“I NEVER WILL FORGET” MEMORIES FROM MISSISSIPPI FREEDOM SUMMER
For seven years, the University of Florida Samuel Proctor Oral History Program traveled to Sunflower County to gather interviews with witnesses to history. These are their stories.
“I Never Will Forget” 2
“I Never Will Forget” 3
“I NEVER WILL FORGET” MEMORIES FROM MISSISSIPPI FREEDOM SUMMER
“I Never Will Forget” 4
“I Never Will Forget” 5
To those who risked their lives
so that we could all be free.
“Nobody’s free until everybody’s free.” –Fannie Lou Hamer
“I Never Will Forget” 6
A Publication of the
SAMUEL PROCTOR ORAL HISTORY PROGRAM
DIRECTOR: PAUL ORTIZ
EDITED BY: SARAH BLANC
Interviewers: Anna Armitage, Sarah Blanc, Margaret Block, Cindy Bobadilla, Michael
Brandon, Lauren Byers, Chelsea Carnes, Kenisha Cauley, Khambria Clarke, Amelia
D’Costa, Nicole Cox, Steve Davis, Diana Dombrowski, A.J. Donaldson, Justin Dunnavant,
Chris Duryea, Sarah Eiland, Candice Ellis, Diamia Foster, Derick Gomez, Michelle Gray,
Christine Guerrier, Brittany Hibbert, Steve Houston, Justin Hosbey, Joanna Joseph, Genesis
Lara, Jennifer Lyon, Joe Mathis, Josh Moore, Danielle Navarette, Stacey Nelson,
Annemarie Nichols, Amanda Noll, Paul Ortiz, Breanne Palmer, Kathy Pierre, Dan Simone,
Nailah Summers, Jessica Taylor, Caroline Vickers, Khama Jamaal Weatherspoon, Marna
Weston, Kaydrianne Young
Transcribers: Sarah Blanc, Diana Dombrowski, Jana Ronan
Technical Direction: Deborah Hendrix
Consultants: Margaret Block (Sam Block Jr. Civil Rights Organization), Stacy White
(Sunflower County Civil Rights Organization)
A note on the transcripts: All quotes are taken verbatim from transcribed interviews.
SPOHP does not correct for grammar or accuracy, but does omit repeated words. Words
in brackets are added for clarity. Some quotes are shortened for space, as indicated by an
ellipsis. Every excerpt in this booklet is followed by the name of the narrator and the
catalog number for their interview. To view the entire interview in the SPOHP archive on
the UF George A. Smathers Libraries Digital Collections, visit http://ufdc.ufl.edu/freedom.
Images and captions provided by Wisconsin Historical Society Freedom Summer Digital
Collection: http://content.wisconsinhistory.org/cdm/landingpage/collection/p15932coll2
June 2014 ∙ Gainesville, Florida
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“I NEVER WILL FORGET” MEMORIES FROM MISSISSIPPI FREEDOM SUMMER
Introduction……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..9
1: The Most Southern Place on Earth………………………………………………………………………15
2: Poverty and the Plantation……………………………………………………………………………………21
3: Designing a Freedom Summer……………………………………………………..……………………..31
4: The Sunflower County Movement……………………………..………………………………………..39
5: Mass Meetings and Freedom Songs……………………………………………………………………47
6: One Man, One Vote……………………………………………………………………………………………..51
7: The Fight for Educational Equity…………………………………………………………………………..57
8: The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party…………………………………………………………69
9: The Deadly Seriousness of Mississippi ………………………...…………………………….……….75
10: “I Never Will Forget”……………………………………………………………………………………………87
Further Reading…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..107
Index of Narrators……………………………………………………………………………………………………….………110
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• INTRODUCTION •
We say, number one, that the Negro struggle, the independent Negro struggle, has a vitality and
a validity of its own; that it has deep historic roots in the past of America and in present struggles;
it has an organic political perspective, along which it is travelling, to one degree or another, and
everything shows that at the present time it is travelling with great speed and vigor.
— C.L.R. James (1948)
The Revolutionary Answer to the Negro Problem in the United States
The Black Freedom Struggle in the Mississippi Delta is older than slavery, as epic as the
Homeric Classics, and as enduring as the Mississippi River. Black Mississippians have created one
of the most remarkable chronicles of resistance in United States history. Hitherto hidden from
view to all but the most perceptive outsiders, the struggle was unveiled in the year of Freedom
Summer as well as in the creation of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, the most
important independent political party in American history.
To understand the origins of Freedom Summer it is necessary to go back over a century
in time before 1964. There are far too many origin stories to tell in this brief space but here are a
few. The role that African American soldiers from Mississippi played in the Civil War was decisive
in winning the war and preserving the Union. Union Army soldiers of Lieb’s African Brigade saved
General Ulysses S. Grant’s Vicksburg Campaign on June 7, 1863 by engaging in the longest
bayonet engagement of the Civil War at the Battle of Milliken’s Bend. In defeating a Confederate
force that had the advantage of numbers and better equipment, black soldiers vindicated
Abraham Lincoln’s emancipation policy as a war measure and struck a fatal blow against the
power of antebellum planters in Mississippi. Many of these troops had been slaves in the Delta
region only weeks earlier. The record of black Mississipians in the struggle for freedom in the Civil
War is a story that needs a fuller accounting. Shortly after the end of the war, the National Anti-
Slavery Standard observed:
The State of Mississippi enjoys the honorable distinction of having furnished more
soldiers to the National armies engaged in our late struggle than any other of the
Cotton States. To be sure, they were almost all black; but that made no difference in
their fighting, while they received few bounties and still fewer promotions, allowances
or pensions as officers. Others may have done better; but they did what they could,
putting their whole hearts into the work.1
1 "Mississippi," The National Anti-Slavery Standard, January 6, 1866
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Black Union Army victories translated into political and economic advancement during
Reconstruction. African Americans supported US Senators Blanche K. Bruce and Hiram Revels as
well as John R. Lynch, the first black speaker of the Mississippi House of Representatives. At the
same time however, gains in politics and black self-assertion were tenuous. Born in 1904, Tarboro,
North Carolina physician Dr. Milton Quigless shared with me the ordeal of the Page family. The
Pages owned a plantation near Port Gibson, Mississippi that drew the ire of whites jealous of an
African American family in possession of 600 acres of land. “One particular Page, his name was
Hamp Page. He’s a bad man. He says, "Don't fool with me. I ain't going to bother you, but if you
fool with me, I'm going to get back at you." And he practiced marksmanship. Threw a dime up;
hit it with his pistol. You never see that dime any more. He was that damn good. So one day,
when he was in town, Port Gibson, the Page plantation was just about eight or nine miles from
Port Gibson. One of them [Pages] had a run in with a white man and the white man slapped him.
So he beat the hell out of that white man.”2 After a heated gun battle, the Pages were driven out
of Clairborne Parish and fled to St. Louis.
Like their counterparts across the South, white planters engaged in a wave of terror and
legal chicanery to disenfranchise African Americans in order to institute a system of economic
peonage and agricultural profits. The Vicksburg Massacre cost 300 African American lives in 1874,
and the vaunted “Second Mississippi Plan” served as a model of voter suppression throughout the
South and a guarantor of legal segregation for decades.
Black resistance persisted. While U.J.N. Blue of Meridian urged black Mississipians to leave
for Africa in 1895 in order to escape white repression, Minnie Cox, the heroic black female
postmaster of Indianola stood strong against white terrorists in 1903-1904 before finally ceding
her position to save her family. During World War I, African Americans voted with their feet and
left the state by the tens of thousands to seek better lives in the North in spite of draconian efforts
by planters to force them to stay. "Because Rev. Thomas Collins read colored newspapers when
ordered not to,” the Afro-American newspaper reported in 1919, “[A]nd because he persuaded
his congregation not to attend an address by a speaker who was booked to advise colored
people to stay in the South, Rev. Thomas Collins, of Yazoo, Mississippi narrowly escaped a severe
beating from the Klan….On the way to the whipping post, Rev. Collins escaped and walked fifty
miles to Jackson, Mississippi where he took the train for Philadelphia."3
African Americans also organized against the threat of lynching. A "racial clash seems
imminent late tonight" the Montgomery Advertiser reported on February, 1911 "as a result of a
shotgun and pistol battel [sic] earlier in the evening between a posse of white men and a crowd
of negroes. The shooting was an attempt on the part of the posse to disperse a gathering of
Negroes in a house on the outskirts of Gunniston.” An anonymous letter writer warned the editor
of the Belzoni newspaper in the spring of 1919 that whites would begin to suffer accordingly if
they continued to engage in anti-black violence. In Vicksburg that same year, "Officials here have
received many threats that the Negroes of this section intend to start riots here to kill white
people in retaliation for the lynching and burning of a colored man here recently. Much
uneasiness has been caused, the officials apprehend not trouble. No chances have been taken,
however, for with big crowds here ,the police force has been doubled, deputies are on duty, no
2 Milton Quigless, Interviewed by Paul Ortiz, From Behind the Veil: Documenting African-American Life in the Jim Crow
South. Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke
University. 3 "Minister Flees Mississippi City" The Afro-American, Apri 4, 1919.
“I Never Will Forget” 11
fire arms are being sold, the cross river saloons are closed and the jail has been converted into an
arsenal."4
Thanks to the testimony of African Americans and the scholarship of historians including,
Emilye Crosby, John Dittmer, Todd Moye, Charles Payne, Akinyele Umoja, and others, we now
know that black Mississippians had been preparing the foundations of Freedom Summer for
decades. Black World War II veterans, including Medgar Evers, attempted to vote shortly after the
end of the war. Amzie Moore was leading voter registration campaigns in 1957 in Bolivar County.
In 1961, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) organized voter registration
schools in McComb. That fall, Burgland High School students organized protests in solidarity with
fellow student Brenda Travis, then 15-years-old, who had engaged in an act of resistance against
segregation at the local Greyhound Bus Station lunch counter. The road to Freedom Summer was
not a straight and easy path; it was more like water on the rock paid for by the blood sweat and
tears of countless black Mississippians.
I first traveled to do field work in the Delta in the summer of 1995. Then a graduate
student at Duke University, I was a research assistant for the NEH-sponsored “Behind the Veil:
African Americans Tell About Life in the Jim Crow South.” I was part of a three-member team of
graduate oral historians based at Mississippi Valley State University. We conducted most of our
oral history interviews with African American elders in Greenwood and in Leflore County. One
day driving on Highway 82 I took a wrong turn and somehow ended up in Indianola. I discovered
then that no one is ever lost in the Mississippi Delta. I stopped at a gas station to ask for
directions. God must have guided me directly to Dorsey White, the owner of the service station.
When I explained what I was doing in Mississippi, Mr. White told me that I needed to interview his
wife Bernice about the history of the civil rights movement in the region. Mrs. Bernice White told
me a series of astonishing stories about the movement in Indianola and a portion of our interview
was later published in Remembering Jim Crow: African Americans Tell About Life in the Jim Crow
South.
After I finished interviewing Mrs. White, I was instructed to return to Mr. White’s service
station for further interview assignments. For the next week and a half, Dorsey White sent me up
and down Highway 82 as well as along numerous dirt roads to conduct oral history interviews
with black elders. Our method of collaboration was simple: he’d give me a name, the town the
person lived in and he would call ahead to a friend in that locale. In his deep and distinctive voice,
Mr. White would say: “Just pull into the first service station or store you see and tell them that I
sent you.” The rest was up to me. This is where I learned how to be a historian.
In later years, I got to know Dr. Stacy White, the daughter of Bernice and Dorsey White.
Stacy became a dear friend and colleague and she invited me back to the Delta on several
occasions to help document Freedom Summer reunions. As I left the University of California,
Santa Cruz, to join the faculty at the University of Florida in 2008 an idea took root in our
discussions: why not bring a team of students from the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program at
UF to the Delta who would be able to conduct many more interviews in Indianola and environs as
a team? In the meantime, we received funding in the form of a generous yearly grant from Mr. Bill
DeGrove, a far-sighted alumnus of the University of Florida who believes strongly in the
importance of teaching younger generations of UF students about the history of the civil rights
movement. This funding makes it possible for us to take twelve students each year to the Delta
and has been supplemented in recent years by campus units at the University of Florida.
4 "Race Riot in Mississippi," Montgomery Advertiser, February 1911.
“I Never Will Forget” 12
The original goal of our collaboration was to sustain yearly oral history field trips in order
to build a publicly-accessible archive of the oral history interviews. We also planned to sponsor a
series of public programs in the Delta that would benefit students and give movement veterans
and scholars a platform to engage in Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s ageless question: “Where do we
go from here?”
SNCC veteran Margaret Block has enhanced the impact of our research trips as her
energy, activism, and ability to open doors for our students has helped us in making history
relevant to the present. I met Margaret during the 2008 Freedom Summer reunion in Indianola
and interviewed her at Mt. Beulah Baptist Church. Subsequently, Margaret has taken many of our
students under her wing, taught us freedom songs, and has challenged us to become community
organizers who use the lessons of the movement to change the troubled world we live in today. It
is no accident that several of the students who organized the Dream Defenders human rights
organization in Florida first spent hours listening to and talking with Margaret about the early
years of SNCC in the Delta. Margaret has inspired our students by reading her fearless poetry as
well as encouraging the high school students that we have been working with at McComb as well
as in the Sunflower County Freedom Project to become poets and freedom singers themselves. It
was Margaret who first suggested that our students interview members of the Catfish Workers
Union in Indianola (organized by the United Food and Commercial Workers). Union leader Eddie
Steele and the members of this incredibly brave group of workers has deepened our
understanding of the connections between economic justice and human rights that movement
activists emphasized in the 1960s.
Thanks to the guidance of Stacy White, as well as SNCC veterans and the members of the
Sunflower County Civil Rights Organization, we have been able to organize seven years of oral
history field work trips to the Mississippi Delta now. The itinerary of the trip has expanded as we
have made more connections. In recent years, we have worked closely with students at McComb
High School’s “McComb Legacies” research project, an afterschool program that teaches high
school students skills on how to bring history to life through video documentaries and other
media formats. Falana McDaniel, the McComb High School Digital Media Technology teacher in
2012-2013 was the recipient of the 2013 Martha Ross Teaching Award granted by the Oral
History Association.
We have facilitated five civil rights history public programs at Delta State University
featuring a wonderful array of speakers, including SNCC veterans Margaret Block, Lawrence
Guyot, Margaret Kibbee, Gwendolyn Zoharah Simmons, and Bright Winn, scholars Curtis Austin,
Emilye Crosby, Hasan Jeffries, and Akinyele Umoja, and activists Rev. Alan Bean, (founder of
Friends of Justice in Tulia Texas) Bill Chandler (executive director of the Mississippi Immigrant
Rights Alliance), and Rose Turner, an extraordinary union organizer who works with catfish
processing workers in the Delta. In addition, UF students return to Gainesville and host public
programs to discuss what they’ve learned. Many students have incorporated their oral histories
into senior theses, dissertations, and conference papers. The goal of all of these symposia is use
the history of the civil rights movement as a starting point to interrogate the world around us
today and to think about what still needs to be changed.
The booklet you have before you is just one of the many products of this deepening
collaboration between grassroots organizers in the Mississippi Delta and students of oral history
at UF. The majority of the oral history interviews, public programs, and community organizing
workshops that we have helped to facilitate are now available at the University of Florida Digital
Collections archive at http://ufdc.ufl.edu/freedom/ and you may view the panels and organization
workshops on the SPOHP’s You Tube channel at http://www.youtube.com/user/SPOHP111.
“I Never Will Forget” 13
The stories that you will read in this book represent generations of struggle. These are
excerpts of the 130+ oral histories that we have conducted over the past several years based on
themes chosen in collaboration with Dr. Stacy White and the Sunflower County Civil Rights
Organization. There are many tragedies and sorrow songs in these pages just as there are
triumphs and narratives of people discussing the building of solidarity between people of different
cultures, regions and racial identities. The record of striving for social justice in these pages is
unparalleled in US history. However, we believe that in many ways that we have just begun to
chronicle this amazing history. There are many more stories to tell, more archives to unearth, and
more public discussions and organization workshops that need to take place in order to figure
out “Where do we go from here?” UF students are ready to conduct more interviews, and to find
new ways using digital technology to make these histories accessible to today’s students and
tomorrow’s newest generation of community organizers. With humility and gratitude—and on
behalf of the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program I sincerely hope that you enjoy these oral
history excerpts and that you will consider joining our growing collaboration!
