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1 Mississippi in 1965 The Struggle for the Right to Vote From the summer of 1962 to the spring of 1963, Leflore County, a predominantly black county in the Mississippi Delta in northwest Mississippi, was the testing ground for democracy for the civil rights movement. The Leflore County voter registration campaign was part of a massive effort of the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO), the Mississippi civil rights umbrella organization, and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Atlanta-based activist civil rights group, in the predominantly black Delta region. As described by Lawrence Guyot, a SNCC worker and later chair of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic party, "Our objectives were very clear. It was not to desegregate the two or three good local white restaurants. It was simply to register people to vote."} In 1962, on the eve of COFO's arrival, only 268 of the county's 13,567 black adults were registered to vote (1.98 percent), although 70 percent of the white adults were registered.2 As a result of SNCC's organizing efforts, hundreds of black people attempted to register. Not only did the county registrar refuse to register black applicants, but this voter registration campaign was met with a reign of terror from the white community. The SNCC office was attacked by a group of armed whites, forcing the SNCC workers to flee through a secondstory window; the county board of supervisors cut off the federal surplus food program upon which most black families were dependent; SNCC workers were arrested on trumped-up charges; and black homes were shot into and black businesses and the SNCC office were burned. In February 1963, on the highway outside Greenwood, the county seat, three whites in a car pulled alongside of and fired a burst of gunfire into a car containing Robert Moses, SNCC leader and COFO voter registration director; Randolph Blackwell of the Voter Education Project (VEP) in Atlanta, the primary funding source for the campaign ; and SNCC worker Jimmie Travis. Travis, the driver, was seriously wounded in the neck and shoulder. These incidents of violence and intimidation spurred numerous Struggle for the Right to Vote 16 protests and marches on city hall and the county courthouse by the outraged black community. In March, shots were fired into the home of Dewey Greene, a voter registration worker and father of two SNCC workers, and more than one hundred black people marched on city hall in protest. Even before the more highly publicized incidents in Birmingham, Alabama, the demonstrators in Greenwood were met by a line of armed police officers, and a police dog attacked the marchers. When the marchers retreated to a local black church, the police waded into the crowd and arrested Moses and seven other SNCC organizers of the voter registration effort who were then convicted of disorderly conduct, sentenced to four months in jail, and fined $200 each. The sense of terror evoked by the police suppression of the Leflore County voter registration campaign was recalled in a 1989 New Yorker interview with Marian Wright Edelman, who, as a third-year Yale Law School student, went to Mississippi during her spring break to provide legal assistance to the movement. As Edelman told author Calvin Tomkins, My last day in Greenwood, Bob [Moses1took a group of people down to the courthouse to register. He walked at the head of that scraggly bunch of courageous people; I was at the end of the line, behind an old man on crutches. This was the first time I'd seen police dogs in action, and I've been scared of them ever since. If I see a German shepherd on the street, to this day I'll cross over to avoid him. The cops came with the dogs, and led them to attack us. I remember seeing a dog jump on Bob Moses and tear his pants, and then it was just a terrifying scene-people running away, Bob and the other S.N.C.C. kids getting arrested , and throwing me their car keys as they were being led off.3 The Justice Department filed a lawsuit seeking to void the convictions and to enjoin police interference with the voter registration effort . But the lawsuit was dismissed when the Justice Department agreed to a deal under which all charges against the SNCC organizers were dropped, without any court order protecting the voter registration effort. Justice Department statistics show that from March to June, 1963, at least 681...

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