voters and northern liberals that he would address equality of opportunity with the "stroke of the president's pen." But once in office JFK's priority is foreign affairs and Cold War anti-communism. Unwilling to offend southern segregationists in Congress who he needs for his military and diplomatic initiatives, JFK offers little public support for the student sit-ins and minimal federal action in defense of Black voting rights.

 

When forced by public pressure to take action against mob violence during the Freedom Rides and the Meredith-'Ole Miss crises, Kennedy's assertion of federal authority is reluctant and tepid. Civil rights supporters and northern liberals press him to enact new civil rights legislation but he declines, arguing that there is no chance at all of doing so in the 87th Congress (1961-1962) against the united and adamant opposition of the Southern Bloc of Senators. And as a practical politician he knows that no Democrat can be elected president — or reelected — without the political support of the "Solid South" (Campaign 1).

 

By the fall of 1961, a year and a half of nonviolent sit-in and freedom ride campaigns by SNCC, CORE, and the NAACP have managed to desegregate some public facilities in some college-towns of the Mid- and Upper-South. But in the Deep South states of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina, direct action campaigns have been brought to a standstill by legal assaults, mass arrests and police brutality — at least for the moment.

 

Following SNCC's decision to pursue both direct action and voter registration, in the fall of '61 Diane Nash, James Bevel (the two of them newly married), Bernard Lafayette, Paul Brooks, and other direct action proponents begin organizing a "Move On Mississippi" (MOM) campaign in Jackson. With its large Afro-American population and two Black colleges they hope to build a nonviolent student-led protest movement that can both challenge segregation and register voters as was done in Nashville.

 

But Mississippi is not Tennessee. Fear lays heavy over the Afro-American community and it's tough going. Half a year earlier, the Tougaloo Nine, had been immediately arrested for the "crime" of trying to read in the white-only public library. When Jackson State College students attempted to hold a support vigil and march they were brutally dispersed by club-swinging police using tear gas and attack-dogs — as were adult supporters outside the courthouse when the nine were arraigned. The arrival of the Freedom Riders in May inspired the community with hope, but after the riders were incarcerated in the notorious Parchman Prison the state's lesson regarding the price of protest was not lost on Jackson's Black community.

 

Nevertheless the MOM organizers dig in and begin holding workshops for Black students on nonviolent strategies and tactics. But before they have a chance to mount their first protest the Jackson police hit them with a preemptive strike. Nash, Bevel, and Lafayette are arrested on felony charges of "Contributing to the Delinquency of Minors." Though the students attending the seminars have not violated any laws the city prosecutor claims that merely teaching them about nonviolent resistance constitutes "contributing" to their future "delinquency" — a police-state legal ploy that utterly tramples underfoot the First Amendment right of freedom of speech and association

.

The felony charges come with high bail amounts that SNCC can ill-afford. If they or others continue teaching nonviolent resistance they'll be arrested again and have to sit in jail awaiting trial and appeal — a lengthy process. As a practical matter, the arrests stifle MOM's effort to build a direct action movement in Jackson.

 

 In municipal court the three are quickly convicted on the "contributing" charges. In addition to $2,000 fines (equal to $16,000 each in 2016) Bernard and James are sentenced to three years in prison, Diane to two years. They remain free on bond while their convictions are appealed. But under the legal rules they first have to appeal up through the various levels of Mississippi courts — all of which will certainly ignore the unconstitutionality of their arrest and conviction. Only after the state Supreme Court rejects their appeal (as everyone knows it will) can they appeal to federal court where, after more time-consuming and costly hearings at various levels they expect that the charges will be dismissed on constitutional grounds. The Mississippi authorities know the convictions will eventually be overturned in federal court, but meanwhile they prevent SNCC workers from organizing protests in Jackson — perhaps for years if the court proceedings can be strung out long enough.

 

Late in April of 1962, Diane declares that her commitment to nonviolence precludes any further cooperation with the biased and corrupt Mississippi judicial system. Though she is pregnant with her and Bevel's first child, she withdraws her appeal and appears before the sentencing judge to turn herself in and begin serving her two-year prison sentence.

 

“To appeal further would necessitate my sitting through another trial in a Mississippi court, and I have reached the conclusion that I can no longer cooperate with the evil and unjust court system of this state. I subscribe to the philosophy of nonviolence; this is one of the basic tenets of nonviolence — that you refuse to cooperate with evil. The only condition under which I will leave jail will be if the unjust and untrue charges against me are completely dropped.