In Solidarity,
Paul Ortiz, May 20, 2014
Director, Samuel Proctor Oral History Program,
Associate Professor of History, University of Florida
“I Never Will Forget” 14
Figure 1. SNCC Poster: One Man, One Vote. National Museum of American History.
“I Never Will Forget” 15
• 1 •
THE MOST SOUTHERN PLACE ON EARTH
Author David L. Cohn wrote that the Mississippi Delta, "begins in the lobby of the
Peabody Hotel in Memphis and ends on the Catfish Row in Vicksburg."5 The fertile Delta was
ruled by King Cotton for a century, producing one of the United States’ largest exports by the
hands of enslaved people. After the Civil War and the end of legal slavery, the plantation
economy of the Delta was reconfigured by employers into a system of sharecropping, which often
devolved into a form of debt peonage in which impoverished laborers would never make enough
profit to elevate themselves from their exploitative labor conditions.
During Reconstruction, African Americans in Mississippi produced the most impressive
group of black leaders in the South. These included Hiram R. Revels, the first African American to
serve as a U.S. Senator; Blanche K. Bruce, who was the first African Americans to serve a full term
in the Senate, and John R. Lynch, first black speaker of the Mississippi House of Representatives.
Terrorists fought to crush black political power in order to create a new economic system that
would permanently subordinate African Americans. The Vicksburg Massacre in 1874 was initiated
by planters who sought to terrorize black plantation workers. Approximately 300 African
Americans were murdered around Vicksburg during the white riots.
Nearly a century later, the Delta was also the birthplace of the White Citizens Council,
which enforced Jim Crow laws through economic means rather than vigilante violence. Author
Charles Payne described the White Citizens Council as, "pursuing the agenda of the Klan with the
demeanor of the Rotary Club."6 Still, as local people in the Mississippi Delta have reminded us
time and time again, for as long as inequality has plagued the Delta, a tradition of activism and
resistance persisted as well. Indeed, it was, to again draw from Professor Payne, this “organizing
tradition” which convinced the activists of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
(SNCC) that Mississippi was ripe for building a social movement for change.
I always saw that things were different growing up, and a lot of places, I couldn’t go. A lot
of things, I couldn’t do, and that always bothered me, to the point where I was working at
a store, a grocery store, as a checker, and, for instance, there was a water fountain—two
water fountains—and always one of the water fountains would say: one say, colored, and
one said, white. I’m wondering, what’s the difference in the water? You know? I got a cup 5 Cohn, David L. (1948). Where I Was Born and Raised, New York: Houghton Mifflin, p. 12.
6 Payne, Charles M. (16 March 2007). I've got the light of freedom: the organizing tradition and the Mississippi freedom
struggle. University of California Press. pp. 34–35.
“I Never Will Forget” 16
and got some water out of the fountain that said white, and one of the store managers
saw me do it. I was fired because of that. Then I started, in my mind, wanting to change
things.
McKinley Mack (52)
I'm thinking, I always ask Mama, white people got a different God than us, don't they? I
never did figure that out. I went, what kind of God they got in their church? I thought it
was a Jesus for the white folks and a Jesus for the black folks, a God for the white folks, a
God for the black people. I went, mmm. I told Mama, I don't want to go to the heaven
the white folks going to.
Margaret Block (6C)
I had been working with Medgar Evers, who was the state field secretary for the NAACP
in the state, and who had held that job since 1954, just prior to the Supreme Court in
Brown v. Board of Education and the Emmett Till murder in Money, Mississippi—all
impacted, at that time, the work that Medgar Evers was doing. The reason that black
people could not vote in Mississippi, in 1890, the Mississippi legislature took the vote from
black people, and they gerrymandered—another word that came up over there—they
gerrymandered the districts. They took the solid black Delta and chopped it up into three
districts, therefore to dilute the voting strength of blacks. Even at that time, in [19]61 and
[19]62, we had black candidates run for office. Of course, they were running more
symbolic[ly] than on the possibility of getting elected—because there were very few
registered voters in the state overall—but we focused on the Delta because of the
significant black population in this mid-Delta.
Charles McLaurin (80)
We lived about two or three blocks from one of the public schools, but we had to walk
way across town to the black school. There was playgrounds—at least one—less than a
block from our house, which we couldn’t go to. So . . . as I said, poverty was rampant, it’s
just that nobody really thought about poverty that much . . . We were required to have a
bed in the kitchen, and two beds and three beds in another room. You know, it was just a
horrible, horrible condition. But many people lived that same way, so we just accepted it
and thought that was the way things was supposed to be.
Carver Randle (24)
Basically, blacks had to sit in the back of [the movie theater], and whites all around [the
front]. I understand the reason that was done . . . I understand at one time the blacks sit
on the ground floor and the whites was in the back, but due to throwing popcorn and ice
down at the blacks, the managers would have to put the blacks on top, and they didn't
have the problem because the blacks wouldn't throw no popcorn and ice down. White
folk, white folk didn't mind throwing popcorn [laughter]. So, in this town, that's what you
had; the hunted and derisioned had the back of two floors.
Charles Scott (34)
“I Never Will Forget” 17
2. A large line of protesters holding signs calling for voting rights and civil rights stand on a sidewalk along a fence.
1964. Wisconsin Historical Society.
I remember my mama telling me that, telling us that, a lot of times she would get ready
to send us to school at the all-black school, and then by the time the busses get ready to
come, the overseer would come out to the plantation and say, well, your kids can’t go to
school today; they need to stay home and go to the fields and get that cotton out of the
fields. She would say she would go back in the house and she’d cry and cry and cry, and
she’d say, this is not right.
Gloria Carter Dickerson (12)
White Citizen’s Council was kind of the cleaned-up Klan. In essence, you could be a
doctor or a dentist and belong to the White Citizen’s Council. The White Citizen’s Council
were citizens who weren’t against black people, they were for the separation of purpose
and race, that you have your needs and we have ours. In a sense, it put the patina of
ethics to a racist circ*mstance.
Dennis Flannigan (8)
I grew up with a lot of myth in my life. I was told by Mom, bless her heart—and she did
the best that she could, because of circ*mstances that she didn’t know any better—she
always would tell us things like, fear the doctor because the doctor was going to shoot
you with the needle. Fear the policeman because he was going to lock you up. Fear Santa
Claus because he was going to put some ashes in your eyes. And, above all, fear the
white man, because he would kill you. In part, that may have been true.
“I Never Will Forget” 18
Elmo Proctor (27)
I never felt any different. I’ve always felt that we all are the same, and it wasn’t no problem
with me. The only problem I had was when I just knew that somebody didn’t like me. And
if he didn’t like me, we had a problem, and it would hurt my heart for you not to like me,
because I love everybody. I always have. It hurt me real hard when somebody didn’t like
me, because, well, that just causes problems.
Andrew Lee (13)
I was under the impression growing up here, that really was the way of life, because I was
taught by my parents that you just had to obey whoever seeing you, or you was in a
whole lot of trouble. They had the old concept of saying to black people, as long as you
stay in your place, but growing up as a kid, I never did know exactly what was the place.
So, my father and my mother told me, well, don't go against none of the segregation
laws. Well, I didn't understand that too much, being a kid, because I just really thought if I
was an American citizen I could just do like the other kids.
Charles Featherstone (33)
We just, actually, my brothers and I always walked the streets, looking for work, jobs or
what you need. Got thirsty, went to go drink out of a water fountain at the service station,
and this white guy raised his foot as though he was going to kick me. You know, in my
butt. I just looked back, and he [asks]—don't you see those cups up there? I didn't say
anything. I was, at that time, especially as a young one, I was a person of few words . . . I
was always aware of the differences between the races. I wasn't a hostile-type person
unless very much physically threatened, but something like that, I understand it, knew the
situation, so I just kind of walked away.
Foster King (20)
My parents were sharecroppers; therefore, we had to go to field, we had to chop the
cotton, pick the cotton, and we had then what you call a split session. We would go to
school; we'd get out of school in May. We was off in June for chopping cotton. We would
go back to school in July and part of August. Then we'd get out again for picking season,
and then we'd go back to school after cotton picking season was over. That's the way it
was in the middle of the summer, with no air conditioning in none of the buildings.
Charles Scott (34)
I know that, if a young white kid grew up to be sixteen or seventeen years old—and I was
about that same age—that we was asked to call that kid mister. And I don’t care how old
a black guy, that same kid would call him, boy, if he so felt. And I thought that was wrong.
I guess from that time, I start to think about, there got to be a better way, there got to be
something that can be done to make things a little bit more on a equal basis so far as
human relations was concerned.
Elmo Proctor (27A)
“I Never Will Forget” 19
We were in the grocery store. We had made it in line up to a point, getting ready to
check out. Line was pretty long. Some white people came along and just broke to the
front of the line and they just told us to back off. We didn't understand why we had to
move when we was already at the front of the line. But then, our mother would tell us,
well, look, don't y'all say anything about it. Just do what you're asked to and let that be
done. Well, we began to question that.
Wardell Walton (106)
3. Printed in the SNCC brochure entitled, 'Mississippi: Subversion of the Right to Vote.' Jerry Tecklin Papers,
Wisconsin Historical Society.
You had to pick and then they would weigh the cotton. I think you didn't get very much;
what was it, three dollars a sack or a dollar and fifty cents? You didn't get very much for
whatever you did. A whole sack of cotton, you could imagine that you get three dollars?
Or a dollar and fifty? I can't remember exactly how much it was, but you didn't get paid
very much for picking a sack of cotton. You know, you would work, and then that sack,
they would weigh it; it'd probably be something like, what? Two hundred and twenty-five
pounds or three hundred pounds for a sack of cotton?
Emma Golden (42)
They're always, in the South, they're going to have a track dividing blacks and whites.
Okay? Certain times of the day, or certain times, like, say, before nightfall, your parents
would be kind of looking for you to be home and tell you, well, you can't be over there
that side of town certain time of night. So, you honored that and respected that.
Darrell Moore (38)
[My parents] were talking about how it's a damn shame that we pay taxes, too, but the
poorer black kids—they used to call us the colored kids—say, the poor little colored kids,
“I Never Will Forget” 20
they spent sixteen dollars a year for each pupil in the black schools, but the little white
kids got sixty-six dollars per pupil.
Margaret Block (6B)
There was, back then, they looked at the color of your skin; if you were light. You know,
the high yellow kids, they were treated different than if you were, say, chocolate or real
black. Mm-hm. It was very unfair. Let me see if I can cite some incident. Well, they did a
lot of things; like, people would call you, and call, yell to you names, and a whole lot of
different things.
Emma Golden (42)
To me, it was real devastating, because the economy in Mississippi, and especially in small
towns . . . depended upon the cotton, you know? So, people picked cotton, they had
money. If they had money, they could buy things. So, the economy would flourish,
because people—thousands of people—were going to the cotton fields every day, and
very few white people went to the fields. I saw white people in the fields, but this was
probably a group of people that lived on a plantation, that was the straw boss's people
and that was probably his cotton. But, when cotton was king, we were slaves.
Tommie Novick Lunsford (43)
But I always had an arrogance about me, that I felt I should have been able to get
something that you was telling me I couldn't get. I can recall one incident in City Hall. It
had a fountain, it said, white fountain and colored fountain. So, I went in, I told the fellow,
I'm going to see how this white water tastes. Well, I drinked out of the fountain, it was just
the same water. I got out of there right quick [laughter]. But I did. I'd test the water. I want
to see, was it different? It was the same thing.
Charles Scott (34)
“I Never Will Forget” 21
• 2 •
POVERTY AND THE PLANTATION
In 1964, the plantation economy in the Mississippi Delta was an engine of
tremendous profits for planters and grinding poverty for workers. In contrast to Delta
planters who drew millions of dollars each year from the federal government in the form
of agricultural subsidies, most black workers struggled to make ends meet. Lawrence
Guyot, founding chair of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party noted that, “The Delta
was the continuation of a feudal system that was a continuation of the aftermath of
slavery.” 7
Most African Americans worked on a plantation, harvesting cotton or soybeans.
This stood in contrast to the more elevated regions of Mississippi, known as "the hills,"
where agriculture was minimal and African Americans found other means of employment.
The economy of the hills created more opportunities for economic advancement for
blacks, whereas the Delta plantation system kept wealth extremely stratified. The practice
of sharecropping, as well as tenant-farming, locked many families in an endless cycle of
debt and exploitation. Black Mississippians recall an impoverished upbringing, but more
vivid are the memories of community support that was richer than the Delta soil. By the
end of Reconstruction, black communities engaged in robust practices of mutual aid and
collective support through institutions such as churches, fraternal lodges, businesses and
informal working class organizations. These institutions would subsequently provide
critical spaces for SNCC to meet and for movement-building to occur in the 1960s.
My parents, like, I think my mother [had an] eighth grade education, and my father like a
fifth grade education. But, to me, they are some of the smartest people I ever knew
because they had—I don’t know, there was just something about them. We were actually
poor. Now, I didn’t really know it, and I say poor—we weren’t really poor, because poor is
not having money, you know. We never had any money, anything, but we did own our
own house. That was a big thing, starting off in like when I was born, 1950, you know.
7 "When Students Ignited A Change In Racial Politics,", by Debbie Elliot,
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=125908995
“I Never Will Forget” 22
And just to be able to survive that time, my parents and being involved in civil rights, I’m
very, very proud of that.
John Tubbs (10)
Well, they didn’t have very much to share other than the very basic necessities, such as
food and things like that. They didn’t have any money, nobody had money. But there was
a charitable spirit. When someone in one family would die, everybody rallied behind
them. When someone was sick, there was a wealth of people to sit with that person, day
in and day out.
Carver Randle (24)
4. A man wearing overalls sits on a porch. 1964. Wisconsin Historical Society.
Yeah, well, I was just a normal, poor black child from a large family. But we had love . . . I
didn’t really think about how poor, because I compensated for it in some fashion . . . But I
think the thing that got us through it all was our mother had love for us. But they always
instilled, tried to instill—always feel that you’re as good as the next person, you can do
whatever you want to do. My mother’s term was always, look like you’re going
somewhere if you’re not. That means that you dress accordingly and you had your
clothes look tidy and those kind of things. So she wanted you to make sure that you go to
“I Never Will Forget” 23
school, get your education. You don’t have to take a backseat to anybody; if you do, you
suffer the consequences.
Willie Spurlock (3)
We all didn't have much, but we really didn't know that we didn't have much. Like some
folks says that you were poor, but we never considered ourselves poor, because I guess
everybody was in the same boat. But, growing up in Belzoni . . . as a child, we had some
enjoyable times. Even going to the cotton fields to chop cotton and to pick cotton. There
was some unbearable situations there but, then too, some enjoyable situations because
of the fact that everybody went to the fields. And so, you had good times out there,
because you intermingled with one another. Now, the downside of it is that you had to
work pretty hard in the fields, and you endured a lot of things out there in the fields that
you normally would not have endured otherwise.
Wardell Walton (106)
So, people basically chopped cotton, which—in plantation days might be all you did, was
that kind of work—they might get maybe eight, twelve days a summer, of work. So,
fundamentally, they’re living on—people, I remember families with big gardens, three
hundred dollar incomes for the whole year. I don’t know how people got by. I remember
her grandmother paid eight dollars a month for her place and the insurance man came
by every year, every month, to get her eight dollars.
Dennis Flannigan (8)
I grew up in a rural community, what we call out in the country. No electricity at all, only
fuel rod lamps. That was our light. We enjoyed the country. We had made crops, picked
cotton, and bigger crops. I grew up as a child, I went to school to a one-room schoo,l in a
one-room schoolhouse. I had to walk three miles there, three miles back.
Delsie Davis (15)
I just didn't realize how little a lot of people had. You're just trying to figure out what to
eat, and eating the same thing every day: pinto beans, I mean, that was a meal for a lot of
people. Glad to get that. The other thing that kind of shocked me was—and is still a
factor, actually—is the poor health of people: children not knowing what a dentist was . . .
people in their forties taking eight kinds of medicine to stay alive. I'd never—the incidence
of high blood pressure, heart problems, such like that, and so many people had these
things. Because I was used to being around adults who didn't have to take any medicine
except when they got sick. For people to chronically have to stay on medicine all the time,
I hadn't seen that before.
