This Light of Ours: Activist Photographers of the Civil Rights Movement

Part Two: Organizing for Freedom

60 Part Two: Organizing for Freedom Community leaders, many of whom were World War II veterans and led NAACP branches, encouraged SNCC to make voting rights a priority . White-black population ratios indicated that gaining the right to vote would cause a dramatic and beneficial shift of power relations at state and local levels. Thus, from an organization of sit-in students, SNCC became an organization of organizers with more full-time field secretaries than any of the older civil rights groups. SNCC’s approach was “radical,” but what made it radical was the people SNCC worked with. Most were people whose voices were usually unheard or ignored—like Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer, a sharecropper, who after attempting to register to vote returned to the plantation where she picked cotton and refused the plantation owner’s demand that she make no further attempts. “I didn’t go down there to register for you,” she told him. “I went to register for myself.” He immediately threw her off the plantation. Soon, however, the forty-six-year-old Mrs. Hamer was one of the Mississippi movement’s most powerful voices and SNCC’s oldest field secretary. Increasingly, though, whites reacted to voter registration efforts with greater violence. The Ku Klux Klan expanded across the state. Early in 1963, a machine gun ambush outside the city of Greenwood almost killed SNCC worker Jimmy Travis when three of the bullets slammed into his upper body. On June 12, 1963, Mississippi NAACP field secretary Medgar Evers was murdered by an assassin who shot him from a hiding place in the bushes across the street from Evers’s home. Additionally, whole communities were punished with economic reprisal or denial of welfare assistance when any resident attempted to register to vote. 61 A “mock” vote is held to demonstrate that blacks desire to vote. The woman on the left, Ida Mae Holland, was a prostitute before joining the movement. She later attended college, earned a PhD, and became a playwright. Matt Herron, Greenwood, Mississippi, 1963 62 63 left A passerby cautiously looks at civil rights literature in a Freedom House window. Involvement in the movement often led to the loss of a job and other retaliation by local whites. Tamio Wakayama, Mound Bayou, Mississippi, 1964 above After the Ku Klux Klan burned this cross in front of a Mississippi Delta Freedom House, a civil rights worker transformed it with a painted message. Tamio Wakayama, Indianola, Mississippi, 1964 64 In the Greenwood COFO office, project director Sam Block is making assignments. In February 1963, segregationists firebombed the Greenwood office, and SNCC worker Jimmy Travis was machine-gunned on the highway just outside town. Matt Herron, Greenwood, Mississippi, 1963 65 M ost of America ignored the mounting terror, and the federal government said it could not offer protection, so COFO—the Council of Federated Organizations, a statewide coalition of local groups that SNCC and other national civil rights organizations staffed—decided to bring the nation’s children to Mississippi. Almost one thousand student volunteers were recruited for a 1964 “Freedom Summer.” Although getting national attention was urgent, COFO organizers worried about the effect of bringing such a large number of untrained and untested, mostly northern, white student volunteers into Mississippi. In fact, most opposed the idea. However, almost all of the community leaders around the state— grassroots “local people” like Mrs. Hamer—strongly favored summer volunteers coming to Mississippi. In their experience, people coming from the outside—whether from another part of Mississippi or from New York City—were a good thing. It meant they were not alone. It increased pressure on unchecked white power. And though racial integration was against the law in Mississippi, local people made it plain that they would integrate these volunteers into black community life. White students would sleep in their homes; eat at their tables; socialize in their dirt yards; and go to their churches on Sundays. COFO workers deferred to this community disposition—for a basic principle underlying COFO’s organizing work was that people should gain control of the decision-making affecting their lives. Therefore, despite misgivings, it was impossible, in fact contradictory, to say, “We don’t like your decision so we won’t work with you.” After a brief period of orientation and training at the Western College for Women in Oxford, Ohio, the volunteers came to Mississippi. 66 67 left Summer volunteer Peter Werner tries to...