 

“The southern courts in which we are being tried are completely corrupt. ... The immorality of these courts involves several factors. They are completely lacking in integrity because we are being arrested and tried on charges that have nothing to do with the real issues. The real reason we are arrested is that we are opposing segregation, but the courts are not honest enough to state this frankly and charge us with this. Instead they hide behind phony charges — breach of peace in Jackson, criminal anarchy in Louisiana, conspiracy to violate trespass laws in Talledega, Alabama.

 

“But over and above the immorality of cooperating with this evil court system, there is an even larger reason why we must begin to stay in jail. If we do not do so, we lose our opportunity to reach the community and society with a great moral appeal and thus bring about basic change in people and in society.

 

“[My child] will be a black child born in Mississippi and thus wherever he is born he will be in prison. I believe that if I go to jail now it may help hasten that day when my child and all children will be free — not only on the day of their birth but for all of their lives.”

 

Meanwhile, Bevel and Bernard continue their appeal so as to overturn the legal fiction that teaching nonviolence to students amounts to a form of contributing to their delinquency.

 

The bold defiance of Diane Nash places the authorities in an uncomfortable position. The municipal court convictions and prison sentences were accomplished with little notice by the press and appeals through the state judiciary are unlikely to attract much media attention. But incarcerating a young mother-to-be in state prison on bogus "contributing" charges that are utterly without legal merit risks a national publicity backlash of exactly the kind that the Freedom Movement is proving itself adept at provoking (Diane 1-3).

 

“When I surrendered, I sat in the front seat of the courtroom and the bailiff told me to move back and I thought ‘I [might be here] for two years, I’m not moving anywhere,’” she says. “So they charged me with contempt of court for refusing to move to the back.”

 

 

The contempt of court sentence lasted for 10 days. While in jail, the only thing on Nash’s mind was her unborn child. She was determined to do everything she could so that her child would enter a world that was equal for all Americans, regardless of race.

 

 

After serving out her sentence for contempt, the judge declined to hear Nash’s other case. Nash believes the federal government tapped her telephone line and listened in when she told organizations in the Civil Rights Movement that she was pregnant and headed to jail for up to two years. On the heels of the horrific imagery of the bloodied and beaten Freedom Riders that had been spread far and wide, they surmised that Mississippi didn’t want to find itself, once again, at the center of a national political debate.

 

 

As a result, the government reduced Nash’s sentence for “contributing to the delinquency of minors” without formally addressing it. This left Nash in a predicament. She didn’t want the prejudiced justice system she had been fighting against to think that she was indebted to it. She was ready and willing to serve her full sentence, after all.

 

 

“When I got home, I wrote Judge Moore a certified return-receipt letter. I said, ‘In case you should change your mind and you want me, here’s where you can reach me,’” Nash recalls. And though the judge never took her up on the offer, Nash was always ready to do what was necessary to make a mark. To change the world, she says with a laugh, “sometimes you have to be bad” (Morgan 7-9).

 

 

The Bevel’s daughter Sherrilynn is born later that year while her parents continue their Freedom Movement organizing in the Deep South, her mother with SNCC and her father with SCLC — soon they will be in Birmingham leading a decisive direct action campaign against segregation. Bernard Lafayette marries NAACP youth leader Colia Lidell and together they move into Selma, Alabama, where they begin organizing what eventually becomes the Selma Voting Rights Campaign and The March to Montgomery, the capstone voting-rights campaign of the 1960s. And that fall, a few months after Diane forces Mississippi to suspend her sentence, students working with the North Jackson NAACP Youth Council pick up the direct action torch by first organizing a Black boycott of the Jackson State Fair and then a Christmas boycott of the city's white merchants (Diane 4).

 

 Works cited:

 

“Diane Nash Defies the Mississippi Judicial System (April-May).” Civil Rights Movement History 1962.  Web.  https://www.crmvet.org/tim/timhis62.htm#1962jackson

 

 

Morgan, Thad.  “How Freedom Rider Diane Nash Risked Her Life to Desegregate the South.”  History.  March 8, 2018.  Web.  https://www.history.com/news/diane-nash-freedom-rider-civil-rights-movement.