Margaret Kibbee (16A)
It was a community then, because everybody looked out for everybody, and adults
looked out for the children in the neighborhood. Well, I guess all of the children. Like, if I
would do something, before I got home—and we didn't even have telephones, I don't
know how my mama knew it—but before we got home, she knew that . . . and they just
“I Never Will Forget” 24
looked out for us. We had our own theater, our own little clubs that we could go to, that
we had just for teenagers. We could go in there and buy songs and dance, but of course,
me being Miss Margaret Block—we would go to the Chinese store to buy some wine
[laughter]. Buy us two cigarettes for a nickel.
Margaret Block (6D)
Across the ages, across the classes, across the color, gender, you know, a lot of times the
big kids would help the little kids. Of course, that’s what they do here. I mean, people—I
was talking with Juanita, who I’m staying with now, and she was saying, oh, she had
babies when she was fourteen and fifteen, and her mother raised her children till they
were, like, five, because she was too young. And she didn’t want to have a lot more
because she was taking care of her older sister’s kids and it was always like that. It was
hard to know, if you were in somebody’s home—I mean, when it’s time to eat, all the kids
there were fed.
Linda Seese (23)
There were a number of houses that had limited on-site plumbing, or none. I almost
never lived in a house with an air-conditioner. You’ve got a fan. Sometimes I lived in a
house where you shared a bathroom with six other families. It was, like, a place with
rooms and everything like that. And I was always having to move because the landlord
put pressure on the people with whom I stayed. But that was the other part of working
with SNCC . . . That you lived with the families and you lived and worked among the
people with whom you were working. You didn’t stay in a hotel or special housing, come
out and deal with the people.
Marbaret Kibbee (16B)
And we saw, both my wife and I, became acutely aware of the difference between what
poverty I had seen as a youngster—growing up in Connecticut and then, you know,
other parts of the country where I had lived and sometimes worked and gone to
college—and Mississippi poverty. I had never been south except—further south from
Baltimore, with the exception of that one trip to Atlanta in late 1960 for just a weekend.
And there were a couple of children who had clearly died of malnutrition or something
related to that, little—they weren’t children, they were infants, newborns. Not quite
newborns. And I do remember our taking a collection to arrange to have them a proper,
modest funeral, which I think the local undertaker provided for a small fee.
Hershel Kaminsky (25)
I remember going to the welfare department and trying to receive some support for me
and the child, and they said, they wouldn't give me a quarter because they wanted to
teach my sisters not to have a child. That there was cotton in the fields that needed to be
scrapped—so this was, like, December, I think, somewhere around December, and the
cotton needed to be scrapped off the ground and shook the dirt and mud off, and you
can do that, because I won't give you any money.
“I Never Will Forget” 25
Tommie Novick Lunsford (43)
I enjoyed those years better; I enjoyed eating [the food we grew], when I look back on it,
because money wasn’t plentiful at the time, but we did not go hungry. People sewed—
most of my school clothes was sewed. You know, you hear people talking about quilting
now. Mama and a few other neighborhood women who get together and have a quilt
committee, and that’s how I made my money, because to make that quilt you got to have
some cotton. I used to pick the edges of the cotton rows to get them cotton for their
quilts, and there would be one for heavy quilts in the winter time.
Leon Minniefield (32)
At that time—Mount Beulah’s on Church Street—and at that time, back then, it was real
popular with the cafes and everything. It was kind of exciting, getting up, going to Sunday
school in the morning as a little girl, but seeing all the other people coming out of the
cafes, as they called them. People would always say, say a prayer for me, you know, when
my mom or great-grandmom would be taking us to church. Some of them would be—I
didn’t know they was drunk back then, but, as I got older I knew why they were
staggering [laughter]. But they would always holler, say a prayer for me, so as I was
growing up, I realized that prayer is really for anybody and everybody, and it doesn’t
mean because you are out there drinking that you don’t believe in God and you don’t
believe in prayer.
Gelda Chandler (45)
“I Never Will Forget” 26
5. A man and a woman pick cotton by hand. 1964. Wisconsin Historical Society.
The girls basically did the housework inside. They cleaned and did the washing and the
boys did the work on the outside. We had to feed cows, milk cows, feed hogs, feed the
mules and cut wood. And the boys did this type thing. My entire family went to the field
too. Cotton was our major crop that was grown. And the entire family chopped cotton,
and picked cotton. And my mama would leave the field about an hour early and go cook
dinner. And then we’d all go eat dinner and we’d all go back to the field. And then the
girls would wash the dishes and the boys would get in the wood, and milk the cows and
feed the stock.
Earnest Brown (77)
By hands on old rubber, we had to wash for all eight of us, me and my sister. Then we
had to wring the clothes out and boil them, put them on the line then take them off, and
at that time, they had the little iron and you put it on the heater and let it get hot, then
you ironed the clothes. So you can imagine that was rough. I talked to a lot of [kids] and I
tell them, you got all the advantage in the world to get all kind of education. You got the
school buses in front of your doors. You got computers. You got typewriters. You got
everything. And we didn’t have anything.
Mary Shepherd (79)
“I Never Will Forget” 27
My grandmother would not let us go to the field. We wanted to go because all the kids
were going. Everybody was in the cotton fields. My grandmother said, you can stay and
wash hair and help me pick up this hair and stuff, but I don’t want you all to go to the
cotton field because you’re just as important to us as the white kids are. Stay up and
clean up around this house . . . We never went to the field and people don’t believe it.
Most of the kids, the ones that were sharecroppers, would naturally have to go. One year
in 1955, I was fifteen, we had one year of what was called a split session. School was out
in May, and then we went back; through June and July they were chopping cotton.
August and September, they were picking cotton, there was no school. We went back in
October. We had four months out.
Lilly Lavallais (47)
At that time all the teachers came basically from the hills. Most of the hill children got a
better education, in my opinion, than the Delta children because they didn’t do as much
farming in the hills and didn’t have to stay out of school and help gather those crops like
the children in the Delta. And it seems as if those persons in the hills had more values on
education because most of the people in the hills own their own land, than the blacks in
the Delta.
Earnest Brown (77)
The first year we bought textbooks, and of course we bought the Uncle Remus stories-
and you knew who Uncle Remus was, the big black guy with big overalls on so you knew
that it was important to you—and my grandparents would always say to me, I remember
this very vividly, with an education you can do anything you want to do. Now they had no
idea what I might do, but they’d remind me of that over and over again. When Maya and
I got married some twenty-five years later, twenty years later or so, whatever the time
was, they gave her all of my report cards that had been saved. Now the ink had faded
away from it but that was just how important education was to them.
William Ware (54)
And when we ride to school, we didn’t have no heat in the school. The principal had to
get some wood and make a fire. Then before we could get started, we had to sit there
shivering until the heater got warm before we could start class. When they’d get the
school warm, then a group would be here and a group would be over here and a teacher
over here with them. We had two teachers and we had the principal. And that was it.
Mary Shepherd (79)
We had a man who would come through the community and his name was Mr. King and
he would provide ice for us. We would get a block of ice, 25 pounds or 50 pounds and. . .
he would either bring it in the house with his tongs or they would have these ice strings
to tie on them and we could pick it up ourselves. If we didn’t have a refrigerator,
sometimes we could put it in a croker sack with sawdust or some way to keep it. We
would set our Jell-O in the icebox on top of the ice. Those were interesting days.
“I Never Will Forget” 28
Anita Jefferson (76)
6. Two homes along a dirt road with a small child on the front porch of the nearest house. 1964.
Wisconsin Historical Society.
People had never tasted any Velveeta cheese until—I mean, [Dick Gregory] sent
[donations] down here, it was good food. I remember one day, we had taken some food
out to some old people that lived somewhere out in the country, almost out to Skene.
They were sitting up there, just sitting around so hungry. When Lois and I got out of that
car with all of that food, the old man started crying. He said he was so hungry, they didn't
know what they was going to do.
Margaret Block (6B)
We had outside toilets at the time and we had outside water. You know, we had a
garden. My mother would sometimes have livestock. Sometimes she might have a cow or
sometimes she might have a pig back there or something like that, that she’d buy from
somebody in the rural area and bring it to town and keep it in there, raise him up, and
then slaughter him the following year, in the winter of the year, you know. But we worked
around the house, and I mowed lawns around there in town with a push lawn mower, did
little odd things like that; picked blackberries. I’d go in the woods and pick blackberries
and plums and bring them back to town and sell them and things like that. But it was a
hardscrabble life, because that was really in the Depression. Times were really hard then.
“I Never Will Forget” 29
If all you know is that people around you, everybody’s in the same shape, you don’t ever
know you’re poor. All that’s relative.
Nathan Boclair (55)
I hated the garden, but now I miss it, because now I realize why we did the okra and
tomatoes and squash . . . we had summer greens, and we had winter greens and collard
greens, but now I realize why my grandfather always did a garden. You know? Because it
did save you money, and a lot of money. I miss it now. My grandfather’s been dead
probably thirteen years, and the first, maybe the last five years, is when I really realize
what it meant to really have a garden. I see why people still plant gardens and have
gardens, because I know what we used to do. But I used to always say, when I get grown
and get on my own, and I ain’t never going to have a garden. I’m not going to plant. But
I miss it, because those kind of things can get expensive.
Gelda Chandler (45)
Okay, well, as a consequence of my work here as a horticulturalist teaching vegetable
production, fruit production, beautification of homes and that type thing– Ms. Fannie Lou
Hamer was getting big time grant money from various sources, Rockefeller Foundation,
so forth and so on. And she had a manager of the farmers’ estate and, as a consequence
of her being involved in her work, they bought some property, she bought some
property, to grow certain things that I was capable of teaching how to grow and give this
to the poor. They could just go out in the field and get okra and beans and peas and so
forth on their own. She gave them that opportunity.
James Davis (56)
Although with us owning our own land, our uncle had a thing that we would always ask
him, why you don’t sell it? We planted a whole acre, peas and beans, then he had a truck
patch. He’d set out sweet potatoes, plant greens and all that, peanuts and stuff. So when
harvest time come, we’d ask my uncle, why are you giving all this away? We worked hard.
He says, it’s better to give than to receive. God has blessed us to have our own land and
there are others less fortunate than we are. So give it to them, let them have something
to eat.
Mary Shepherd (79)
“I Never Will Forget” 30
Figure 7. Earl Newman: SNCC (father and child). Oakland Museum of California
“I Never Will Forget” 31
• 3 •
DESIGNING A FREEDOM SUMMER
Medgar Evers was one of many World War II veterans from Mississippi who returned to
the state at the end of the war and attempted to vote—unsuccessfully. “All we wanted to be was
ordinary citizens. We fought during the war for America, Mississippi included. Now, after the
Germans and Japanese hadn’t killed us, it look as though the white Mississippians would…”8 Less
than twenty years later, Bob Moses stood before a Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee
(SNCC) press conference to announce the launch of Freedom Summer. The campaign mobilized
hundreds of activists and college students to travel to Mississippi and challenge long-standing
inequalities for disenfranchised African Americans. It is important to note however, that many of
the foundational civil rights activists in Mississippi—organizers such as Charles McLaurin,
Lawrence Guyot, and James Chaney—were native Mississippians.
Several campaigns prefaced the launch of Freedom Summer, including the “Freedom
Vote,” organized to demonstrate the eagerness of African Americans to vote in Mississippi, and
voter registration drives in McComb, Mississippi that were driven out by Klan violence. SNCC
organizers appealed to local leaders throughout Mississippi to train and strategize with Freedom
Summer volunteers. Their plan was to restore representation to the black majority in the state
through voter registration drives, and to supplement the inadequate public education of the Delta
with the alternative curriculum of the Freedom Schools. During this period in the Delta's history,
less than seven percent of eligible black adults were registered to vote, and the average school
year for Mississippi’s black students was less than 100 days.9 These Freedom Summer projects
were met with violent retaliation from white supremacists, and cautious determination from the
African American community.
Like I keep telling people, the movement just did not start with Freedom Summer in
[19]64. We were winding stuff up in [19]64. We had organized, you know. We had more
help in [19]64, but we were always active, we were always activists, like SNCC and SCLC
and CORE. We were already here at the time they decided to have the [19]64 Freedom
Summer. 8 Wynn, Neil A. The African American Experience During World War II. 2011. p. 88.
9 "Freedom Summer". CORE. 2006. http://www.core-online.org/History/freedom_summer.htm
“I Never Will Forget” 32
Margaret Block (6A)
My real first awareness—and I can’t think of the year it happened—was when this little
[fourteen]-year-old kid came down from the North, Emmet Till. And there are rumors—
and I don’t have anything to substantiate the rumors, whether the rumors were true—
that this young kind did a wolf whistle or something, and whites of Mississippi killed that
little kid. Like, what in the world can a little kid do by whistling at a white woman or a
person, period? The little kid may have not known anymore about what he was doing
than I would have known at that age.
Elmo Proctor (27)
Then in the [19]60s, in [19]59 when people began to ride buses into the South—the
Greyhound buses—and the beatings and other things, I wanted to come then and I didn’t
have the nerve to come to the South. There’s other ways to put that, but that’s the truth
of it. I would have gone with someone but I wouldn’t go by myself. I remember talking to
a friend . . . who was African American. He said, are you crazy [laughter]? Meaning, why
in the world would I leave my family to go down there? And I realized that it’s not a
journey you make with someone, it’s a journey you make by yourself.
Dennis Flannigan (8)
8. Three people work on a community construction project. All three support a beam while the man in the foreground
hammers a nail into it. 1964. Wisconsin Historical Society.
[I] went to the training, the second training, in Oxford. At which, the beginning of the
training, Rita Schwerner got up and said her husband and two other men were missing
“I Never Will Forget” 33
and presumed dead. So we had to all think about what we were doing. I felt like I had to
come for myself. I originally went to Ruleville. There were a lot of people that went to
Ruleville, probably because of Mrs. Hamer. Well, there wasn’t—nobody was living in
Indianola at that point. I mean, of the outside agitators.
Linda Seese (23)
I was involved in little marches, little things we did in the Bay area. So, I was, as a teenager
in high school, I was looking forward to either going in the Peace Corps or going in the
civil rights movement, and I decided the civil rights movement was more appropriate
because that was sort of my job. I mean, that was my duty. This was my country, that was
where I could make my contribution. I owed it to straighten things out. I thought I could
be of more influence, serve more of a purpose in Mississippi. I wanted to go in [19]64; I
was just getting out of high school, then. But I didn't have the money. It wasn't anything
else that kept me from going, so I had to save my money, and I did. So, in [19]65, I came.
My mother gave me Three Lives for Mississippi, hoping I'd change my mind, but I didn't,
so I came.
Margaret Kibbee (16)
Dr. Martin Luther King’s record in Mississippi is impeccable. He was frightened to death of
Mississippi. Andy Young wrote Bob Moses a letter saying, look, we really don’t want King
to come to Mississippi, but, if he comes, make sure there are a lot of tall people . . . we
asked him to come to support the Freedom Election. He comes down, he flies into five
cities, he gives speeches, and he supports it. We ask him to support the summer project.
He comes into Mississippi, moves across the state, and he vigorously supports it.
Lawrence Guyot (78-A)
I suppose when I was in Seattle, Washington, I had planned to go to the Peace Corps, but
I was selected out because I was asking too many questions about Vietnam and about
class structure in the United States. They said you’ll have servants in Ethiopia as teachers,
teachers have servants. I said nuh-uh, I’m not going to have any servants. I don’t believe
in having servants. My mother grew up in an orphanage and she was a servant and I
won’t have servants. I was arrogant, twenty-three, twenty-four year old, and so they
selected me out. They said maybe it’s the way you wear your hair. I had big hair and I
played guitar and I walked around barefoot, it was 1962. So I started to question America
at that time. I was living in Seattle so I joined Seattle CORE and we were doing sit-ins and
demonstrations just like this for the same reasons, so I was active in Seattle. Then I read in
a paper called the National Guardian—no longer exists—about a call for white
volunteers, northern volunteers to come down.
Liz Fusco Aaronsohn (21)
A year later, another speaker came, and they were college students from the North who
had been down, and they said, now it’s going to happen. We are looking for a Freedom
Summer. And they explained it. I thought that that would be a right thing to do, because
“I Never Will Forget” 34
there was a huge wrong going on in America, and I volunteered. I became a volunteer
sometime in the early spring, packed up, and went. If we jump decades later, no, I would
not want my children to do that. You know? But we had no concept of the extent of the
danger, of the intensity of what we were getting into, and there really was no way anyone
could say, now, I want to sit down and I want to let you know what this is. No. No one
could explain that to you. You can’t explain war in the trenches, you couldn’t explain the
intensity of Mississippi at that time.
