Thunder of Freedom: Black Leadership and the Transformation of 1960s Mississippi

3. Mileston

45 3 Mileston September–October 1964 Eighteen months after Holmes County’s first “movers” attempted to register to vote, Henry and I entered the county. There were many local people who were willing to struggle, who were gaining confidence, in addition to Hartman Turnbow. We joined Mary and the four COFO Summer Project volunteers who had stayed on, plus Abe Osheroff, who made no secret of his intent to entice us, especially Henry, into his exciting community center construction project. Often in our first crack-of-dawn mornings, Henry did construction with Abe while I drove off with Mary, John Allen, Don Hamer, Larry Stevens, or Mike Kenney, the remaining outside whites who had been working in Holmes County for the COFO Summer Project. We visited local movement leaders in the delta and eastern hill communities: George and Willie Mae Wright in Sunnymount, Cora and Roby Vanderbilt in Old Pilgrims Rest, Austin Wiley in Mount Olive, and others. Many of the hill leaders had been drawn to Mileston in 1963 and early 1964 to learn about organizing their own communities. In the rural, impoverished, black world at that time, organizing was mainly done without access to telephones. Communication took place at regular meetings or by going to see an individual at home or in the field. With the Summer Project came two-way radios for both cars and bases in movement offices or houses. Because Holmes COFO worker John Allen was doing especially dangerous work opening up the adjoining Carroll County, his car was equipped with a radio, more for the security of reporting problems to the base than for communicating ideas or arranging work or meetings with local leaders. We outsiders knew how much 46 BECOMING PART OF HOLMES COUNTY phones could help; we longed for them. Early on, I learned that there weren’t phones in enough black homes to require a list, although I made lists of other longed-for “necessities,” like the bathtubs I located in several Mileston movement homes. Navigating rural distances by car was a more difficult, risky way to communicate than using a phone. Early civil rights work meant driving—driving dirt roads, mud roads, no roads, and occasionally gravel roads. Pavement was found only in the white folks’ parts of town, which we avoided whenever possible. Driving meant flat tires nearly every day, wishing for a two-way car radio, and getting stopped by the state patrol, who were always out to get movement workers. The first people to organize in Holmes’s hills, as in its delta, were the black landowning farmers. Hill holdings were often smaller than the forty acres that most often was the amount that had come from the Roosevelt federal program in Mileston; black holdings were usually smaller than those of whites. Most of the houses were run-down old shacks disconnected and isolated from each other and, seemingly, the world. The houses may have had a TV set, but no indoor toilet or running water. In some outhouses, the maggots sifted through shit within a foot of the seat. Totally rural and almost exclusively black, these hill communities were often centered on a small, independent black church that provided life-sustaining strength to its members. Even though at least 125 such churches existed at that time in the county, it was risky to hold movement meetings in them. More than twenty black churches in Mississippi had been firebombed that summer, and it was the investigation of the burning of Mt. Zion Church in Neshoba County by Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman that had led to their deaths in June. At a citizenship meeting in the upstairs of an old store in Tchula, the delta town about six miles north of Mileston, workers attempted to organize a mass meeting and tried to encourage the development of local leaders. The upstairs room was the meeting place of the black Masons of Tchula. Joe Smith, their leader, was also the chair of the local NAACP. It was not an accident that the movement met there. The store was along Highway 49, south of the Tchula black neighborhood of Goose Hollow. We could hear the jukebox playing downstairs. The twelve of us at the citizenship class listened to John’s talk about voting and organizing. He spoke in elementary terms, asking slow, measured questions, attempting Robert Head with granddaughter Patricia and wife Pecolia. The Heads lived on the highway...