 

 

“The Campaign for a Second Emancipation Proclamation.”  Civil Rights Movement History 1962.  Web.  https://www.crmvet.org/tim/timhis62.htm#1962jackson



Civil Rights Events

 Mississippi 1961

McComb Project Fails

Here is a useful map of Mississippi.  https://socketize.com/7124/no7141/

Who was Bob Moses?

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."  …

 In the fall of 1956 I began graduate work in philosophy at Harvard.  … Before long, however, I tired of thinking about thinking and the meaning of meaning. In that remote realm of tautologies, indexes, and surds, I was in danger of forgetting that the meaning of life was no abstract speculation but my immediate and concrete concern.  …

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 (Heath 1-3).

“The sits-in woke me up,” recalled Harlem, New York-native Robert “Bob” Moses, discussing how his involvement with southern struggle began. When he first arrived in Mississippi in the summer of 1960, there was no student movement in the state. Moses was sent by Ella Baker to find students from the Deep South to participate in a SNCC conference that October in Atlanta. SNCC’s voter registration efforts began when Bob Moses met Cleveland, Mississippi NAACP president Amzie Moore, one of the people Miss Baker had put him in contact with. Moore decided to attend the October conference and placed the idea of voter registration on SNCC’s table.

Moses learned of the denial of Black voting rights from his discussions with Amzie Moore. “I was taught about the denial of the right to vote behind the Iron Curtain in Europe; I never knew that there was denial of the right to vote behind a Cotton Curtain here in the United States.” Moore also told Moses that he wanted to use the energy of the student activists in SNCC for voter registration. The young math teacher promised to come back the following summer after his classes at the Horace Mann school were out.

When Moses returned in 1961, Moore told him he was not quite ready to begin organizing in the Delta and sent him to his NAACP colleague, C.C. Bryant, in McComb. There, with other local community leaders, Bob Moses began SNCC’s first voter registration organizing effort.

What SNCC workers learned while working in that small Southwest Mississippi city, and the surrounding rural counties, forever shaped SNCC’s organizing style. Moses nurtured the development of local grassroots leaders, and he recognized the untapped potential power and unheard voice of locals who spoke up at meetings and participated in voter registration efforts. ‘‘Leadership is there in the people,’’ he said. ‘‘You don’t have to worry about where your leaders are, how are we going to get some leaders…If you go out and work with your people, then the leadership will emerge” (Bob Moses 1-2).

Herbert Lee

A Wisconsin Republican, John Doar had been asked to stay on in the Kennedy Justice Department partly because he had pioneered a go-out-and-poke-around-for-yourself approach to civil rights lawsuits, which made him unusual among Washington desk-bound lawyers.  With Moses, Doar visited Negro farmers who were afraid to come to registration meetings because of the intangible reality of rural life—ominous messages maids and sharecroppers were hearing—and several were particularly worried about signs of anger on the part of E. H. Hunt, a state representative of local influence, against Herbert Lee, an NAACP farmer who attended Moses’ registration meetings.  Doar promised to drive out to Lee’s farm on his next trip, but he found waiting at his office the next day a message from Moses that Hunt had just shot Lee to death in full public view outside the Liberty cotton gin (Branch 50-51).

Herbert Lee had played a key role in supporting the Amite County voter registration movement. He helped found the Amite branch of the NAACP along with E.W. Steptoe in 1953, and he was an active member even after law enforcement began cracking down on the organization in 1954. As a prosperous independent dairy farmer, Lee could sell his goods across state lines where he would get a better price and protect himself from the economic pressures from local whites for his civil rights work. When SNCC came to Amite to help Steptoe register blacks to vote, Lee offered to ferry activists around the county as they canvassed the area to recruit registration applicants. Because of his economic independence, Lee had the freedom to openly fight the area’s oppressive racial policies, but this would draw the ire of his white neighbors (Ramsey-Smith 68).

  

Herbert Lee was the first local person to be killed because of his involvement with SNCC. On September 25, 1961, Lee drove to the cotton gin in Liberty, Mississippi. State legislator E.H. Hurst approached Lee with a gun in his hand saying he wanted to talk. “I won’t talk to you unless you put the gun down,” Lee said. Hurst ran towards Lee’s truck and shot him.