Bright Winn (3)
That’s why we became activists, because of Emmett Till. You can talk to Dorie Ladner or
Joyce Ladner or my, well, you can’t talk to Sam. I don’t know about Hollis [Watkins] but
Wazir Peaco*ck. Emmett Till was the reason we couldn’t wait to get big enough to join a
movement. He said that he was the fire, he started the fire. That’s what they did when
they killed Emmett Till.
Margaret Block (6)
If you remember the murders of Schwerner and Chaney and Goodman, those happened
in the first week of the Freedom Summer, and those people had trained the week before.
The week that they disappeared, I was in training, as well as all of the people, pretty
much, who came to the Ruleville-Indianola area.
Dennis Flannigan (8)
9. A young man at a nighttime rally in support of the MFDP. Behind him people carry signs with portraits of James Earl
Chaney and Andrew Goodman, two of the three civil rights volunteers who were murdered in summer of 1964.
Wisconsin Historical Society.
“I Never Will Forget” 35
I had a psychiatric interview with a psychiatrist in Mount Sinai hospital in San Francisco.
They decided I was just crazy enough to come to Mississippi and not worry anybody else.
They asked me a lot of questions about, could I take orders and directions from someone
that had less education? They wanted to make sure that I wasn't going to try to come
down there to tell everybody what to do, that I could take directions.
Margaret Kibbee (16)
When we signed up, SNCC sent us a list of books to read. Souls of the Black Folk by
W.E.B. Dubois, Black Like Me . . . to be read. I took the bus to Oxford, Ohio from San
Francisco and I read some of them. In Oxford, Ohio, the training—the hands-on
training—was being out on the quad and having to assume the fetal position as people
beat you; you know, how to protect yourself. Then, while someone is being beaten, to
throw your body on that person’s body to protect them, so that was hands-on training.
The rest of the training was, we had speakers—Bayard Rustin, a noted fellow in that day
who had been active for years in the North and the South, and he talked to us about his
experiences and his philosophy. I remember a lawyer, a Southern lawyer, talked to us, and
he said, now, let’s talk about law and order. You may be within the law, but you are
against the order
Bright Winn (3)
So I tell people I didn’t get an education by going to college. I got an education working
in the movement and coming in contact with people like Hollis and John Lewis and my
brother [Sam Block] and Amzie Moore and Diane Nash and Septima Clark. All of these
people had a big influence on me. Although I’ve always been a free thinker, as my
momma called me. But it got me in trouble, too [laughter].
Margaret Block (6A)
I remember one night, Medgar Evers was in town and I didn’t know nothing about no
Medgar Evers . . . That night, Dr. Bowell had one of his cars parked at his daddy’s house
on Roosevelt Street, he had one at his own house out there on Old Inverness Road . . .
Well, I saw this kind of tall fellow—I guess he seemed tall to me because I was so short
myself—and he got in the backseat of the car. He was laying down in the seat. So I asked
Dr. Bowell, why is this man here? You told me to take him down to your daddy’s house so
he can switch cars, and use the car there now, but why is he laying down on the seat? He
said, you don’t know who that is? I said, no. He said, that Medgar Evers. He said, we’re
trying to get him back out of town to Jackson, see. So I want you to drive him from my
house down to Roosevelt Street and we can change cars there, and I can drive him to
Gadsden.
Charles Featherstone (33)
Septima [Clark] was amazing. If you know about Ella Baker, then she’s kind of an Ella
Baker, because she was in South Carolina, in the Carolinas, Sea Islands and all of that, and
“I Never Will Forget” 36
it was her idea to have citizenship schools. That was her idea, and nobody ever talks
about Septima Clark, Miss Clark. But I think I’m just very blessed to have known women
like her and Ella Baker and Dorothy Cotton. It’s a blessing for me to have known these
people, and for Miss Clark and Miss Baker to be one of my mentors is incredible.
Margaret Block (6A)
The reason I came to this part, to the Delta, was in that training, Charles McLaurin—who
had not been there for the first week—came and spoke about cars passing him and
shooting at him and really terrifying and dangerous things up here. And the beatings that
he’d had, and Fannie Lou Hamer spoke of her beatings, and the deadly seriousness of
Mississippi.
Dennis Flannigan (8)
I mean, you’ll have to excuse me, but there was a lot of sexism in this movement, and . . .
and it was strange, because the leaders of the local movement were women. There
weren’t many men because of economic, social factors that made all the men go move to
the North. You know? There were young men, like Otis and Cephus and McKinley Mack,
but very few actual men living in the community, in the [19]20s and [19]30s, [19]40s.
Linda Seese (23)
I think people have a basic need for community and love and tenderness and stuff like
that, there’s always this conflict between opposing forces. I think that the movement came
out of a wholesale disgust from the old ways of thinking and doing things, the Eisenhower
era; frivolous consumerism, bouffant hairdos, just bullsh*t. . . I’ve got to tell you that
women in the movement—if there were no women, there would never have been a
movement. Never, never, never. You get what I’m saying? Never. Women are so under
represented and under respected, I don’t care what movement you’re talking about. The
American Indian movement, Wounded Knee. The United Farm Workers in California, I
worked with them . . . Every movement I’ve ever had the honor of working with, women
have played huge roles and no credit, virtually no credit.
Allen Cooper (1)
But my grandmother, I remember always sitting on the stool in the kitchen doing hair and
cooking. When the Freedom Riders came in [19]59, no, [19]60, because I left in 1961, I
was always sending her money because she was always saying, I’m going to make some
sweetbread. I’m going to fry some pies. I’m going to make some soup or something for
them, but don’t ever tell anybody about it, because I don’t want them to do the same
thing they did to Irene’s house—Irene Magruder’s house was burned; you probably know
about that.
Lilly Lavallais (47)
But, you know, but it’s just, I think I missed – I didn’t miss that college, that whole
experience being on campus and hanging out and partying all night and pledging, you
“I Never Will Forget” 37
know, being in they sororities and stuff. Some of my friends now be sitting around talking
about, oh, what did you pledge Margaret? I tell them all the time I pledged SNCC. They
don’t know what I’m talking about, they’re Deltas and AKAs, and I tell them I pledged
SNCC, okay.
Margaret Block (6A)
So I joined the civil rights movement here, joined Charles McLaurin and a lot of other
people here, and we started doing a lot of protesting and stuff. That’s where I really
started to work, you know, because I saw a positive thing happening. That’s when we
decided that voter registration was a thing to change, that the word, vote, means more
than people think it means. I went to jail for that: ain’t no telling how many times. I was all
over Sunflower County, getting people to register to vote and stuff, and even went up to
a little town north of here called Doddsville, not knowing that little town was owned by
one of our senators, Senator Eastland. That, up there, I went to jail for that. Then we
would go to restaurants; couldn’t never go in and sit down and eat food, you always had
to go to the back door. I went to jail for that. So, then it got to where, on the weekends,
to make sure I wouldn’t be in protesting places, they would come and pick me up and
take me to jail anyway, whether I did anything or not.
McKinley Mack (52)
10. A role-playing activity during a Freedom Summer training session. 1964. Wisconsin Historical Society.
But it was young people and they seemed not to – they seemed to have been not afraid,
and we were risk-takers. That’s what we were, and I saw that SNCC was, we were risk-
takers. We would do stuff and people, Dr. King would be goin’, you know, just look at
you, because we were not afraid to challenge nobody or to do nothing.
“I Never Will Forget” 38
Margaret Block (6A)
Figure 11. Freedom Summer offices, 1964. Collection: Susan Gladstone papers. Wisconsin Historical Society.
“I Never Will Forget” 39
“I Never Will Forget” 40
• 4 •
THE SUNFLOWER COUNTY MOVEMENT
Sunflower County is celebrated as the birthplace of blues icons B.B. King and Charlie
Patton, but it is also the seat of the White Citizens Council, founded by Robert B. Patterson of
Indianola in 1952 to enforce segregation and inequality through economic coercion. Fortunately,
Sunflower County was also the home of community organizers like Bernice White, Cora Fleming,
Alice Giles, and, most famously, Fannie Lou Hamer, a middle-aged sharecropper whose work
encompassed the goals of Freedom Summer, and whose actions led her to be fired from the
plantation where her family lived and worked for nearly two decades. Hamer became a powerful
organizer for the civil rights movement in Sunflower County, and a leader in the Mississippi
Freedom Democratic Party. Women like Ms. Hamer and Ms. Irene Magruder were some of the
first people in Sunflower County to embrace Freedom Summer volunteers like Margaret Kibbee,
Bright Winn, & Alan Cooper and provide a safe place for them to sleep, and to carry out the
"necessarily slow and patient work," of voter registration. 10
SNCC was about empowering local leaders . . . we didn’t create E.W. Steptoe or Hartman
Turnbow or Fannie Lou Hamer. We discovered them, enhanced their skills, put them in
contact with one another, and started operations that they could grow in. That’s why we
build a foundation of—some people go in to organize people. We go in to organize with
people, to empower with people. To get people to understand that the greatest asset we
had in this state was the people themselves; their churches, their religious institutions,
their social institutions: the Elks, the Masons . . . and that’s what we did.
Lawrence Guyot (78-A)
Well, in our case, Mrs. Magruder was the first to let us in, yes. Single woman, elderly. She
let people in. Oscar Giles and Mrs. Giles, together, let people in. It probably, if I can ring
my memory, was more often a woman head of household that first let us in. There may
be a sociological reason for that, and I am not a sociologist, but there may be, in that, the
black men of this area were always at threat of being lynched. You know? Women were
not at threat of being lynched, that was not the tradition. So if a black woman stood up
10
An expression used by Bob Moses, quoted in Hogan, Wesley C. 2007. Many minds, one heart: SNCC's dream for a
new America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. P. 387.
“I Never Will Forget” 41
and said something, well, she could lose her job, she could lose her home—Mrs.
Magruder’s home was burned—but she wasn’t dead.
Bright Winn (3A)
I think how quickly we were welcomed. We came to church for a meeting and we were
found. That, if you think about it, this is Mississippi, where you’ve been subjugated
enough to—a man across the street, an older man when I was leaving, came over and
cried, and he said he remembered when he’d been fixing his Model T which had a flat
tire, and white people drove by and just hit him as he was just—swerved out of the way
to hit him. That was the Mississippi of fear and violence and hate. We arrived, and in a
sense, with almost a blink of the eye . . . even more compelled by this, I think about it
now, people reached out.
Dennis Flannigan (8)
I remember when we first started the NAACP, when we would wear wide straw hats and I
really didn’t know too much about it. I wore a straw hat because a lot of people was
wearing them and I wore them because they was wearing them, and that’s what the
Freedom Riders wore. I got bottles threw later in the country, and where I was walking up
the road, I got bottles thrown at me. You know? Stuff like that. Had people screaming
out, hollering names, and stuff like that.
Andrew Lee (13)
12. Two men wearing suits stand in front of a crowd of people. 1964. Wisconsin Historical Society.
My father and mostly my mother was very, very active in the civil rights movement.
During the summers that the Freedom Riders came to Indianola, they actually stayed—
“I Never Will Forget” 42
some of them actually stayed at our house. So, that gave me an opportunity to meet
some people that were from other places than Mississippi. At the time, the only place I
had gone outside the state of Mississippi was Louisiana, so I met some people from
different parts of the United States; youngsters, college age. That really made an
impression on me because I was able to talk to them and, basically, understand what
goes on in their world.
John Tubbs (10)
I got a cup of water out of the fountain said, whites. And I was fired for getting water out
of a white fountain. And, on my way home, feeling discouraged because it was, at that
time, it was like you were less than human, to me. I was walking home, and I met a very
good friend of mine, name of Charles Scattergood. And Charlie Scattergood told me, he
said, brother, say, where are you going? I said, I'm going home. I just got fired off a job.
He said, what? I said, for drinking out of the wrong water fountain. He said, well, you
come home with me [laughter]. We went down to the Freedom School, which was a
Baptist school, and he sat down and he talked to me, and that day, I decided to become
a member of SNCC, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
McKinley Mack (52)
And this particular county was—every place and everyone contributed, but Sunflower
County was the seat of the Citizen’s Council, the White Citizen’s Council was started right
in this town. The whole area was ripe, white, rife with Klan. This was Senator Eastland’s
home county. This was an extremely important and pivotal place. Plus, it was the home of
Fannie Lou Hamer, who was nothing more than a humble, honest, hard-working, black
plantation worker who had it. Had it. She would have told you, there was nothing special
about her, but she sure was special.
Bright Winn (3A)
Well, they were moving sharecroppers off the plantations. They would wait, 'cause, you
know, sharecroppers would work and never get no money. At the end of the year, they
owed the boss man, and after they made all of these cotton crops. So Amzie and Dr.
Howard and Medgar Evers started going late at night, like 2 or 3 o'clock in the morning
and moving these families out. Dr. Howard even built some little houses for them to
move in, in Mound Bayou, when they got them.
Margaret Block (6D)
When the civil rights people came, Lord, I remember it was the [19]60s. By then, they
would tell us, y’all get in there and lay down, because some of the people came to our
house one night. Man, you talk about somebody who’s scared, because I thought they
was going to burn our house down, they had just burned Miss Irene’s house and Ms.
Giles and them’s store on Church Street. Man, I thought, man, those folks up in there
fixing to get the white folks out of this house, you know [laughter]. We were scared,
because that was in [19]64, [19]65, when the movement started.
“I Never Will Forget” 43
Betty Campbell (14)
Well, we basically focused on organizing the young people, because the older people, at
that time, they really didn't want to get involved. They were afraid of their livelihood; they
were afraid of their jobs. They were afraid of being whipped or beaten. So, we really
focused up on trying to organize young people to begin to be more actively involved in
the civil rights movement during that time. So, we had individuals from other states to
come in and they would teach us how to protect ourselves, how to respond to certain
situations, and also, in terms of how to get other people involved and doing the things
that we needed to do to try to secure some of the rights that we were fighting for, right.
Wardell Walton (106)
13. Two women stand on the porch of a home. Three men, probably Freedom Summer volunteers, are talking to them.
1964. Wisconsin Historical Society.
They would have these marches through Jackson, around the streets of Jackson during
the noon hour, most of the day. I was so amazed about how orderly they were and how
orderly they had to be, because we would have marches in San Francisco that used to
take over Market Street; go do what you want to do, and everybody's making a lot of
noise. Traffic is blocked off for your convenience. At this one, you had to stop for
everything. You didn't look sideways. You marched two-by-two; you stopped for every
red light and stayed on the sidewalk.
Margaret Kibbee (16)
If you are proud people, sometimes, you're looked at as a person that's offensive. A
person that rocks the boat, so to speak, sort of trouble in the water. It's not easy,
sometimes, living in fear. Offending the wrong person could cost your life, so to speak.
“I Never Will Forget” 44
But, as a young teenager, now, going to school in the early [19]60s when Freedom Riders
came into the Delta and voter registration and all that began to take place, there were a
lot of protests in the cities and stuff like that. I, being a young teenager, I got interested
seeing people come into town. I felt, at the time, you're a teenager, that something
wasn't right.
Foster King (20)
That way, guys in the dormitory—the athletic dormitory—say, hey, man, what kind of
town is Indianola? They just bombed a school last night. They just burned a church. They
did this. And I just kept hearing about that, and I was very disturbed about it, but at that
time, I didn’t see a role that I could play or wanted to play to address that. I kind of felt
like there were a handful of people here who were going to deal with that, as well as the
people who had come from the outside; the North, the West, the East, to work with the
local people. So, I never saw myself as being involved in that. My main concentration was
to get an education, get a job, and try to get myself out of poverty. So, I would come
home on weekends and sometimes through the week, and there would be people
picketing and marching around the courthouse, the library, and different places. I would
just watch it. Never got involved. And it was some time later that I realized that I had
finished school here and was in my senior year at Mississippi Valley State and was not
able to go to the public library.
Carver Randle (24)
Women here in the civil rights movement in Mississippi—and I don't think it was
necessarily true all over, but it was true here: women would carry on such an important
role and had such leadership positions in the civil rights movement in Mississippi; Mrs.
Hamer, Mrs. Gray, Mrs. Devine, they were very important. But you had women
throughout in the movement who were important. I was talking to Lenny and Eunice
Jenkins, and I remember how important they were and active they were. Wendy Jenkins
and I did a lot of canvassing for many hours together, getting people registered to vote,
trying to do things. So, women just always played an important part. They made
decisions.
