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

Two. Oxford

7 t w o Oxford it is still easy to remember the warm, beautiful moonlit evening in the heart of a bucolic Ohio countryside when I first met the young men and women who were going to Mississippi. On the moon-swept campus of the Western College for Women, a cool breeze lightening the evening air, they moved casually toward the lighted buildings beyond the green. The sound of young voices and a guitar drifted through the large open windows. I felt like I was joining a college weekend. Stepping into the harsh light of the Admissions Building where clusters of kids in bright blouses, shorts, and jeans were meeting for the first time and signing in for the next day’s orientation classes, my old Panama hat and seersucker suit made me suddenly aware that I was seriously overdressed for the occasion. As I hurried to my dorm room to shed the noxious clothes and put on the khakis that I would wear for the rest of the summer, I heard one student as he nudged his companion and nodded toward me. “Dig the hat. He must be an FBI guy.” For the nearly one thousand students who went through the orientation sessions, the Western College for Women in Oxford, Ohio, in the spring of 1964 was the birthing room of their arrival and mine in the civil rights movement. The meetings between the white students and the very young but hardened veterans of the struggle in Mississippi were thrilling, frightening, and memorable. They were to spend a week together so that the assembled students could get some insights into the strange landscape of American apartheid. No two groups of young people could have been more different. With only a few exceptions, the SNCC organizers were black, some college educated, but most from the mean streets of Jackson or the tiny, impoverished towns of the Delta. Many of them had been trying to inspire blacks to try to register to vote for years. And for their efforts, 2. Rev. Jim Lawson at Oxford orientation, June 1964. “There is a positive power in being good!” ..--- ..-"-- ~_.....-~ ~.rJ-_-""r' Oxford   |   9 men and women alike, the SNCC workers had been beaten, arrested, and constantly harassed by the local sheriffs and police. Most had never had a real conversation with a white person, and their suspicions about the students from the North were obvious. Even after all these years later, that orientation week retains a surreal aura for me. More than four hundred volunteers, most of them white, were being instructed by a handful of blacks from the civil rights movement on the world of Mississippi that they were about to enter. It was a place we strangers could not really believe because there were voices we had never heard before. The faces of the volunteers from the North reflected the wholesome good looks of those who have been spared the hardships of illness and poverty all their lives. Now they had come to perform the kind of good service many had heard about in their Friday-night or Sunday-morning church service. Eagerly, they held out their hands to the SNCC workers, and were often startled by the reluctant response. For the first time, many of the affluent children of the North were trying to relate to young people who were not only poor but black, and some were surprised by the cautious suspicion of the blacks. But many started to recognize that the partnership on which their lives might depend was going to take some major effort by each group. The invitation of the SNCC leadership to the northern students was a bold and calculated move, but one whose success could not be guaranteed . Their lonely, painful struggle for equality had largely been ignored by the national press, and their pleas for equal protection under the law had fallen on deaf ears in a Congress dominated by southern senators such as Mississippi’s Eastland and Stennis, or by a Justice Department headed by J. Edgar Hoover. Hoover was never persuaded that the civil rights movement in the South was not part of a communist conspiracy. SNCC knew in its bones that blacks in the South had no recourse when the night riders shot up their homes, burned their churches, or lynched their leaders. In order to gain the attention to these terrible inequities by those of conscience...