Thunder of Freedom: Black Leadership and the Transformation of 1960s Mississippi

Chronology of Movement Events in Holmes County and the United States

281 Chronology of Movement Events in Holmes County and the United States Cheryl Reitan and Kimberly Stella May 7, 1955: NAACP leader Reverend George Wesley Lee is assassinated in Belzoni, Mississippi (Humphreys County), after registering to vote and encouraging others to register. “41 Lives for Freedom,” The Civil Rights Memorial, Southern Poverty Law Center, 2005, www .crmvet.org/mem/411ives.htm, accessed April 2, 2010. 1961: Freedom Riders come through Jackson, Mississippi. All are jailed in Jackson and then sent to the Parchman Prison Farm. “Freedom Ride 1961,” in The Student Voice 1960–1965: Periodical of the Student Nonviolent Coordination Committee, ed. Clayborne Carson (Westport, CT: Meckler, 1990), 45 (April and May 1961). October 1, 1962: Campus riots break out in protest of James Meredith’s enrollment in the University of Mississippi–Oxford. Meredith is the first black person to study at the University of Mississippi. The riots cause two deaths and seventy-five injuries and necessitate protection from federal troops until Meredith graduates in 1963. Claude Sitton, “Negro at Mississippi U. as Barnet Yields; 3 Dead in Campus Riot; 6 Marshalls,” New York Times, October 1, 1962, 1. 1962–1963: Holmes County black farmers go to Greenwood in adjoining Leflore County to attend SNCC-organized Freedom Meetings. Wesley C. Hogan, Many Minds, One Heart: SNCC’s Dream for a New America (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2007), 86–87. 282 Chronology of Movement Events March 1963: Bob Moses and another SNCC worker meet with Mileston citizens to talk about voter registration and going to the courthouse to try to register. Letter by Howard Taft Bailey to the Board of Trustees, Holmes County Community Center, Mileston, January 7, 1965. April 1963: The First Fourteen attempt to register at the courthouse in Lexington. Soon afterward, Hartman Turnbow’s home is firebombed. He is arrested for arson. “5 Negroes in Vote Drive Charged with Arson in Mississippi Blasts,” New York Times, May 10, 1963, 14. May 3–5, 1963: Martin Luther King Jr. is arrested in Birmingham. “Racial Strife,” New York Times, May 5, 1963, 191. June 11, 1963: Medgar Evers is assassinated in Jackson. Myrlie Evers, “He Said He Wouldn’t Mind Dying—If . . .,” in The Autobiography of Medgar Evers, ed. Myrlie Evers-Williams and Manning Marable (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2005), 304–8. August 28, 1963: The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom draws 250,000 to D.C. “Program of Rights March,” New York Times, August 28, 1963, 21. September 15, 1963: Four young girls are killed in a Birmingham church bombing. Claude Sitton, “Birmingham Bomb Kills 4 Negro Girls in Church; Riots Flare; 2 Boys Slain,” New York Times, September 16, 1963, 1. November 1963: Black residents of Holmes County join with other black Mississippians to cast ballots in the mock Freedom Vote. “The Student Voice, November 11, 1963: Over 70,000 Cast Freedom Ballots,” in Carson, The Student Voice, 77. November 22, 1963: President John F. Kennedy is assassinated. “Ambush Building Chosen with Care,” New York Times, November 23, 1963, 8. May 1964: White newspaper publisher Hazel Brannon Smith condemns Chronology of Movement Events 283 violence against civil rights activists and blacks in the Lexington Advertiser , her Holmes County weekly. She is awarded a Pulitzer Prize for courageous journalism. “Pulitzer Prizes,” New York Times, May 5, 1964, 42. Summer 1964: The Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) Freedom Summer begins. The project attracts nearly one thousand outside volunteers. Most are white college students, among them law students, but also included are lawyers, clergy, and doctors. They come to Mississippi to work in the movement, in most cases for the summer. Joe Street, “Reconstructing Education from the Bottom Up: SNCC’s 1964 Mississippi Summer Project and African American Culture,” Journal of American Studies 38, no. 2 (August 2004): 273–96. June 1964: The Holmes County movement welcomes more than thirty outside volunteers as part of Freedom Summer. They teach literacy, political organizing, and voter education in Freedom Schools, churches, and makeshift community centers in Mileston, Tchula, Old Pilgrims Rest, and Sunnymount–Poplar Springs. California carpenters Abe Osheroff and Jim Boebel begin work on a community center at Mileston, built with twenty thousand dollars that Abe raised. Daniel Perlstein, “Teaching Freedom: SNCC and the Creation of the Mississippi Freedom Schools,” History of Education Quarterly 30, no. 3 (Autumn 1990): 297–324. Holmes County blacks are turned away when they try to attend a Democratic...