Margaret Kibbee (16A)
We had a Sunflower County mimeographed brochure, pamphlet of, maybe, eight and a
half by eleven, ten, twelve pages, double-spaced which consisted, primarily, of research
that had been done by SNCC’s—what can I say? Exceptional research director at the
time, Jack Minnis, who dug up a great deal of information about who really owned the
large plantations here in Sunflower County and, also, what little industry existed. And, not
unlike other parts of the South, it exposed the kind of colonial relationship between the
Southern economy and the larger national economy and even international, if you will.
While Senator James Eastland was a large, one of the largest landowners, in the county,
the largest landowner was an English company. They owned, I think—I think I do
remember the figure, thirty-eight thousand acres which were, I think, mostly in cotton.
“I Never Will Forget” 45
Hershel Kaminsky (25)
Our menfolks was much more fearful than our ladies. And . . . I’ve gone places where
there would be four or five men and twenty-five or thirty ladies talking about the same
thing. But the men, as a whole, was either very young, and I don’t say, necessarily, didn’t
mind being hurt—I don’t think anyone wants to get hurt. But there was an urge and a
necessity thing going on, whereabouts these things needed to be done. There were other
people and of other races that was coming in to help, to try and alleviate this problem
that we was having here in Mississippi. Some of these people were being killed. And I says
to myself, if other people think enough of my freedom to have some of the things which
the constitution guarantees us to have in the state of Mississippi—if they’re willing to
come here and sacrifice their family life, risk their lives and being killed—and some
were—that the least I could do was lend a helping hand and be supportive.
Elmo Proctor (27A)
So I think I got a phone call, I got a phone call from Jim Dann at the jail, and he said, go
down to the Freedom School, everything’s wide open, they arrested us down there and
the car’s there and the key’s there. So I got ready to go and I walked, and it was the
longest walk of my life. In my memory, it just seemed like miles, and I remember because
. . . I had already been told that, every time a car comes you have to turn around and
look and see, and if there’s a white person in the car you get way off the road because
you could expect that they would try to run you down. Every time a car came, I was
terrified. Every time I heard a dog bark, I was terrified. And I walked and I walked and I
finally got to the Giles grocery store, and I felt like I was being embraced in a family,
because then they called other people and we all went down to the Freedom School
together. But that walk, in my memory, for thirty years, was the longest walk of my life.
When I came back here in 1994, I realized that the walk was about four blocks. And in my
memory, it was such a significant event and such a terrifying event that it had stretched
itself out.
Karen Jo Koonan (30)
One day, they came, some white citizens came to the post office and the postmaster told
Amzie to leave out the back door. Amzie went out the front door with his apron on and
his broom in his hand, and told them, he’s Amzie Moore, and what they want? He’s not
going anywhere. You know, he just told them, I’m not going anywhere.
Margaret Block (37A)
Then, when the Freedom Summer stuff started happening, I remember Mama and Daddy
calling us in and saying, look, this stuff’s going on; we don’t think it’s going to be a
problem, but y’all just stay out of the way. Be nice. We don’t like what they’re doing, but
be nice, and if something happens, just get out of the way, which is what we did. You
know, we talked politics; we’d hear great-grandma and them talking about politics,
“I Never Will Forget” 46
cussing the Kennedys and Johnsons and all that. It wasn’t like I grew up in a liberal
environment; things just affected me different, I guess.
David Rushing (41)
[My brother Sam] said, violence begets violence, and if you could show the world that we
were nonviolent and just trying to get human rights, then we would have the whole
country on our side, rather than just these people down here. That’s why, when he went
to Greenwood and he decided to go national, he called it national, CBS. He called them
and showed them how he was nonviolent, but yet still they were attacking them over
there, like when they shot Jimmy Travis in the head over there.
Margaret Block (39)
And being seventeen and doing this type of work here in this town, that was a no-no. But
I had to take that chance, you know? I was willing to accept anything come at me,
because I was about change. If you don’t take a stand for something better, they’re going
to remain the same. Once I did that, and then, like I was telling you, the guys that were
visiting here from other states and stuff, we all got together—black and white kids, you
know. We all got together, and that was it. Now we are where we are now, because of
that. It was an experience for me, education for me, because being a sharecropper—
farmer’s child, I never was in the public that much. But, in high school, I was working, I
would go and work at the store for school money, you know, stuff like that. Once that
happened, now I say, I got to take a different route. It happened, you know.
McKinley Mack (52)
14. A woman in the foreground writes on a pad while a young woman looks on from a doorway. 1964.
Wisconsin Historical Society.
So, they called us in there one by one. What was that, fifty-some of us? Fifty-two or
something that of us. When they called me in, they were always talking about outside
“I Never Will Forget” 47
agitators. When I got in there, Lord knows, they thought I was an outside agitator. I asked
them, why do you think I’m an outside agitator? You know, I think to myself, they don’t
think we’ve got sense enough to do anything? You know. I see that your address is
Chicago, Illinois, on my cumulative record. I said, if you would have looked on it, you
would have saw that was my mother’s address. You would have seen that I graduated
from H.M. Nailor Elementary School and Eastside High School, here in Cleveland,
Mississippi. They couldn’t say anything.
Jennifer Buckner (68)
I don't know if you can revitalize a movement that was that great, but you got, like I said,
today you got to start living out loud. You can't be afraid to go to jail, because if we had
been afraid to go to jail, I don't think we would have been successful, and you can't be
afraid to get beat up or anything else. I was, I had me a knife with me, I was going to cut
somebody up.
Margaret Block (6D)
I think we had to, those of us who stayed long enough—those who got frustrated with it
left, an those of us who said, wait a second, there’s something here I can learn. Because
we began to respect the people we were working with so deeply. We were so dependent
on them for our safety, for our lives, for our food, for the reason for our existence. I think
there was also a spiritual content to that, the mass meetings and the church services, all
of us who were white and had not been raised in the black Baptist church. There’s a
depth of knowledge here that we don’t know anything about, we’ve never been taught
anything about.
Liz Fusco Aaronsohn (21)
“I Never Will Forget” 48
• 5 •
MASS MEETINGS AND FREEDOM SONGS
Freedom Summer volunteers would spread the word about their cause by organizing
mass meetings in churches and community centers. In Sunflower County, Williams Chapel Church
in Ruleville hosted mass meetings despite the severe danger that resulted from these gatherings.
During the summer of 1964, 37 churches were bombed by white terrorists as a result of their
affiliation with the civil rights movement.11 Freedom Songs were a powerful tool that drew
reluctant local people to these meetings. Organizers like Hollis Watkins and Margaret Block would
alter a few words in a traditional church hymn to make it relevant to the civil rights struggle, and
the resulting harmony served as a critical bonding opportunity for a community under siege.
One of the reasons that music was so important was because music in the movement, as
we saw it, could be used as a tool for bringing people together, of introducing yourselves
to people and getting close to people, motivating people and inspiring people.
Hollis Watkins (5)
The music was the glue that kept the civil rights movement together. And it was the best
organizing tool that we had, because we would be singing those songs at a meeting and
people would pass by and hear us singing and say, oh, you guys going to sing that song
next week, again?
Margaret Block (6A)
We talked a lot about what was the purpose of the march, and why were they marching,
and why were they singing these Freedom Songs. We sung a lot of Freedom Songs in our
house at that time, also, while the movement was going on. I also remember one night,
when Mama was going to a mass meeting, she took me and Dr. King was there, and he
spoke at a church in Cleveland, Mississippi. I’ll never forget that night that he really spoke,
it just inspired me so much to see him talking about people fighting for their rights and
doing it in nonviolent ways and let justice roll down to everybody.
Gloria Carter Dickerson (12)
11
McAdam, Doug (1988). Freedom Summer. Oxford University Press.
“I Never Will Forget” 49
Brother Christian, who is a member here—or was—his wife is still one of my historians of
the church. She keeps me posted on the history. She’s the one that helped us get the
plaque put out front. She taught history and was a big part of that movement. She talked
about how well-guarded [Martin Luther] King was the day he came and how the corner
was blocked off; they were watching who came in and who went out. But St. Paul is a
church where we’re trying to live the history, also tell it, so the next generation will know
the things that have come down. Very few of our young people are aware that the
church and the parsons was shot up in [19]67, bombed in [19]68.
Tanya Evans (59)
There was a big thrust to organize people for a huge . . . a large demonstration to
attempt to register to vote at the time the Congress was going to open in January of
1965. We put a lot of effort into that, mostly through talking to people and going house
to house, but even more importantly trying—having mass meetings, what were called
mass meetings every week in the Freedom School. During one of those mass meetings,
there was some kind of Molotov co*cktail that was dropped from a crop duster right
outside the school. That was the first attempt to the bomb the school, but that just left a
small crater. I don’t think it was more than . . . maybe four or five feet wide. It was big
enough, because it was dropped and there was an explosion and all, and people were
shaken up. We were quite shaken.
Hershel Kaminsky (25)
Believe it or not, I don’t have a favorite [Freedom Song] because to me, to me, the songs
are tools that I use to reach people that I’m trying to reach. So for different kind of
people, you use different kinds of songs. It’s just like if you’re getting ready to do some
carpentry work, you know, you want some hammers, some nails, you want some levels.
You’re not coming out with the axe and a hoe.
Hollis Watkins (5)
15. A man stands with his arm raised at a mass meeting.1964. Wisconsin Historical Society.
“I Never Will Forget” 50
Reverend Storey was the pastor of this church and of the one in Ruleville that Ms. Hamer
belonged to, Williams Chapel. So, we would meet here and have our Tuesday nights’
meeting here. Then we’d go to Williams Chapel in Ruleville and meet on Thursday nights.
That’s how we did, we had to go back and forth, because this was the only church that
would allow us to have a meeting in there. They were afraid that they was going to get
the church bombed. They did burn the church down, burned it in Ruleville.
Margaret Block (37A)
I mean, I remember going to mass meetings with Jesse Jackson here in little old Indianola,
and it was so tense, so tense. The children of the older power structure kind of knew that
something had to give. You know? They’re not liberals, but they’re a different breed, and
so it was this internal struggle among a lot of the older families here.
David Rushing (41)
The church, like we’re in right now, is like a refuge. It was the only public place we could
meet. So the church buildings became really important as a place to meet and talk and
sing. We sang to keep the fear from taking over our whole being. We sang when we were
scared, we sang when we were happy, we sang when we were sad. It was really powerful.
Allen Cooper (1)
I paid strict attention to how people joined in and participated, you know, in the singing.
In other words, I’m looking at how this is really a bonding piece in the church. When
people would sing songs that people were familiar with, 99 to 100 percent of everybody
in the church would be singing. There’s not a lot of things you can get 100 percent
participation from, so to me, that’s an indication that this is a very powerful instrument
here as a part of this process. Also, when I looked at how the church service took place,
there was some singing going on before anybody began to talk. To me, that is saying to
me that this is an attention-getter. This is a bonding force that is taking place. This is
getting people ready and prepared to receive a message coming from someone. I’m
saying if this can work and has tremendous effect in the church, then I can use that same
approach in working with people in the community as a part of our mass meetings.
Hollis Watkins (5)
“I Never Will Forget” 51
Figure 16. SNCC Button. Wisconsin Historical Society.
“I Never Will Forget” 52
• 6 •
ONE MAN, ONE VOTE
By 1964, civil rights activists were campaigning for political and economic empowerment.
After the end of Reconstruction, southern states suppressed the African American vote through
mass murder, constitutional amendments, and poll taxes. When these policies were scaled back,
citizenship tests, all-white primaries, and acts of violent intimidation would disenfranchise black
voters. For African Americans, the simple act of going to the courthouse to register was met with
harassment, economic retaliation, and violent attacks. In 1962, only 6.7% of eligible black voters
had registered to vote.12 Freedom Summer volunteers mobilized to encourage local blacks to
register to vote and train them to overcome the many obstacles that registrars set before them.
The volunteers would also provide an escort to the courthouse to protect people from retaliation.
Volunteers often remarked that for every ten people that attempted to register, it was a victory if
just one person was successful.
It was—I think it was in the thirties, I think, when [Medgar Evers] come here. No, it was in
the fifties. Anyway, he broke it down, him. Cause, you know, they wouldn’t like us to vote
nothin’ and we couldn’t vote and receive no votes, but he come here and talk . . . to the
Church out there, in town, and all of us went out there, and some of them liked it and
some of them didn’t like it but we went anyhow. And so he had all us to vote. And so
that’s when I got a chance to start the voting. Now it ain’t no problem.
Florine Carter (74)
Jim Dann, I think, came along one evening, and he was trying to go around interviewing
people to get them come register to vote, and as he was doing it, people were pulling
their shade down and locking their doors. And so I felt shame about this. So, I seen Jim,
and I talked to him; I take him home, he talked to my parents. And my parents fixed a
meal for him, because seeing that he hadn’t eaten. These people down during the
summer, some of them were living off ten dollars, twenty dollars a week. And sometimes,
that money didn’t come through, ten, twenty—somebody would send them a little
stipend, you want to call it. So, that’s where I got involved from there, after talking to Jim
and getting him fed and talking to my parents, and I got involved from there.
Otis Brown (4) 12
"Freedom Summer". CORE. 2006. http://www.core-online.org/History/freedom_summer.htm
“I Never Will Forget” 53
We weren’t allowed to vote, you know. I seen the lady today who came, her name was
Margaret [Kibbee]. Margaret, she’s a lawyer in Greenville now. She was a white lady, and
two black mens came to my house, told us that we could register to vote. I said, well,
we’re not allowed. She said, you can now. So they start marching in this town. They
marched and picketed on every corner, but I didn’t go because I had small children. I
didn’t want them to be killed or hurt or nothing, and I didn’t go. They burned down the
store, burned the store, and burned down a lot of buildings. They burned down a lot of
stuff here in this town. This town has grown. But it’s different now.
Delsie Davis (15)
It was very satisfying. But, it was like we registered one person successfully, and we didn’t
register ten successfully, and we are eons from doing it. So, yes, it was individually
satisfying, but we were going for the big, so . . . and, many times we would take ten
people to register and ten would fail. So, that was discouraging all of the time. You know,
and to convince people to go and register; to walk around this town and say hi, and visit
them, and get a glass of water from them, and sit in their living room and try to convince
them to go to register. They were scared, they were scared to death. They would just say,
no. I can’t go. I would leave my job, they’ll bomb my home. So it was a very discouraging
time.
Bright Winn (3A)
We actually had policemen and things around the courthouse, halfway intimidating
people for trying to get to vote. And, at that particular time, we had to interpret parts of
the Mississippi constitution rather than interpret the United States constitution as to what
was right or wrong and certain amendments, articles and things of that particular
constitution. We did take Mississippi history when I was in seventh grade, but we never
really got up into the Mississippi constitution, not like we did the United States
constitution, because . . . the United States constitution takes primacy, basically, over any
state constitution. It outweighs a state’s constitution.
Elmo Proctor (27A)
I went to Mr. Isaac’s house, knocked on the door and went in. I never will forget what he
told me. He told me I should be at home studying, getting my lessons, rather than out
doing voter registration, because I didn’t know who was registered and who was not.
Well, hell, I had enough sense to know then. A bunch of them ain’t, because there ain’t
but five registered anyway. So, again, I got a good chance of being in somebody’s house
who’s not registered, you know what I mean?
Lee Roy Carter (39)
Yeah, there were people who were very elated when they took the test in the past. You
know? That they were able to do that. There were people who went and couldn’t pass.
You know, the test was a subjective test, and the constitution of Mississippi—which you
had to interpret—you could take a one-liner, or you could take a paragraph. The three of
“I Never Will Forget” 54
us, being college-educated, there are some paragraphs we wouldn’t be able to interpret
as law. You know how that is. It was up to the registrar’s to which amendment he would
give out. So, of course, he would give the most complex of amendments to the people,
and so many people wouldn’t pass. As I was telling the students today, the federal
government came down and took some registrars to court, you know, to examine this
whole thing. One registrar, the federal fellow was questioning him on the stand, and he
said to him, this is a copy of the constitution. Amendment Four, what does it say? The
registrar said, I can’t read [laughter]. And he was the one that was assigning and
determining as to whether you had passed the test or not. You know? So it was totally
absurd.