The murder took place in broad daylight in front of a dozen people. “Lee’s body lay on the ground that morning for two hours, uncovered, until they finally got a funeral home in McComb to take it in,” Bob Moses remembered. Hurst claimed that Lee had attacked him with a tire iron, and the sheriff coerced the Black witnesses into corroborating his story. Hurst was acquitted by an all-white coroner’s jury that same afternoon.

Lee and Hurst lived on adjoining farms and played together as boys. Through adulthood they maintained a cordial relationship. At one point, Hurst had helped Lee apply for a loan for his farm. Hurst’s affections towards Lee changed when he started attending voter registration classes and driving Bob Moses around the county. His association with SNCC made him a target.

The murder was devastating to SNCC. At Lee’s funeral, his wife approached Moses and said, “You killed my husband! You killed my husband!” “I had no answer,” he remembered, “It is one thing to get beaten, quite another to be responsible, even indirectly, for a death.”

Lee’s death forced SNCC to confront its inability to protect local people from white retaliatory violence. Before Lee was killed, the Department of Justice sent Assistant Attorney General John Doar to Amite County. E.W. Steptoe and Bob Moses spoke with Doar and told him that Hurst had threatened Lee because of his involvement with the Movement. The Department of Justice refused to offer Lee any protection.

After Lee’s death, Doar asked the FBI to open a federal investigation. The local FBI rejected his request three times before they finally looked into Lee’s death. Meanwhile, SNCC tried to find a witness who could testify in a federal case. A man named Louis Allen recanted and offered to testify against E.H. Hurst. But word got out about Allen’s offer. For three years, Allen faced harassment and economic reprisals for his willingness to testify and on April 7, 1964, the night before he planned to leave Mississippi, he was killed outside his home (Herbert 1-2).

Interviewed several years later by Eyes on the Prize, Moses said: … the Citizens Councils and the Klans in Mississippi, they were in back of the action which resulted in those kind of murders. Because what we knew was that there were meetings in Liberty drawing cars and license plates from all across the southern part of Mississippi, and on up into the middle part of Mississippi. People coming and sitting down talking, what are they going to do about this voter registration drive. Now, we don't know what they planned, but we do know that after the meetings there's violence began to break out, direct attacks on us as the voter registration workers and then these murders. First Herbert Lee and then a couple years later Lewis Allan, both killed right there in Liberty, Mississippi (Interview 2).

One girl in particular was affected by Moses’ condition, as he wrote, “At the mass meeting, a young girl kept staring at me… I think the sight of my battered and bandaged head registered some great outrage in Brenda [Travis].” The next day, August 30th, high school student Brenda Travis, along with recent graduates Bobbie Talbert and Ike Lewis, organized a sit-in at the white section of the Greyhound bus terminal in McComb. Just as in the sit-in at the Woolworth lunch counter, police quickly arrested the young activists and sent them to jail for roughly one month (Ramsey-Smith 67).

On October 2, the NAACP and the SCLC paid for the bond of the five young activists, including the high school students Brenda Travis and Isaac Lewis. While Watkins, Hayes, and the others could risk their safety by continuing their civil rights work, Travis and Lewis wanted to further organize their classmates to build a larger nonviolent student movement. This presented a difficult problem for the black Burglund High School, where school administrators had little appetite for the chaos that would be brought on by open civil rights work. The murder of Herbert Lee made the issue especially sensitive, as students would no doubt use him as a symbol to continue rebelling. Commodore Dewey Higgins, principal of the high school, expelled the two students in hopes that the rest of the student body would be too afraid to continue organizing with SNCC (Ramsey-Smith 70).

… more than 100 Black high-school students led by Hollis Watkins and Curtis Hayes ditch school and march in McComb to protest Lee's killing and the expulsion of Brenda Travis. When they kneel in prayer at City Hall, they are arrested, as are the SNCC staff who are with them. Bob Moses, Chuck McDew, and Bob Zellner (SNCC's first white field secretary) are beaten. The SNCC workers are charged with "Contributing to the delinquency of minors," a serious felony.

More than 100 students boycott the segregated Burgland High School rather than sign a mandatory pledge that they will not participate in civil rights activity. SNCC sets up "Nonviolent High" for the boycotting students with Moses teaching math, Dion Diamond teaching science, and Chuck McDew teaching history. Nonviolent High is one of the seeds from which grow the "Freedom Schools" that spread across the state three years later in the summer of '64.

