And Gently He Shall Lead Them: Robert Parris Moses and Civil Rights in Mississippi

4. "Food for Those Who Want to Be Free"

FOUR "FOOD FOR THOSE WHO WANT TO BE FREE" Mississippi was the hardest state for the civil rights movement to crack. It therefore offered the cause its greatest prize. In the early spring of 1962, SNCC workers resumed the drive to register the poor to vote, this time targeting the heavy black population in six counties of the Mississippi Delta, mostly farmland tilled by poor and uneducated blacks for absentee owners .1 While other rights workers were busy during the summer months' with fruitless negotiation in Albany, Georgia, Moses had returned to Mississippi's LeFlore County, operating out of headquarters in the Delta city of Greenwood.2 A description in 1964 by Moses of the effort in Mississippi will do as well for 1962: "This 71 72 U FOOD FOR THOSE WHO WANT TO BE FREE" movement is pointed in a different direction-not toward the downtown white but toward the rural Negro, not toward acceptance by the white community but toward the organization of political and other kinds of expression in the Negro community, or really toward the organization of a Negro society."3 And for Moses the rural areas proved to be the most difficult yet the most rewarding to organize. In June 1962, Moses and his workers attended the Highlander Folk School training session on voter education techniques in Knoxville, Tennessee. There the SNCC team listened to Highlander founder Myles Horton and passed on lessons learned the previous summer in McComb about the techniques of nonviolent action and the methods to be used in working with illiterate and poor rural blacks in remote farm areas. After the workshop, Moses persuaded Bernice Robinson, who had taught the first adult literacy classes for Highlander in South Carolina, to conduct sessions in Mississippi during the summer and again in the spring and summer of 1963.4 And in July Moses submitted a report to the governing board of the Mississippi Adult Education Program summarizing the first workshops on adult voter registration education and leadership training. Held at the Mt. Beulah Christian Center located midway between Jackson and Vicksburg, the workshops were conducted by Harvard law students and a political science major from Brandeis under the direction of Moses and Bernice Robinson. Amzie Moore led evening program discussions, and Moses noted: IIWe mapped plans for voting drives in Greenwood, Ruleville, and the mid-Delta rural counties ... and are planning a workshop for 60 to 75 students the week of July 22nd- ((FOOD FOR THOSE WHO WANT TO BE FREE" 73 27th." 5 Moses worked throughout the summer with these black youths, most of them Mississippians, who had been recruited in the spring while he was engaged in the congressional campaign of the Reverend R. L. T. Smith.6 So Moses was again trying to persuade black Mississippians , who had no reason to be confident about the political system, that they must persevere. He sought to make tangible to his audiences the need for collective assertion. He noted, for example, the probable effects of automation on agriculture. His argument about the disempowering role of technology to a group of black farmers was simple, concrete, and powerful: This spring, you're going to see a plane over-head and something is going to come out of the back, and that will be weed-killer, and it will kill all the weeds in the cotton field. That means that nobody will be chopping cotton this spring. Then, this fall, you're going to see a machine go up and down the rows of cotton, and that will be an automatic cotton-picker. And that means there will be nobody picking cotton this fall. That airplane and that cotton-picker together are automation. . . . IIAutomation" means that a lot of people won't be eating this winter. But don't go to Chicago, because you won't be eating there, either. So we'll set up a food program to hold you for a while ... and see what we can do.7 Without the right to vote, blacks would be powerless in the face of such developments, having no access to any federal programs for retraining or the like. Moses was placing black rural workers between a rock and a hard place. Ultimately advancing technology threatened their economic livelihood; immediately not only their 74 " FOOD FOR THOSE WHO WANT TO BE FREE" incomes but also their personal safety was endangered should they act on...