Bright Winn (3A)
17. A group of people fill out papers. 1964. Wisconsin Historical Society.
[Otis Brown] was the project director when I came here. And as a project director, he was
probably one of the most honest, sincere, and hardworking project directors we ever had.
Now he makes jokes about not working now. Has a big mouth, too. I told him one time
that if he could live his life compacted into a few months, he’d probably take a deal and
do that. But anyway, he did work really hard all the time. And he was the one that we got
our assignments from and did what we were supposed to do. Most of our work involved
voter registration and we had our blocks marked. We had, like, a clipboard, and you’d
walk around and you’d go around, and you had a list of everybody who lived on that
street, and you checked who had tried to register to vote, and who did. Now the Voting
Act was not recognized in Indianola in 1965 when I got there. So you would take six
people up to the courthouse and you’d be lucky if one or two got registered
Margaret Kibbee (16A)
“I Never Will Forget” 55
I talked to people about the fact that, hey, we take oaths and things when we go down to
the local board to register and vote, and we go to the Service. If we should happen to be
killed in the Service, we are veterans like everybody else. And that, in order to have our
voices heard, we were going to have to become like the other group that had these
opportunities. And, without these opportunities, that we would never be able to make any
kind of moves so far as bettering our condition.
Elmo Proctor (27A)
Well, one of the things that we did was to go door-to-door and talk to people about
registering to vote. Sometimes, we'd get very positive responses, and sometimes we
didn't get very positive responses because people had not voted. So, voting at that
particular time was not something that they felt free to engage in, so we had to really
convince people that it was their right to vote and that they could register to vote.
Tommie Novick Lunsford (43)
Most of what we were doing was voter registration. We actually had it pretty well-
organized. We had clipboards with all your, really, a list of everybody on the block. There
were even notes on how people would react to you, and whether or not they were
registered. I remember one lady, I got to know her later on, they said, will not register,
but will give you a piece of watermelon.
Margaret Kibbee (16A)
The most proud thing is, I did—there was a lady in a little town south of here, Inverness. I
went to pick her up and brought her to register to vote. This lady was ninety-nine years
old. You know? And bringing her for the first time, and this lady was just scared to death.
She was leaning on me for that support. We went on and I went on and we got her
registered to vote, because she couldn’t read and write. All she did at the time was mark
the x. That was really gratifying, to see a person that age still . . . saw the things that
should have been changed. She understood that the only way you could change
anything was by that little word, vote.
McKinley Mack (52)
So she told the white folks, said, look here, now. If he hadn't got no sense to vote, he
hadn't got no sense to teach. So, she had all of her teachers registered. She made them
register all of us. So they said, well, she got up here; at that time, a woman could do a lot
more than a man could do, to tell you the truth of the matter. But, anyway, she had all of
us register to vote. That was one of the best things she'd ever done, simply because of
this reason: when they came there that night, in that big room I was talking about, it was
at a church right there in front of my house. It's even now a church, because they built a
new school across town over there. So, now it's a church there. So, they had to march
there that night; Martin Luther King, man, he turned the place out there. Stokely was
there.
Nathan Boclair (55)
“I Never Will Forget” 56
I said, I’m going to get in it. I got in it and joined it up, went to register to vote. At that
particular time, they tried to halfway trick you. They would ask you questions like, what do
the amendment of the Mississippi constitution, pay this and all that, said about . . . what
you do in order to vote. Truthfully speaking, wasn’t none of that even in the Mississippi
constitution. At any rate, I end up passing that exam, and I told them—well, I done read
the whole Mississippi constitution, that part wasn’t in there. So, what you want me to put?
They kind of laughed. And, after getting that done, it was work from then on.
Elmo Proctor (27B)
The sheriff is behind us, they don’t know what the f*ck to do, all these black people in
cars going down to the courthouse. It was hotter than sh*t, it must have been ninety-nine
degrees with humidity, it was dripping wet. I had the matriarch of a community in the
backseat of my Volkswagen. Ninety-nine years old, walked her into the courthouse. She
knew she wasn’t going to get registered. She knew, because they were rejecting
everybody, but we just kept on and kept on. She knew it, she knew how important it was
to do the act. She couldn’t even write, couldn’t read, but she went down there because
she knew it was important to do that for her people. Things like that were really powerful.
Allen Cooper (1)
18. Two African American men wait outside voting booths. 1964. Wisconsin Historical Society.
I want to say, back on the positive of it, back in [19]65, the black part of town did not
really count no more than it was convenience for the white part of town. For instance,
“I Never Will Forget” 57
services were limited. You literally could go down a street, and when you got to the black
side of town, you knew it before you saw anybody on the street. It was maintained at a
minimum. If an animal died on the street, it rotted. Nobody picked it up. You know,
services were limited. At least after you started getting black elected officials, you had
somebody to whom you could go to. It made the white elected officials a little more
responsive, also, because all of the sudden, you count. So that everybody, whether you
had black or white officials, at least you had a voice or a say, and you wielded some
power that way. So, you did matter, and they had to account to you. Once you got the
vote, it laid the foundation for different court cases, like we had the equalization of
municipal services lawsuits and the redistricting lawsuits and all of these things, which
wouldn’t have been possible without registered voters.
Margaret Kibbee (80)
We took the position early in SNCC, in Greenwood, that it was totally unfair to not
educate people and then say, because they’re not educated, you can’t register to vote.
We consciously brought illiterates down [to the courthouse]. Freedom Smith couldn’t read
a lick, but every time we went down there, he went down there. And they told him, they
said, now, Mr. Smith, now, you know you can’t read and write. He said, I know that. Said,
but I know how to vote.
Lawrence Guyot (78A)
“I Never Will Forget” 58
• 7 •
THE FIGHT FOR EDUCATIONAL EQUITY
In 1964, most children in the Delta did not have an opportunity to graduate from high
school because the schools that were available to them did not offer all twelve years of
curriculum. The school year was interrupted for most children by the agricultural calendar, and
students would leave school to harvest cotton and soybeans. The Freedom Summer project
launched a network of several dozen community hubs called “Freedom Schools” to supplement
local public education with an enriching, progressive curriculum.
The Freedom School model was a revolutionary experiment in education designed to
promote mutual learning between teacher and student—a concept almost unheard of in
American education. These schools utilized a critical pedagogy that made education a reciprocal,
democratic activity. Freedom Schools focused on literacy, math, African American history,
citizenship, and civil rights, offering courses for children and adults. However, their curriculum
remained flexible to meet the needs of each unique community. Freedom Schools were also the
organizing base for many demonstrations, such as picketing the all-white library in Indianola, or
planning the integration of Sunflower County schools. The movement’s demand for equal
education eventually led the federal government to initiate the Head Start program from which
millions of children throughout America have benefited.
Gentry was a complete high school, but before Gentry you had so-called Indianola
Colored High, or Carver Elementary; the name was Carver Elementary. I think they went
to tenth grade or eleventh grade, and in order for blacks to complete high school, they
had to either go to Piney Wood—some fellow had an institute, I understand, up in Drew;
Drew Institute, where they lived on dormitories and things and they'd go here to finish
high school—but there wasn't no high school in Indianola for blacks to finish, not at that
time.
Charles Scott (34)
Well, we got out of school in May, and we stayed out June and July chopping cotton. We
went back to school in July and August and we got out for September and October, then,
to pick cotton. So we were in school the hottest time of the year in Mississippi in July,
August. We had no cold water fountains. We had no air conditioning, of course. No fans.
The food in cafeteria was sub-standard, very horrible. We didn’t have tables and chairs to
“I Never Will Forget” 59
eat at in the cafeteria; we had the little desks, like you have in school, with the little circular
thing that you write on. That’s what we ate on. Like I say, the library was bad. We had no
facilities in the laboratory. I mean, the whole—we were just protesting to improve the
whole situation for everybody.
Carver Randle (24)
I missed the classroom, because I had been a teacher before. I was older than most of the
young people who came down, I was twenty-eight when I came down. I was already
teaching three or four years. So the white power structure would not let me teach—there
weren’t any integrated schools and they wouldn’t let me teach in either of the black or
the white schools, so I left. That’s when I went up to New York City and got involved with
Teachers Against Racism. I think everything in my life led me to that or got in the way of
that; one or the other.
Liz Fusco Aaronsohn (21)
I remember particularly liking the evening classes we had with the adults, and that would
be literacy and talking about voting, too, and you’ve probably heard about the twenty-
one questions to vote thing. So we’d work with that. I was just fascinated by the old
people who would come in who, you know, probably they weren’t as old as me now, but
had a really hard life on the physical plane, working in the cotton fields and not
necessarily eating well and not having been to school maybe much at all. Mrs. Weeks,
who I lived with, was thirty-six—so she wasn’t that old—but she had been able to be in
school through fourth grade, so after I left, when I wrote her, I printed and I used short
sentences and not big words because that’s the level of reading that she was at and she
wasn’t even old. Her mother had been illiterate, and she taught herself to read and write.
But there’d be the old people, they’d come in and, their poor hands, they could barely
hold a pen because they were picking cotton. I think it must be just hell—and probably
arthritis from all the white flour. Just to learn to write their name.
Linda Seese (23)
We did build towards what was a very large demonstration in January, I think we had at
least—I don’t know, you’d have to ask others if memory is sound on this, but I think
probably more than, maybe about a hundred and fifty people. Actually, hundred and
twenty-five, a hundred and fifty at one point or another, came, marched around the
courthouse. Charles McLaurin was shouting words of encouragement through a bullhorn
to us, and it came off without incident. I think there were lots of incidents around in other
parts of the state, and on that day, with those demonstrations.
Hershel Kaminsky (25)
It was in [19]65, they started boycotting the library because they wouldn't let blacks in. I
never thought about it. You know, I mean, what's wrong with folks coming in and reading
in the library? They had a couple of incidents. In one of them, one of the Freedom Project
workers got beat up by some local thugs right here in front of the library. That really
“I Never Will Forget” 60
caught my attention and made me start thinking about things. Plus, I read a lot, kind of
let things sink in and got sort of freed myself some of the old ways of thinking.
David Rushing (41)
We learned how to teach; our jobs was hard, because we had to teach people how to
read and write, older people. Well, you could understand that. That’s why I don’t
understand why people don’t read today and don’t write. I’m going, I don’t know what
we did wrong. Maybe we should have kept the momentum of the movement going, but
people were placated.
Margaret Block (39)
19. A group of young people on a sidewalk protesting with signs. 1964. Wisconsin Historical Society.
And another thing that stood out was, when I was about ninth grade—or maybe tenth—
being arrested in a protest. Being arrested in that protest, we observed some of our
friends got beaten down. When they got beaten down, we decided to try to go in and
intervene. We went across the street to intervene, guns were pointed at us and told us,
you know, that we were going to get shot or killed. So, we retreated back, and later, that
same afternoon, the sheriff came along and arrested us, and me in particular. Put me in
the car and put a .38 to my head and told me, nigg*r, if you breathe, I'm going to blow
your g-d brains out. Went to jail, and so that stood out in my life, and it still stands strong
in my memory, as well.
Wardell Walton (106)
“I Never Will Forget” 61
Then, one day, we decided to picket the white library because there was no black library.
We got forty people, two or three of us and forty people. We went up and we picketed.
We—freedom now, and made noise. I remember, I’d been—this was after Christmas—
because I had attended midnight mass at the Episcopal Church. I’m Episcopalian, and of
course, it’s an all-white church, but I wanted to go to mine. I met the priest. He happened
to be there as we’re picketing, and he wasn’t very Christian about it, you know [laughter].
He said, you shouldn’t be doing this, you know. I just probably said some smart, would
Jesus be doing this? And he huffed on away. But we stayed there long enough. Three in
the afternoon, they just arrested all of us, marched us right into the jail and put us in a
council room, an auditorium room in the police department, and left us there. They didn’t
fingerprint us, they didn’t say a thing, they just kept us there under arrest until five o’clock
when the library closed. Then, at five o’clock, they let us all out. Well, it was closed, so we
went home. We picketed that place many times.
Bright Winn (3A)
That was the most important thing, other than this library incident, which was—Charles
Scattergood was his name. He got beat up pretty badly, and some of the people who did
the beating up were people I respected until I saw what they did to him. I just said, I can’t
believe this happened. They beat up a man for trying to let kids come in the library and
check out books.
David Rushing (41)
The very basic thing of, especially with the kids and the teenagers, I mean, we got cadres
out of the teenagers from the Freedom Schools. They were ready to go, picket the library,
integrate the schools, that happened a little bit after the heyday, down here, of the
Freedom School. To do the voter registration classes; yeah, to teach the kids to help the
kids to be proud of who they were, to change their self-esteem or to get good self-
esteem.
Linda Seese (23)
I used to view the Freedom School as a second school. When I went to the high school,
then I would come home, drop my books off, and I’d be over there religiously, assisting
people with how to read so when they go get ready to vote, and those kind of things. . .
And I enjoyed it, because I felt that I was helping somebody, and I’ve always been one
that wanted to help, you know, people.
Willie Spurlock (3)
But in the entire community, what benefit in academics was there with that three month
period of time? I wouldn’t even try to measure it, except it was a point, it was a rallying
point for those young people, to become aware that black was beautiful; that they in fact
had a sense of being; that they, too, were important, and that they could get involved
and make a change. That’s what I think the importance was. So Freedom School, just
freedom point of rallying.
“I Never Will Forget” 62
Bright Winn (11D)
We had an old church here that was a Freedom School, and it got bombed by an
airplane. The plane came over, a two engine airplane, and tried to burn it. There was
some kind of explosive and it burned the outside, not the building, but it burned the
grass. Then they came back with Molotov co*cktails in the ground and burned it down. It
was really well equipped, thousands of volumes of books and a lot of classes being held
there.
Allen Cooper (1)
Like Zellie is a primary example. . . writing her poetry, and Georgia telling her it was good,
and her thinking, well, it can’t be good, because I’m a black girl. But, after enough
reinforcement, she could run with it. And Roosevelt Weeks was a son of the woman I lived
with, he was fourteen, and he was an amazing painter. I don’t think he’d ever had—you
know, it could have just been a box of watercolors that you get for a buck. I don’t think
he’d ever had paints before, and he didn’t—I tried to keep him in supplies in years after,
while we maintained contact. It was talent. Just needed to tap it and it would come out, if
you give it a . . . so I think it was, for the long run, too, to see that—which we’ve seen. To
see that the younger generation could change how they looked at themselves and,
therefore, what their community was like.
Linda Seese (23)
So I taught African dance, and I think for the children who took the class, it really
countered their notion of what Africa was all about, from what they had gotten from
television—which was, you know, undignified, uneducated savages. That’s what they had
believed that Africa was about. When I taught dance, I taught about the dignity and the
strength and the power of the cultures in Africa, in West Africa. I taught dances from
Ghana and Nigeria. So, Africa—what I was trying to do was to change that concept of
Africa and Africans at the same time as letting them have a lot of fun, because it is a lot of
fun, and find a way to express themselves physically. And, you know, they kept coming.
Karen Jo Koonan (30)
I’ll just repeat it, teaching people to read and write, helping people to get on Social
Security, welfare. Some people’s old enough to be drawing Social Security and they were
told they couldn’t draw Social Security. It was education, voter registration, and other
stuff. Most people think just going around just integrating places and all this. It was trying
to inform people of rights and the things that they’re entitled to, and to try and to help
people learn to read and learn basic law.
Otis Brown (4)
I know we got the building, it had belonged to the Baptists, and it had been—at one
point—the colored school. And like a big one-room school, I think. So, we had a bunch
of books that we brought down from the North and donations and I’m pretty sure we
had tapes and, well, records. We probably had a record player, you know? 78s. We had a
“I Never Will Forget” 63
whole African history section and black history. That was one of the most important, I
think, was the black history. I mean, it was new to me, but I’m not black and I’m not a kid.
I mean, I wasn’t a kid then. It was just—it had to be mind-boggling. If these kids had ever
heard of anybody famous, it would have been George Washington Carver and the
peanut, so there was a whole world for them that opened up, of accomplishments in their
race and what . . . Reconstruction and just . . . I mean, the schools here were beyond
pitiful. They were criminal, really, and they got the books—the cast-out textbooks from
the white schools. They had, routinely, forty, fifty, sixty in a classroom with one teacher.
The teachers would not, at that point, touch the movement with a ten-foot pole.
