Civil Rights Events

Mississippi -- Grenada County Freedom Movement

Recollections

From 1963-1967 Bruce Hartford was a full-time civil rights worker for the Congress of Racial Equality and then on the Alabama and Mississippi field staff of Dr. King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). After attending UCLA and San Francisco State he became a freelance journalist covering military and political affairs in Asia during the Vietnam War. For 30 years starting in 1980 he worked as a technical writer for Silicon Valley software firms. He was a founding member and officer of the National Writers Union (NWU). Today he is webspinner for the Civil Rights Movement Veterans website (http://www.crmvet.org) and continues to be active in social justice causes (Bruce 1).

Interviewed by Shiela Michaels of Oral History in February 2002, Bruce Hartford recalled the following:

I was in Grenada from the summer of '66 until the spring of '67. And the Grenada movement was amazing. In many ways it was equal to Selma in terms of the popular support. Didn't get the publicity, but we did things in Grenada that just — 

We had marches every day. Sometimes day, sometimes night marches. And the Klan would mobilize mobs against us. And we would be doing these marches at night. Very dangerous.

…

Grenada became so intense at times that when SCLC field staff who had led demonstrations in places like St. Augustine — which was also very heavy — came to Grenada, they were taken aback. One guy — I won't call his name — the first demonstration he was assigned to lead in Grenada he saw the mob and he turned us around. He didn't know what we were used to facing. He didn't think we could — I mean, he was right from his point of view. I'm not criticizing him. He made the call to protect the people. Later, everyone lit into him because to us it was just the ordinary mob. We were used to it. No big deal. After that he led marches into the teeth of it. [laughing].

…

I'm not philosophically nonviolent. But you know, I'm definitely down with the tactic. I saw us do nonviolent things in Grenada that to this day are just unbelievable to me. Every night, we had these marches of two or three hundred people circling the square. On several occasions there were periods of three or four nights in a row when violence against the Movement would peak, and surrounding us would be mobs of 500 or more Klansmen. These weren't your typical spur-of-the-moment pick-up mobs, they had been mobilized by the KKK from all over the state to come to Grenada to do business. Some of the time — not always — we could literally hold them off by the quality of our singing. We could create a psychic wall that most of the time they could not breach, even though they wanted to. And on those times when they did attack, our nonviolent response minimized their injuries to us.

…

Another time, I was walking one day towards Bellflower Church which was our headquarters. A pickup truck pulls alongside me. A guy leaps out and just starts to beat the crap out of me. So of course I drop down on the ground, curl up, like we were trained to do. He knocked my glasses off. Now I had special industrial glasses, the kind somebody working welding or a machinist uses — unbreakable. And the guy's kid, a boy, I don't know maybe 10, 12, something like that, he starts jumping up and down on the glasses. He yells, "Daddy, Daddy, they won't break! They won't break!" So eventually they both got tired and walked off, and I wasn't hurt because of the nonviolent training.

…

So the first day of school, I think we screwed up. For some reason we didn't really anticipate serious trouble. We sure should have though. So we're in Bellflower Baptist Church, and this TV reporter comes running in — national network TV. I won't call his name, but he was major known. He covered the South for ABC, or NBC, or CBS. He's totally freaked. His face is beat up, his shirt is torn. He runs to the pay phone, and he dials — I guess his boss or someone — and he's shrieking. He's not going to leave the church! They're trying to kill him! Call the Govenor, turn out the National Guard!

And then suddenly the little children are coming in. Screaming. Bloody. Elementary school kids. Been beaten the shit out of —

…

Anyway, that first day, Joan Baez, the singer, was in Grenada. She was heavy into nonviolence then. And she was with nonviolent teachers, Ira and Sandy Sandperl. They had some sort Non-Violent Institute or something, and they were in town to help. So that day, Joan Baez, she said she was going to go down to the school and chain herself to the flagpole as a protest. And we had a hell of a time arguing her out of that, because we were certain she would have been killed.

But I'll say this for her, she stayed and helped for weeks and was with SCLC in other places too — it wasn't just a photo-op for her. We used to have a simple test for who was part of the Movement and who wasn't. It wasn't an ideology test, or a test of rhetoric and jargon. If you showed up and put your body on the line, you were part of the Movement, and it didn't matter what your political beliefs were, and by that test Joan Baez was a Movement sister.

…

One night, Hosea Williams from SCLC was leading the mass meeting in Bellflower and it was packed. Standing room only. Somebody comes pushing inside, "The cops have the church surrounded, and they just arrested so- and-so." (I don't remember who.) So we scout it out, and the cops are out there all right, and anyone who leaves the church, they're being arrested. Later we found out they had a bunch of warrants, and people for whom they didn't have a warrant, they let go. But we didn't know that then.

Hosea said, "Okay, everybody line up at every door and every window -- back door, front door, all the windows. At a given signal, everyone leave at the same time so that they can't catch all of us." Which was a good plan.