Late in October, an all-white jury convicts the SNCC members on the "Contributing" charge. Their attorneys appeal, but bail is set at $14,000 each (equal to $107,000 in 2012 dollars). Unable to raise such a huge amount, they languish in prison. With their SNCC teachers in jail, Nonviolent High cannot continue, and the boycotting students are accepted by Campbell Junior College in Jackson.

Meanwhile, arrests, beatings, and shootings continue. CORE Freedom Riders are brutally attacked by a white mob when they try to integrate the McComb Greyhound station. Paul Potter and Tom Hayden of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) are dragged from their car and beaten in the street when they come to McComb to support the Movement. Shotgun blasts from a Klan nightrider almost kill Dion Diamond and John Hardy.

Despite their repeated promises of protection for voter registration, Kennedy, the Justice Department, and the FBI do nothing. The DOJ's legal efforts are feeble and ineffective. The arrests, the reign of terror, and the brazen murder of Herbert Lee by a state official, all take their toll. The McComb-area voter registration drive is suppressed — for the moment.

Finally, in December, SNCC manages to raise the bail money and the jailed SNCC staff are released on appeal.

In a narrow sense, McComb is a defeat for SNCC — the project is suppressed and driven out by arrests, brutality, and murder. But in a broader sense it is an important milestone; the crucial lessons learned in McComb form the foundation for years of organizing to come, not just in Mississippi but in hard places across the South — places like Selma Alabama and Southwest Georgia. In McComb they discover that courage is contagious and that local people — particularly young people — will respond to outside organizers. They discover that as student activists they have much to teach, but also much to learn from the community, and that if they respect the community the community will in turn protect, feed, and nurture them. And from the community will come new leaders and new organizers to expand and sustain the struggle.

Bob Moses wrote: One of the things that we learned out here [in Amite County] was that we could find family in Mississippi. We could go anyplace in Mississippi before we were through, and we knew that somewhere down some road there was family. And we could show up there unannounced with no money or no anything and there were people there ready to take care of us. That's what we had here in Amite. One of the things that happened in the movement was that there was a joining of a young generation of people with an older generation that nurtured and sustained them. ... It was an amazing experience (McComb 4-7).

Veteran activist Tom Hayden says a key to Moses's success as an organizer was his hunger to learn from local people. "Bob listened," Hayden wrote in The Nation. "When people asked him what to do, he asked them what they thought. At mass meetings, he usually sat in the back. In group discussions, he mostly spoke last. He slept on floors, wore sharecroppers' overalls, shared the risks, took the blows, went to jail, dug in deeply" (Speech 1).

Works cited:

“Bob Moses.”  SNCC Digital Gateway, SNCC Legacy Project and Duke University.  Web.  https://snccdigital.org/people/bob-moses/

Branch, Taylor.  Parting the Waters.  Digital Education Systems.  Web.  https://library.duke.edu/digitalcollections/media/jpg/sinsheimerjoseph/pdf/sinsi02005.pdf

Heath, William.  “The Children Bob Moses Led.”  The Washington Post.  Web.  http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/longterm/books/chap1/children.htm?noredirect=on

“Herbert Lee Murdered.”  SNCC Digital Gateway, SNCC Legacy Project and Duke University.  Web.  https://snccdigital.org/events/herbert-lee-murdered/

“Interview with Bob Moses.”  Eyes on the Prize: America's Civil Rights Years (1954-1965). Washington University Libraries.  May 19, 1986.  Web.  http://digital.wustl.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=eop;cc=eop;rgn=main;view=text;idno=mos0015.0875.073

“The McComb Project.”  Civil Rights Movement History 1961.  Web.  https://www.crmvet.org/tim/timhis61.htm#1961mccomb

Ramsey-Smith, Alec.  “A Tremor in the Middle of the Iceberg”: The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and Local Voting Rights Activism in McComb, Mississippi, 1928-1964.  Department of History, University of Michigan.  Web.  https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/123058/Ramsay-Smith%20-%20Project.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

“Speech on Freedom Summer at Stanford University."  Say It Loud, Say It Plain: A Century of Great African American Speeches.  Web.  http://americanradioworks.publicradio.org/features/blackspeech/bmoses.html