And Gently He Shall Lead Them: Robert Parris Moses and Civil Rights in Mississippi

6. Young American Revolutionaries

SIX YOUNG AMERICAN REVOLUTIONARIES On Easter weekend 1963, at SNCC's fourth annual conference, Moses gave a speech outlining his plans for continuing voter registration in Mississippi's Delta. The need was for Ii not five hundred but five thousand " blacks to register to vote, but SNCC must realize that it was confronting a white monolith: III don't for one minute think that the country is in a position or is willing to push this down the throats of white people in the Delta, and it will have to be pushed down their throats because they are determined not to have it done." 1 This speech shows a different Moses from the young philosopher who had who came to work for SCLC in 1960. He was now talking explicitly of the need to force a confrontation between the federal government and 104 YOUNG AMERICAN REVOLUTIONARIES 105 the state, using more openly the vocabulary of power and competition. Blacks would have to take control of the political structure: education, jobs, and medical care would follow.2 Moses now believed the black leaders already in positions of leadership were too cautious to be on the side of a radical group like SNCC. The answer was to persuade the majority of Mississippi blacks to elect leaders whom whites could not control. During this period the shift from middle-class black concerns to the concerns of the poor, unemployed, or marginally employed rural blacks quickened under SNCC's influence. SNCC and CORE field secretaries were increasingly arguing that the needs of the blacks they worked with in the cotton fields centered not in desegregation but in the right to vote. Criticism of the "black bourgeoisie" and Ilwhite liberals" began to be made publicly. By almost any standard, Moses had become radicalized , or rather, further radicalized, because anyone in the deep South who challenged its racial system was by definition a radical. By staying in Mississippi, in the center of danger-slowly, steadily, patiently exhorting, failing, and trying again-Moses had become a revolutionary guerrilla chieftain deep in an enemy land. Yet it was a contradictory radicalism. The talk was of conflict and seizure of control; but the method and object remained the seemingly innocuous, traditional institution of the ballot, which was a sort of mirror image of Moses himself. In the end, the direct action wing of the civil rights movement and the voter registration wing differed less in kind than in emphasis and strategy. The decision on the part of a Mississippi black to attempt to register 106 YOUNG AMERICAN REVOLUTIONARIES was an immediate act of rebellion and self-empowerment . But the disciplines of nonviolence (to an extent still part of the ethos of SNCC, as its title announced) and civil disobedience that King's legions employed were also of that character; they were practices of selfpossession and self-transformation. And they too aimed not merely at personal triumph and moral witness against segregation but, in such forms as economic boycott , at a transformation of economic and political institutions . SNCC and SCLC, even in their differences, together embody the dual character of the movement: immediate liberation in empowering personal action and permanent liberation through the redistribution of power. They were, as Moses had originally realized, both practicing direct action. By the spring of 1963 in all of Mississippi some 6,700 of the more than 60,000 blacks who made the attempt had been registered to vote.3 Violence against blacks continued. On May 8 Moses raced to Mileston, about a dozen miles northeast of Lexington in Holmes County. Mileston was the scene of a firebombing at the house of Hartman Turnbow, the first black to attempt to register in the county. With his own automatic rifle, he had driven off armed whites who tried to prevent his escape from the fire.4 Turnbow represented a small but growing segment of blacks in Mississippi, often farmers, who did not simply meet violence with disciplined nonviolent action. King, according to Turnbow, was the only one to have urged him to practice nonviolence.5 Moses took meticulous notes as usual, and an FBI agent dispatched by John Doar at Moses' request also investigated. The sheriff came by and accused Turnbow of firebombing his own house to generate sympathy for YOUNG AMERICAN REVOLUTIONARIES 107 SNCC's voter registration campaign. Moses, Turnbow, and three others were themselves arrested for interfering with a fireman in...