So we did that. The signal was given, and we all run out. Of course, the plan was good for most folk, but not for me and the other two white civil rights workers because we stood out in the crowd, so to speak. I got maybe 20 yards before they grabbed me. They took us to the jail, roughed us up a bit, nothing really serious — you know, the normal. And so we're in jail.

…

Well, Grenada went up and down about four times, in terms of mass activity, and eventually, like all of the mass movements, people got wore out. But we did get a lot of people registered. Towards the end I was trying to form a welfare rights group that would last, but it didn't. … Late '66, early '67. We also tried to form an ASCS group, to protest the agriculture, the crop subsidy issue. … Anyway by then I was burned out. I was just like totally fried. … You know, my stomach was in knots. I couldn't eat, I was down to 120 pounds. I'm now 215. I haven't grown any taller. I've just grown taller from side to side, as Yenta put it in Fiddler on the Roof.

So I left the South in Feburary of '67. I went up to New York to work for Bevel on the Spring Mobilization Against the War, the first big mass mobilization against Vietnam, in New York, a march to the United Nations. The "Spring Mobe" it was called. So I signed on as staff for them, and I was on the Spring Mobe staff from around April of '67 until September when — under pressure from my parents — I went back to school, to San Francisco State (Interview 36-40)

Grenada Today

Today when you drive the back roads of Grenada County today, almost all the old sharecropper shacks are gone, burned or bulldozed down. Grenada's Black neighborhoods are now filled with empty lots where once impoverished rental dwellings were jam-packed side by side on muddy lots. The narrow Union Street block where Chat & Chew used to do business and voter rallies were squeezed into the narrow street by slum shacks is now open and empty. And with commercial trade now drawn away to outlying strip malls and a giant Walmart center, "downtown" Grenada around the square has fallen on hard economic times.

In the years after 1966, Afro-American voter registration and turnout rose steadily. But with many Blacks economically driven out of the city, county, and state, white voters managed to maintain and increase their numeric superiority. Nevertheless, in 2018 two of the five county supervisors in Grenada were Black as were four of the seven city council members. Now that they have a voice in civic government, their streets are paved and many have sidewalks. There are Black men and women working in government offices and wearing badges in patrol cars. The schools are fully integrated, though the children of the white middle and upper class attend well-financed private academies rather than desperately under-funded public schools.

Yet though legally-enforced, mandatory segregation is now a thing of the past, whites and Blacks in Grenada still live largely separate lives. The economic disparities between the races still remain as does a culture that in some ways is still seems rooted in the history of white-supremacy. But the brutally segregated Jim Crow "southern way of life" was permanently ended in Grenada Mississippi — killed by the nonviolent Afro-American Freedom Movement (Grenada 1).

A third year White & Case associate from New York, Peter Eikenberry arrived in Mississippi on the 4th of July weekend of 1966. One week later, he was assigned to work with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. He was asked to go from Jackson to Grenada to interview black people who had been beaten in Grenada by local police officers and members of the Mississippi State Highway Patrol. Most of the victims were merely spectators watching SCLC organizers picket the local jail to protest the arrest of others of their members. Thereafter, he was present full time in Grenada for over three weeks, including his trying of his first jury trial case.

NAACP lawyers Marian Wright and Henry Aronson were able to obtain federal injunctions mandating that the various police organizations protect the marchers from the hundreds of white Ku Klux Klan members and others who were massed at the town square adjacent to the sheriff’s office determined to stop the marchers. Eikenberry monitored compliance with the federal court’s orders.

Forty eight years later, in early July 2014, Eikenberry returned to Grenada in the company of Reverend Jerome Robinson to interview 1966 civil rights activists. “Jerome … and I interviewed close to 20 people over four days.” The following stories contain highlights from some of the interviews.

Dianna Freelon-Foster stated that she was 14 in the summer of 1966 and was employed hoeing cotton for the summer. She said, “I put down my hoe, and I never turned back after I heard Martin Luther King. I joined the marches at night to the sheriff’s office. I felt better about us as a collective after the night marches happened – we were in a secluded world. I knew who I was. I did not need to be with white folks to survive. My father Felix Freelon was involved. His barber shop was across the street from the church where the activities were centered. My participation shaped my life as to what I was to become. In September, I was a member of the ninth grade class who integrated the Grenada high school. I and the other black students were constantly failed by the white principal and teachers.

“After the ninth grade was integrated, I did not want to be there, but I had committed to do it, so I wanted to ‘see it through.’ Some of the teachers were horrible including one who became superintendent of schools. Once, we walked out of school because of harsh treatment; it was almost unbearable. Parents led the walk out and we went to court the same day. We received so many demerits that we often failed. I went to summer school to pass my senior year – I was one of maybe two black students that graduated in their right year.

