REBEL

3. Never Turn Back: The South, 1960–62

49 Never Turn Back: The South, 1960–62 Themovementbeganmakingitspushintothe Black Belt, the heart of the old Confederacy, as Casey and I arrived, newlyweds, in Atlanta in the fall of 1961. She became immediately employed as the YWCA’s liaison to SNCC, and I became SDS’s first field secretary, at a salary of sixty-two dollars per week. Though not a typical young American couple, we were very happy. We rented a pleasant, white two-story cottage behind someone’s home in the northeast section of the city, about ten minutes’ drive from the headquarters of SNCC, SCLC, and Dr. King’s Ebenezer Baptist Church on Auburn Avenue in the heart of the black community. Our landlords thought of us as a young journalist and a church worker, a description we didn’t mind. The news from the front lines was grim: From the southwest Georgia town of Albany (near Plains, the home of Jimmy Carter), to a central Alabama county called Lowndes, to southern Mississippi towns named Liberty and McComb, SNCC workers were engaged in desperate efforts to secure a niche for organizing and voter registration. Barely after arriving in Atlanta, I was quickly drawn into efforts to protect an SNCC project by exposing Mississippi to the conscience of America. Mississippi: the heart of darkness, the undying core of racist resistance, where even the bravest protestors sucked in fear with every breath. The vast Mississippi Delta, home of sprawling cotton plantations and the birthplace of the blues, had a deserved reputation as the poorest, most repressive area in America. Statewide, blacks were 43 percent of the population, but only 5 percent of the registered voters in 1960. In the Delta there were even more blacks and fewer registered. Their median income was $1,100, one-third that of whites. Two-thirds of black families had no bathtubs, no showers, and one-half of those families had no running water at all. Many lived in tarpaper shacks on the edge of the cotton fields they worked. 3. 3. Rebel 50 In the three counties targeted for SNCC voter registration drives— Pike, Amite, and Walthall, all in the rural south of the state—virtually no blacks dared to vote. In Pike, where blacks totaled 38 percent of the twenty thousand residents of voting age, only two hundred cast ballots in 1960. In Amite, with blacks 47 percent of the eligible, only one individual voted. In Walthall, not a single one of the eligible blacks voted. No one could recall civil rights organizers in these three rural counties except briefly in the fifties. According to reliable legend, the first of them was shot and killed in 1952, and a second shot and run out of the state shortly after. And yet SNCC was ready to take the challenge. Thinking back, I am still not sure where their courage came from. How are seemingly ordinary people capable of extraordinary feats? Perhaps like soldiers who know their cause is worth dying for, they were simply and bravely carrying out their acknowledged duty. Perhaps the civil rights movement had reached sufficient scale that they knew an individual sacrifice would not be forgotten or in vain. We were imbued with very idealistic American values: a belief in racial integration, not just as a future ideal, but as an ideal to be practiced in the here and now; a belief that places like Mississippi were not part of the American dream, but nightmares that America would awaken from; a belief, finally, that the Constitution, the president, and the American people were really on our side. Our example would mobilize them. One local movement leader in 1961 stated these feelings simply and clearly: “My sole reason for demonstrating was to reach the better people—who hadn’t thought about injustice before. . . . We were depending on the white community. We had faith.” These motives were often conveyed with effect. One television commentator at the time described black demonstrators as “deeply moving . . . American citizens rising up with devastating orderliness and good manners to demand their Constitutional rights.” Of course, these attitudes were not shared by all, but as underlying assumptions they help explain how one could confront the back roads of Mississippi alone, and they are a clue to the angry turn to “black power” and violence a few short years later when the American promise delivered too little, too late. At the time, I didn’t recognize how thoroughly American were the SNCC sentiments; I was more struck by...