Linda Seese (23)
The structure was not what most teachers who came down from the North expected the
structure to be, and some, probably myself at first—there was an uncertainty—as there
always is in teaching, but there was a special uncertainty here because we thought we
knew what school was, and what teaching was, and we thought we knew what learning
was. I had a master’s degree, high-powered education: Smith and Yale. No wonder I was
so arrogant. Came down, and I started listening to local people and it took me two years
to learn what I needed to learn. The Freedom Schools, as we conducted them, were
different depending on the constituency, depending on who showed up, depending on
who was there, in every place across the whole state.
Liz Fusco Aaronsohn (21)
And we continued doing things in the Freedom School, having classes with the kids. And
the young people, in particular, wanted to do a lot more. I think only a matter of a few
days after I arrived, a number of people, including Otis and—Otis Brown—and McKinley
Mack wanted to go down and integrate the local movie theater. That resulted in my—a
number of us getting arrested, including myself, and I spent the next three days shaking
in my boots in the white cell in the local jail.
Hershel Kaminsky (25)
She had made up her mind; this is my opportunity to get my kids in a good school, to
keep them in school during all nine months, because at the black schools you had split
sessions where the kids only went to school for six months out of a year. They were out of
the school to go to the cotton field, either to pick cotton or chop cotton, and the white
kids always went to school nine months out of the year. So, she was saying, this is my
chance to get my kids in a school where education—where they can get a good
education, and this is something that I’ve looked forward to all my life and thought about
all my life, and now this is my opportunity and I’m not going to let anybody take that
away from me.
Gloria Carter Dickerson (12)
Well, I was aware of the prejudice that was there, but I had faced it head-on, but not in a
situation of actually attending school at an all-white school; that was a different
“I Never Will Forget” 64
experience for me altogether. Not only visiting a school, all-white school, but being the
only black male at that school . . . And, as I got comfortable—because this is a pretty
scary experience, you know—but as I got comfortable in the class and started to listen
more at the lessons, there were times when I would actually raise my hand and I was
never called upon. It was just like, you do not exist. You are not here.
John Tubbs (10)
So that’s what we did, in the name of getting an education and getting out of the cotton
fields and also lifting ourselves out of poverty. [My mother] kept saying that she was
going to break the cycle of poverty for her family, and she was determined that she was
going to do that, and the way to do it was through education. So, that’s why we chose to
go to one of the all-white schools.
Gloria Carter Dickerson (12)
20. Groups of students attend class during Freedom Summer as they sit outside in the shade. Likely at the Freedom
School, Priest Creek Baptist Church. Wisconsin Historical Society.
Everybody knew each other because we all went to Gentry High School, so we basically
knew everybody, everybody knew each other. We all knew—some of them we knew a
little bit better than others, you know. Like Zellie Rainey, I knew her real well because she
was a distant relative. She and her mother, Mrs. Rainey, and my mother were very close
friends and they were active into the civil rights organizations, so I knew her really well.
John Tubbs (10)
One of the reasons was to prove to them, and myself, that I was capable and that I could
make grades, and that I could make the best grades in the class. So, I always studied
really hard so that I could make good grades—not for their benefit, but for my benefit, to
“I Never Will Forget” 65
know that I could actually do that; I could actually take all this pressure and all this stuff
around me and still make good grades.
Gloria Carter Dickerson (12)
Many things and thoughts have gone through my mind since that time, and my mother
told me they just saw opportunity for their children to do something different from what
the other children was doing. Like I said, they realized the danger of it, but they did not
pressure us to go. After they had talked to us about the situation and we made our own
decision to go with what they had already arranged with the school system. I thank them
for that today. It really enhanced my life.
Leon Minniefield (32)
They would actually tell us not to be afraid, to try to blend in, try to be a participant in the
class. What they basically told us: what we do here today is what’s going to affect
tomorrow. Basically, at the time, that really didn’t mean that much to me, because it’s like
being in the heat of battle. You know? It’s kind of hard to remember what you’re there for
when everybody is picking on you or whatever, you know.
John Tubbs (10)
21. A girl at a demonstration holding a sign that reads: 'We are tired of being ruled by racists.' Behind her, other people
carry signs as they walk along a fence. 1964. Wisconsin Historical Society.
When we went to school, it was a different experience from what I expected. I expected it
to be a more friendly atmosphere than it was; it was a hostile environment. It was like no
one wanted to get next to you, that you were a stranger, you were somewhere you’re not
supposed to be. It was, you know, there were a lot of name-calling, nigg*r this and go
back to your own school. Very hostile environment. And no one would talk to you or
even get close to you, so that was the kind of environment that we walked into on a daily
“I Never Will Forget” 66
basis. Then, when we would come home in the evenings sometime, we realized that—I
didn’t realize that Mama was afraid as she was for us, because she later told us that she
would go to bed as soon as we left for school and she would just pray all day long. She
lay in the bed, she couldn’t move, it’s like she was paralyzed, just worried about her kids
and saying, Lord, take care of my kids. And she says she didn’t say any fancy words, just,
Lord take care of my kids. Then, when we would come on the bus, she would come out
to the bus, she said, and she would count us one-by-one to make sure we all got off the
bus. That was a signal that she thought that they may do something to one of us, may
not come home one day.
Gloria Carter Dickerson (12)
When you are the only black student in a classroom, when there’s only six other peoples
at the school that is like you, surely there’s a lot of things that go through your mind. Do
you fit in? Am I right for here? So it’s not . . . problems, but it’s something that you
constantly have to think about, how you going to be treated; social changes. I guess I
wouldn’t call it peer pressure, but I guess the most things we thought about, I thought
about, was fitting in.
Leon Minniefield (32)
They did let us out by classes, so if I went to the cafeteria, I didn’t get to go with one of
my sisters or brothers, I had to stand in the line with all of the white kids. Then, when I
went to sit, no matter where I sit, everybody at that table would jump up or everybody in
that aisle would jump up. So, having to go into a cafeteria every day and get your plate
and get your lunch and go sit and see everybody jump up, it’s just something—it’s not
something good to see.
Gloria Carter Dickerson (12)
I was threatened sometimes about having my house bombed and, mind, we stayed out in
the country. So we didn’t have police protection, we didn’t have all this type of thing. So,
actually, uncles had to sit guards and watch. Our family members took watch, because we
didn’t know what these people was going to do. We’re talking literally, we told the police,
and say everything, and every once in a while a police wasn’t going to show up because
it’s out of their jurisdiction.
Leon Minniefield (32)
At Eastside, they had discipline. But, what I would say, the politics wasn't right, and even
during the time, I recognized it when I was going to school over there. For example, when
King died, we demanded the march downtown. They told us we couldn't; we did it,
anyway. I was one of the ones, you know, organizing it, the march downtown, you know,
when King got killed. At the same time, like for the annual, I had a big natural afro—of
course—and, when it got ready to take pictures, they want me to cut all my hair off. You
know? But the policies of the school were set by the board, and if you look in the old
“I Never Will Forget” 67
annuals, then you will see who was running the schools. Uh-huh: all white, yeah, during
that time.
Isaac Shorter (35)
We'd be back and forth between Indianola and Sunflower because, with Indianola, once
the Freedom School burned and the other workers left, it was like me, Otis, and Cephus
were doing everything. So, we had some times here and some in Sunflower, so we were
trying to get a meeting place—we were really trying to get a place for the Freedom
School, and it just looked that it had been burned earlier that year before I got here. They
were very remarkable at just blocking us at every end. So, it looked as if we were going to
be able to build it in Sunflower before we could build it here, so we did that and we
moved to Sunflower and built a community center there. We did a lot of things from
there; we had the first quarter order elections, that looked like we had a chance to elect a
black mayor. We were very hard hit, lost by a very narrow margin. But we did a lot of
political stuff in Sunflower. We stayed in Sunflower until—right to close around [19]69,
and then moved back to Indianola.
Margaret Kibbee (16A)
22. Teachers at the Freedom School convention during Freedom Summer. The woman in the center is Liz Fusco, one of
the coordinators of the Freedom School project. 1964. Wisconsin Historical Society.
So, we applied for that money and had our first Head Start in Leland. The next year, we
knew how to get started early, and we got involved here in Sunflower County. We ran the
program and when they found out that we was going to do without them, they came in
and formed a cap organization which was umbrella to encompass all of the federal
programs, and we had a dual program for about three years. They were able to
“I Never Will Forget” 68
overpower us and finagle around, get the Head Start totally under their control. Well, see,
at that time, it wasn't the type program that the local government wanted to come to
Sunflower County, because in order to utilize federal money you had to totally integrate,
like the libraries, health department, doctors' office. You had to have just one waiting
room where everybody go in. But, see, during that time, it was illegal to have an
integrated setting, which mean that all of the doctors' offices had two waiting rooms: had
colored on one side, white on the other side, you know . . . But, in order to have federal
money, you couldn't use facilities like that; everybody had to use the same, you know.
Colored men and white men have to use the same bathrooms, and ladies the same way.
This is the reason that they didn't want Head Start in Sunflower County, because it was
going to cause too much integration, too much . . . what did they call it? At that time,
mingling that race, and they was trying to keep everybody separate.
Dorsey White (50A)
And when, suddenly, there were these jobs available through what’s his name’s program?
Well, it was the CDGM, Child Development Group of Mississippi, which began in the
summer of [19]65, suddenly they had control of the sum of money and jobs for local
people and they made those decisions.
Hershel Kaminsky (25)
Well, Head Start gave a lot of people some type of relief from having to try and stay
home all the time with the kids. And by Head Start moving in and taking some of that
pressure off, you had a few more women that was able to actually go out and help
support the family. It was basically costing little or nothing for this to happen. So,
economically, Head Start played a major role in helping a lot of people and the working
parents economically, so they could get out and help do some of the things that was
necessary in order to have a fairly decent life. And, by that same token, it not only gave
them an avenue to try and help support the family, but it basically put that young child
out there in somewhat of a learning environment at the same time, enabling these young
people to get a little bit earlier start in life than a lot of us had the chances to take. By
doing that, a lot of the young people became better students.
Elmo Proctor (27A)
Some changed before left here, because what happened is they brought the Head Start
program, and that’s the first weak part of the civil rights movement. They offered all the
veterans jobs. And most of them took the jobs . . . So in a sense, the leaders of the
movement was drained away. They got their money and they ran. And now we’re left
there fighting them back, a few of us. But I say, the way the system started draining off
towards the Head Start program and other things—and different programs came along.
Because people do need money. I ain’t faulting them ‘cause they left. They need to take
care of their family, they need income. So, the Head Start was a good Trojan Horse, the
way I see it.
Otis Brown (4)
“I Never Will Forget” 69
We had here in Indianola a pretty little organization of the FDP block system, the
Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. It was a very good system where they had block
captains and the block meetings every week, and then, eventually, you'd come together,
sort of like a city-wide meeting. Then there'd be a county-wide meeting, and then there'd
be a district-wide meeting, so you were getting ready for caucus politics. But the little
block meetings did very well. There were two blocks: we had the whole city, the black
community, organized, but there were two blocks that went on meeting for about two
years after there wasn't really a viable state organization. I thought that was kind of
remarkable, that people held them together.
Margaret Kibbee (16)
So bringing black history to people, bringing their voices back to them, we had a
newspaper called The Student Voice, and the whole idea that voice was really important. I
think what most of us discovered, even though there were separate projects; voter-
registration, community centers, and Freedom School, we realized before the end of the
summer that it was really one project, that you couldn’t have voter-registration without
Freedom School and you couldn’t have a place for all of this without a community center
and who you were teaching, if we’re going to put that in quotations, who you were
“teaching”, they’re not just teenagers that you thought you were going to be teaching
lessons to. It’s everybody, it’s elderly people who want to learn. It’s Paolo Freire’s idea, but
we didn’t know about Paolo Freire at that time, although he was operating in Brazil at the
same time as we were operating in Mississippi, but we didn’t know about that then. Only
later did we find that out.
Liz Fusco Aaronsohn (21)
“I Never Will Forget” 70
23. Two children color together in a coloring book during Freedom Summer. 1964. Wisconsin Historical Society.
I used to say that: At first, it was the cotton fields, and everybody worked in the cotton
fields to make a white man rich. Then, when cotton started dying out, it was catfish, and it
was just the same thing; working in the catfish factories, fileting catfish to make another
white man rich. It just continues and continues. If our children don’t get an education,
then they’ll continue to work in a factory or on a field or doing something, whatever the
next catfish or cotton is, to make somebody else rich.
Valerie Simpson (51)
• 8 •
THE MISSISSIPPI FREEDOM DEMOCRATIC PARTY
In 1964, SNCC and Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) challenged the legitimacy
of the all-white Mississippi Democratic Party by organizing the Mississippi Freedom Democratic
Party (MFDP), and electing 68 delegates to represent their supporters at the 1964 Democratic
National Convention. During the Credentials Committee hearings, the MFDP raised the
consciousness of the nation when delegate Fannie Lou Hamer gave a televised speech detailing
her meager life as a sharecropper and the brutal beatings she endured as a result of her activism.
“I Never Will Forget” 71
President Johnson offered a compromise of seating two delegates, to which Hamer responded,
"We didn't come all this way for no two seats, 'cause all of us is tired."13
Though the MFDP was denied official recognition at the DNC, their actions opened the
door for women and people of color to exercise positions of leadership in the Democratic Party.
The achievements of the MFDP and the civil rights movement in the Deep South led to the
passage of the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, and Title IX. These important innovations in
American law and jurisprudence have benefited millions of Americans in the areas of
employment, citizenship, and equal treatment under the law.
What we were able to do with MFDP is cull the best organizers from throughout the state,
get them first involved in the Freedom Elections, where they could see that we could run
a statewide operation, with very, very little money, with a lot of oppression, and that
Freedom Election brought a lot of press which diminished violence. So we learned then
that violence wasn’t spontaneous; violence could be—if it could be stopped, it can be
stopped at other times. We also saw that we had to drive home a point, and that point
was that, if blacks were unimpeded when it comes to voting, we would vote in large
numbers. We got a hundred thousand people to vote; some people say it was eighty, it
was really, factually, a hundred thousand.
Lawrence Guyot (78A)
Now, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party was organized parallel—parallel party to
the regular white Democratic Party in this state. We brought in our summer people, our
friends here, who came down in the summer of [19]64, and there were three missions—
objectives. One was to continue voter registration, and we did that . . . and to organize
the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. We did that. And to establish Freedom Schools
in the state. We did that. Then, we went to Washington—I mean, to Atlantic City, New
Jersey, to challenge the seating of the regular Mississippi delegation, segregated, racist
delegation from Mississippi in Atlantic City. We did go there and, as you know, the
highlight of that whole thing was Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer’s testimony before the
credentials committee of the National Democratic Party.
Charles McLaurin (80)
All those people understood that the right to vote was tied to the right to live and die.
We all knew somebody who had been killed for the right to vote, and they all knew that
they were risking everything they had by going publicly. You can’t be any more public
than that. You’re going to take on the Democratic Party. You’ve got to remember, at that
time, there was no Republican Party in Mississippi. There was no Republican Party in the
South. So you’re taking on the most—and we did it. And then we forced a situation
where it took Lyndon Johnson himself to stop us. And I’m rather proud of that, see,
because I’m—he had to exert everything he had control of. There were twenty-five FBI
agents that had infiltrated that delegation—
Lawrence Guyot (78A)
13
Mills, Kay, This Little Light of Mine: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer, (New York: Plume, 1994), p. 5.
“I Never Will Forget” 72
I think the most compelling story that I heard when I came, first as a volunteer in the
training, was the story of Mrs. Hamer being beaten and, in a sense, the sheriff telling two
black prisoners that they had to beat her or they would be beaten. This terrible kind of—
she walked with a limp, . . . but the power of her rhetoric and the power of her
commitment. She had been, kind of, the accountant on a plantation. When she got
involved, they just told her, get out of here. So I’m—if you’re, for some people, this is
Gandhi. You know? They would be stunned if they got to be where Gandhi’s ashes were
scattered or Dr. King. For me, Fannie Lou Hamer is all of that. Being famous does not
mean—and she’s certainly well-known—there are many giants that stride this earth, and
only a few of them are found by the camera.
Dennis Flannigan (8)
Mrs. Hamer, I admired her, the way she just left off of that plantation and didn’t look
back. The best thing they could have done was to let her vote and kept her on that
plantation, because she came off of that plantation and brought the world, got the
world’s attention about what was going on.
