We Had Sneakers, They Had Guns: The Kids Who Fought for Civil Rights in Mississippi

Twenty-four. Legacy

167 t w e n t y - f o u r Legacy for millennia, the great Mississippi River has majestically surged south from its headwaters in the Far North, carrying its wealth from the very heartland of America. In its waters it has borne nutrients and mineral riches from Minnesota, Iowa, Illinois, Missouri, Indiana, Arkansas, and Tennessee. And when it has overrun its banks in the Mississippi Delta, as it has since before memory, it has deposited its riches in a vast floodplain, creating a soil as fruitful as that of the fecund Nile. Admiring agronomists have long said that “Mississippi is what America is.” In the years that have passed since leaving Mississippi, I have come to believe that in a thousand ways Mississippi has indeed become “what America is.” But what is undeniable and regrettable is that America has absorbed in its fabric a racism that it once deplored as “barbarous” when it was most blatantly displayed in feudal, apartheid Mississippi. The truth, of course, is that the cruel legacy of the “peculiar institution” of slavery was never the exclusive preserve of the South. Like the Mississippi River, racism , too, can overrun its banks, and spill across America. In our day, we have seen how it can taint our political discourse and soil the reputation of our leaders. Nearly one thousand summer volunteers left Mississippi at the end of the “long, hot summer” of 1964, and reentered the frenetic political landscape of a rapidly changing America. What they had experienced during those intense months of confrontation, what they had achieved, or failed to achieve, I cannot fairly categorize or assume. As I had found during my years of service in the navy during World War II, drawing conclusions is best left to the historians. What I do know is true is that every kid who went to Mississippi, like every kid who ever went to fight in the 168   |   The Roads from the Delta military, fought only his own war. It was never “A Grand Clash of the Civil Rights Movement Versus the Establishment, Fought Across the Sweep of a Feudal Dixie.” Not for the boy who came in sneakers, who was trying to conquer his fear, who was only eager to help and to survive. It was not a “grand contested landscape” for that girl from Oberlin, or that boy from 40. Summer volunteers in Ruleville in 1964 (clockwise from top left): Fred Miller, Ellie Siegel, Gretchen Schwartz, Dale Gronemeier, Linda Davis, and Jerry Tecklin. “I’ll never forget this summer.” Legacy   |   169 Howard, or that black kid who left the mean streets of Jackson to work in the Delta. Their war was often a battleground small in dimension, but immeasurably deep. Sometimes that war was lit only by the fire of a burning church in Hattiesburg, or a torched Freedom House in Indianola. It was hard to see in all the smoke, or in the sad early dawn light in a prison cell in Meridian. Only sometimes could he or she even discern the real face of the enemy. That school principal! That mayor! My Justice Department? But what became undeniably clear was the discovery of a portrait of himself, or herself, that was somehow different, surer perhaps. Wiser, maybe. And the discovery of a startlingly alien landscape of their own native land. That was me! That was America! We did that? We did that! When our son, Richard, returned from Arkansas, he wanted very much to make us all understand what he had learned. “What I think I know,” he said, “is that the civil rights movement was successful. It proved that we were capable of helping grassroots people change the fabric of their lives. If the whole political structure of the South, which had been so repressive and unjust for hundreds of years, could be transformed in less than a decade, then it was worth all the lives and sacrifice it cost. I came home feeling and believing that anything is possible.” Like my son, the kids with whom I worked in the Delta had learned an enormous lesson. They had learned you can win. They brought that hard-earned confidence into the Peace Corps and out into the world; into the Vista Volunteers in the rusting, abandoned mining towns of Appalachia ; into the sweltering inner cities of the North; and onto a myriad of campuses that were finally being roused by...