…

“People told me that no one wanted to go to Grenada – it was too ‘tough a nut to crack.’ One of our activists, Annie Lee Stewart, died from injuries she received on what we called Bloody Sunday in Grenada. On one occasion the police used tear gas on the people on their way back from the march downtown. At that time, another woman had a heart attack and died after the tear gas attack. I am a believer of non-violence after protesting in 1966-67, but it was very hard to believe in it when we were protesting.”

In 1966, Toll Stewart was 32 years old and employed by the Baily Brothers Laundry together with over 30 other black employees. His employer “was a racist but did not threaten [his] job when [he] marched.” “When demonstrators were arrested in Grenada, they were just loaded on cattle trucks and carted away to the penitentiary. I made sure that my entire squad of 20 in the march was comprised of my fellow workers at Baily Brothers – so if they got arrested we would all have to be released to avoid closing the laundry down.” (The federal judge had mandated the marchers to be in squads of 20, marching two by two.)

“My mother, Annie Stewart, my sister, and I fed the SCLC organizers every day: pork chops, chicken, and steak – more food than they had seen elsewhere. Annie opened her house for those who wished to sleep there every night. I just realized recently that the Lord provided the food because we did not have the resources to buy it. We bought the food in Greenwood, 30 miles away, because the black people in Grenada were boycotting the white merchants.

“In the summer of ’66 – early on in the first days of the protests – there were often violent events. Once there was a rally across from my mother’s home. The Police Chief, Pat Ray, told people to disperse, and Annie invited the people at the rally onto her property. The police chief said, ‘I told you people to disperse,’ and Annie said, ‘I told them not to, they’re on my land, I pay the taxes.’ The captain cocked his shotgun and Annie said, ‘You are a yellow dog if you do not shoot me.’ I was standing inside the front door in the dark with my shotgun pointed at the chief’s head. If the chief had brought his gun down to shoot, I would have killed him. But the chief turned and walked away. “Everything became better after the 1966-67 civil rights uprising because before, the police could do anything to you they wished, black people did not have the vote, the schools were not integrated, and the economy was worse. I have never missed a vote in the almost 50 years since the time I received it.”

Gloria James Lottie Williams was 21 in July 1966 and had completed three years of study at Valley College. “I was trained as a typist in high school and was hoping for a secretarial position at the hosiery mill where I worked that summer in Grenada. Rather, they employed me as a folder. That summer, I marched with the demonstrators every night to the courthouse and one morning I was called in by my boss to ask if I had marched. I told my boss that I had and I was told not to do that again. I, however, did continue to march and I was not fired or ever even questioned again.”

“My mother, Lottie Williams, was badly beaten on ‘Bloody Sunday.’ Lottie worked for the owners of the Dalton’s Department Store in Grenada and was fired as a household maid for having marched with the demonstrators. After the marches in July 1966, we all went to the Bell Flower Church for hymn singing, reporters’ interviews, etc. At some point, Stokely Carmichael came to Bell Flower, where he was interviewed in a room behind the sanctuary by 10 or 12 reporters but he was not permitted to take his ‘Black Power’ message to the assembled throng in the main body of the church. The Bell Flower Church had a very dynamic young pastor at the time, S.T Cunningham (27 years of age), which is the reason that Bell Flower became the center for the movement’s activities in 1966 and 1967.”

Jerome Robinson and Eikenberry interviewed Eva Grace Lemon at the Senior Center in Grenada where she was the receptionist/secretary. She was one of the black children who integrated the first grade of a Grenada elementary school in 1966 – shown in a historic photograph with Martin Luther King. She said she was “very scared.” She said, “Dr. King said, ‘come on, little girl, we are going to go inside now.’ I and the other black children were repeatedly failed in our courses for the first few years and after the first year, all of the black children in the school had black teachers and the white children had white teachers.” (Eikenberry 1-10).

In determining to return to Grenada to interview activists from 1966, the biggest question I had was whether all the organizers, lawyers, marchers, court orders, etc., had made a difference in the lives of the citizens of Grenada, especially in the lives of those who participated.  Would they say, on the other hand, that they had been deserted when we collectively left little more than a year later?  The answer was almost universal that the town was better off, that things had changed for the better, and just about all the people interviewed felt that their lives had been changed for the better in a very substantial way.  This was true of Dianna Freelon-Foster, Toll Stewart, and Gloria Williams (Eikenberry 11).

Works cited:

“Bruce Hartford – Webspinner: Civil Rights Movement Veterans.” Huffpost. Web. https://www.huffpost.com/author/bruce-hartford

Eikenberry, Pete. “Return to Granada.” Federal Bar Council Quarterly. March/April, May 2016. Web. http://federalbarcouncilquarterly.org/?p=455

“Grenada Today.” The Grenada Freedom Movement (June-December). Civil Rights Movement History: 1966 (July-December). Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/tim66b.htm#gren_return

“Oral History/Interview” Conducted by Sheila Michaels. Veterans of the Civil Rights Movement. February 2002. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/nars/bruce1.htm