Margaret Block (6B)
I got elected as Chairman of the Freedom Democratic Party because I worked very closely
with Fannie Lou Hamer, Peggy Jean Connor, Victoria Gray, and Annie Devine. Those are
the women who supported me. I ran against Aaron Henry and Leslie Macklemore, but
they were the key to getting me in there. And I knew, very, very—why? Because I worked
with each one of them, and each one of them understood that my idea of the Freedom
Democratic Party was that it would be a long time. That Atlantic City would be something
we did, but that would be just the beginning.
Lawrence Guyot (78A)
“I Never Will Forget” 73
24. Campaign posters for two Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party(MFDP) candidates, Aaron Henry and Fannie Lou
Hamer. 1964. Wisconsin Historical Society.
And sometimes you’d be out in the country and you’re talking to these old people who
couldn’t read. But they knew something was happening. And you know, they’d say, I’ve
been waiting for this day! So you had moments like that. But the other thing that we were
embroiled in was with the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. With really nothing, they
had done a remarkable job of organizing the community in that they were trying to
follow the way that the Democrat Party was supposed to be. You know, we were not a
primary state, we were a caucus state, where you have your precinct caucus, your town,
city, whatever, city caucus, and then your county, and then your district, No, on to the
state. And that’s how you elected your delegates to the convention. So they were
organized that way.
Margaret Kibbee (16B)
Anyone who is aggrieved under Section Five can bring a Section Five case. This changes
the whole way lawyers are practicing throughout the South, because we win that
Supreme Court decision eight to one. It broadens Section Five and covers everything
from moving polling places to requirements for candidates. It does away with all literacy
tests, and it says very clearly, you either pre-clear, you litigate, or it’s unconstitutional.
They’re null and void. Which meant that the state of Mississippi had passed twenty-four
laws to get under the coverage of the Voting Rights Act. I’d gone to jail, I’d gotten twelve
hundred other people to go to jail with me to prevent them from the doing that, but the
Supreme Court overturned every one of those cases. So, we learned that the—that the
Voting Rights Act was a powerful weapon.
Lawrence Guyot (78A)
“I Never Will Forget” 74
But there was a song that we used to sing that [Fanie Lou Hamer] would sing, and I hear
it all the time in my soul. I'm going to do what the spirit say do. And that was, to me,
when she would say, I'm going to do what the spirit say do, I'll go to jail if the spirit say
go, I'll go to hell if the spirit say go—see, this was commitment. That was commitment to
me, and I learned that song. That has been my commitment, is that I do what the spirit
say do. So, because she taught me so well, simply by being who she was—I was now a
protégé, and she taught me line by line. But, what she taught me is how she carried
herself. She taught me about what she stood for. She taught me about the fact that she
was not afraid to be who she was and she was not afraid to say what she had to say. It
cost a lot. I know it cost a lot. It cost her her life, in fact. This is why I think that those of us
who are left, we have a job to do.
Tommie Novick Lunsford (43)
25. Lawrence Guyot, civil rights activist, stands and addresses a seated group. 1964. Wisconsin Historical Society.
So, when I step off the scene, when others step off the scene, then you have peoples that
are qualified, peoples that are anxious to carry on what has been started. And, if Ms.
Hamer had had—she did have—but if she had peoples around her that was concerned
about carrying on what she stood for, then automatically, Ruleville would be more
enhanced with the things that she was doing. Because she would bring clothes, she would
bring in—needs, whatever the peoples’ needs were, she tried to address.
Hattie Jordan (60)
“I Never Will Forget” 75
And what we got, instead, was the most beautiful language ever written, called Section
Five of the Voting Rights Act. Section Five, as you remember, very simple. It’s the most
powerful language in civil rights history. It says, any covered political subdivision, if the
state wants to change any law that has to do with voting, that has the possibility of
diluting the vote, they must either submit that for pre-clearance to the Department of
Justice or they must litigate it on the merits in the Court of Appeals in the District of
Columbia only.
Lawrence Guyot (78A)
I was married that summer and, after I was married, my wife and I went on our
honeymoon, you might say, almost, to Mississippi. And we’re assigned to be Freedom
School teachers in Indianola. It was the tail end of the summer. People were leaving and
there was a question, big question is, what to do now after the Freedom Democratic
Party challenge? People coming back, coming home, many of them—at least, the ones I
met—both tremendously energized and, at the same time, saddened and disturbed
because they didn’t want to take just two seats, as Mrs. Hamer said. We didn’t come here
for just two seats.
Hershel Kaminsky (25)
We had sixty-eight members of the delegation, and all sixty-eight members of that
delegation voted. Fannie Lou Hamer did not make the decision alone. The delegation
made the decision, but Mrs. Hamer was the backbone of it, because they met with her
and tried to get her to change; to accept what they told us was a compromise. To accept
three seats, at large, representing no state in the United States; nobody told us whether
these people were going to be seated on the floor or whether they’re going to be seated
in Alaska someplace [laughter]. Mrs. Hamer said, we did not come here for that, for three
seats. We’re all tired and we want the whole thing. Of course, we did not unseat the
regular Mississippi delegation in 1964, but we did get rule changes; changes that affect
both the Democratic and the Republican parties and broadened the base of participation
for people around this country.
Charles McLaurin (80)
So, I am convinced that what kept the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party so powerful,
so committed to local people and so committed to group decision-making was, it comes
out of SNCC. When SNCC was at its best, there was no such thing as hierarchy or criteria.
There were no—you didn’t get roses and you weren’t fettered for who you were or what
you were, it’s what you were doing. If you could get it, go in to a town and organize it,
and if you could get people to take on attempts to register to vote, you were treated as
a—you were rewarded for that, okay? But it wasn’t like a, well, you know, your daddy’s an
author, a professor, and somehow—no, no, we didn’t have that kind of hierarchy. Our
hierarchy was who is doing the most to empower people. And we believed very strongly
that anyone had the right to empower anyone else. We believed that empowerment was
as satisfying as sex and as addictive as crack. We also knew that no movement had ever
“I Never Will Forget” 76
succeeded without it. We couldn’t just ask people to risk their lives unless they were
risking their lives for a higher purpose, even of themselves.
Lawrence Guyot (78A)
“I Never Will Forget” 77
• 9 •
THE DEADLY SERIOUSNESS OF MISSISSIPPI
The majority of the Delta’s white residents resented the outsiders who were attempting to shift the
power dynamic in Mississippi. Members of organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan and the White
Citizens Council often overlapped with members of local law enforcement, resulting in a lack of
trust between the civil rights workers and the police. Retaliation took the form of harassment,
beatings, drive-by shootings, and fire bombings. FBI agents were stationed throughout the Delta
to monitor the activities of civil rights organizers and white supremacists alike. Four civil rights
workers and three black Mississippians were killed throughout the duration of Freedom Summer.
1,062 people were arrested, 80 volunteers were beaten, and four people were critically wounded.
37 churches and 30 black homes were bombed or burned.14 Most civil rights era campaigns
emphasized non-violent direct action, but in Mississippi, many activists relied on armed self-
defense as a means of survival.
I hadn't been taught to be nonviolent. I was taught to protect myself. I just couldn't
imagine me allowing somebody to beat me over the head with an axe handle just 'cause
they enjoyed it. So, I stayed away from the marches and the demonstrations, but I
attended meetings and assisted other ways. My wife testified to a fellow in court two
times in order for the city and the county, for the government to get a case against the
city and the county for school integration and the voter registration. So, as a result, I had
to sit up and guard my house at night, keeping them from burning it down and stuff like
that. I was involved. But I didn't march or demonstrate because I believe in self-
protection.
Dorsey White (50A)
I didn’t never believe in nonviolence. I wasn’t going to hit nobody or start nothing, but I
was not going to be a recipient of a bullet or something and not try to defend myself. My
father and them always taught us that self-defense is the first law of nature. Yeah. Then I
used to have me a little switchblade knife. I kept it in the pocket of my skirts or whatever I
had on, and I knew how to pull it out. I was going to stick a sheriff in the eye one day
over there in Tallahatchie County. Mmm-hmm. Because he said what he was going to do
14
McAdam, Doug (1988). Freedom Summer. Oxford University Press.
“I Never Will Forget” 78
to me, and I told him I will get you before you get me. And when I popped that knife, at
that time, we was at the courthouse, so the Justice Department was watching the whole
thing, John Doar. So they came up there and they told me to go back over here, and I
went, well, you just saved his life. Mmm-hmm, I wasn’t going to take it [laughter].
Margaret Block (6A)
Linda [Seese] went into the restroom and I was on the couch and I heard, boom. She
stepped out of the bathroom and let out a yell. She said, we’re on fire, and they’d thrown
a Molotov co*cktail through the window into my bed. I grabbed the fire extinguisher and
ran there, and my bed and the floor was aflame with gasoline. The fire extinguisher would
do nothing. So I yelled for everyone to get out, and by that time the smoke—the black
smoke—we had to leave like that. We got Mrs. Magruder into her bath robe and got her
out, she owned the house. Wilton, who was here, her nephew, we all got out. Then I ran
back in because I had my jacket and my father’s World War II Bible that he had carried
through the war, and I got it. It’s been forty-five years, it still gets me emotional.
Dennis Flannigan (8)
The fire engines came, and I heard somebody yell, they got the Freedom House, which
was around a little curlicue, which, it was a little house that we used as our office and for
volunteers to stay in. They bombed that, too. The Molotov co*cktail came through the
window and some poor little Oberlin student was in his sleeping bag and it landed on his
sleeping bag and started the flame.
Bright Winn (3)
26. A woman stands in the foreground looking at the camera, while behind her two law enforcement officers wearing
helmets examine protestors during a Freedom Summer protest outside a Woolworth's department store. 1964.
Wisconsin Historical Society.
“I Never Will Forget” 79
Yeah, we had a shootout. It was August the 7th, 1964. We had taken the Brewer Brothers
from Sharkey Road, which was out from Glendora, the farmers. We had taken them over
to Charleston to the courthouse to vote, and we expected trouble because we knew
those people over – that was one of the strongholds of the Klan, too, was Tallahatchie
County . . . So when they came, when these Klan came down there at night, we were
out in the country and we was on this farm and it was one long road. When we came out
from the country, they was gonna shoot at us. I mean, when we came back, they came
down through the road, they was gonna shoot at us and they were so surprised when we
shot at them first. They took off. We had our spotlights. This lady named Ms. Elsie Brewer,
she turned on a big ol’ spotlight, turned it on, and they didn’t know what to think of, and
when we shot at them, we didn’t hear nothing else from them. They would harass us on
the radio and stuff, but we didn’t hear anything else about them coming out there to
shoot nobody. Because we let them know that we were fully prepared to shoot it out with
them. We even made Molotov co*cktails.
Margaret Block (6A)
This is a three-cell jail with a holding cell that is not as big as most people’s garage—in
this town, not even in another town—meaning that this can only have been a hundred
and ten to a hundred and fifteen degrees when people were in there. It tells you the
conditions. And we talk about them for civil rights workers—here was the conditions of
every weekend for people who were black and might be on the streets too late at night
or might be whatever the reason. As Charles was saying, plantation owners used to call
ahead and say, don’t let them out till Sunday night, I’ll need them in the morning.
Dennis Flannigan (8)
As far as spying on a regular basis, I don’t know that there was somebody doing that. I
mean, later on, you know, we looked at my Sovereignty Commission file. It was, in my
case, kind of stupid, they were a little overly preoccupied with who I might be going with,
or something like that. That was a big preoccupation with the white folks.
Margaret Kibbee (16B)
So, I calmed that down and ran to Giles’s. Well, as a matter of fact, I grabbed a kid’s
bicycle and I pedaled to Giles’s. Giles was there and he had, by now, suppressed his fire. It
all landed in one area, and when the fire department came, he denied them entrance. He
wouldn’t let the firemen in, all-white. He said, I’ll fight my own fire, and he did.
Bright Winn (3)
The sheriff came around and said, what the hell are you doing? Wouldn’t even get out of
the car. We said, we’re just sitting here keeping warm. He knew who we were. He just
drove off, and when he drove off Otis and I put the fire out and crawled under the car.
The car was on a ditch alongside the road. I parked it so that there was a big opening
underneath. We crawled under there, and the whole white section of Inverness came
cruising around, looking for us, driving all the way through. When they got past us we got
“I Never Will Forget” 80
out from under the car and went into the middle of a sewer field. It smelled like hell, and
we laid between the furrows. The furrows were like, that high. We were laying down in the
sewage, but out in the middle of the field. Nobody wanted to walk in the sewer water,
and they put their searchlights out but they couldn’t see us because the furrows were a
little bit higher than we were. We stayed out there for a while until they finally gave up
and went home, and we crawled over to an old man’s house.
Allen Cooper (1)
I was the first person out there. I was working all by myself. So, one day I came home,
Mrs. Brewer asked me, what does SNCC mean? I told her, the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee. She pulled that big old rifle from behind her chair and she said,
sh*t, we ain’t—I mean, they ain’t nonviolent.
Margaret Block (6A)
At one time a bomb was thrown over to our office, but they were so far away they
couldn’t get there, and it was just in our driveway, so we saw it the next day. They made
bombs out of co*ke bottles and some kind of rag, and gasoline. Usually they’d get drinks
from the country club, which was not that far from there. They’d make ‘em there. But they
had to be, like, a street away and throw ‘em over a row of houses. So they weren’t that
good. And so that was the only way they got to bomb the office. But they couldn’t go
down there without us seeing them. So if you were by the store you could see ‘em. You
knew what was going on.
Margaret Kibbee (16B)
27. A line of protestors outside of a Woolworth's department store during Freedom Summer hold signs while law
enforcement officers stand nearby. 1964. Wisconsin Historical Society.
“I Never Will Forget” 81
Now, one time – that’s the time when Stokely [Carmichael] was out on the project with
me out there in Tallahatchie, and Stokely going to tell me, we gonna make some Molotov
co*cktails, we gotta go to town to the gas station, and I’m going, mmm-hmm. He’s telling
me, gimme the cash money, we makin’ Molotov co*cktails tonight, and I’m looking at him,
never have been nowhere but to Chicago and Memphis and Jackson all my growing up
years, and I’m lookin’ at him. Pretty soon I went, Stokely, I don’t drink, and I don’t want no
co*cktail. I thought he was talking about something to drink. I knew what a co*cktail was,
but he’s talking about the Molotov co*cktails.
Margaret Block (6A)
Yeah. We didn’t have a place to meet, so then we had to meet—we could still meet out
in the open, but classes pretty much ground to a halt except the ones I mentioned with
the older people, about the sort of visionary classes. I’m sure we met in people’s living
rooms or . . . and then, I can’t remember where we sort of set up shop after that. It
seemed like the people—it didn’t really, I don’t feel like it hurt the spirit. If anything, it
helped. You know? People were more . . . by that time, people were either in or out, and
if they were in, they were more determined then.
Linda Seese (23)
And, see, the worst, the most dangerous person in our area, really, [the police would] get
the black person to do stuff. That’s what your problem was. You didn’t have to worry
about anybody running down the street with a hood on. You had to worry about the
black [informant]. Well, in our case we knew who it was. It was Pogey Slim, Nathaniel Jack,
who was the black policeman. And he was the one who did stuff. And he was on the
police force. And so when Police Slim would drive by your house at night, you know, you
better be careful!
Margaret Kibbee (16B)
At times, I would have to go to SNCC people, I’d say, wait, no, you can’t drive to Jackson
like that, you know better. Black people in one seat, white people in another. You folks
are driving off integrated, you can’t do that. Black and white could not ride together
because, as soon as you do, people know. No Mississippians drove integrated. If it was an
integrated car, it was always separate. I’d have to catch our own people and say, don’t do
that.
Bright Winn (11C)
So, I’m naïve, wondering where in the world [the police] are going to take us, you know?
So, by that time, some kids who had heard about arresting us, they got one of the girls’
cars that had stayed on campus, and they followed. Somebody said, if we go down old
rural road, I know where they’re taking us. I said, well, where are they taking us? I’m not
going to say—oh, no. They took us to Parchman Penitentiary. They said that’s the only
place they had some room. Excuse me. The only place they had some room at Parchman
Penitentiary was in maximum security, and that’s where, you know, they got the people
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on death row. But they were on one side, and they had us on the other side of the wall.
There was—I can’t think of his name, but there was a young warden there, a white
warden. He said that I didn’t want them to bring you all here, but since you are here,
we’re going to make your stay as comfortable as possible. Well, how comfortable can you
be?
Jennifer Buckner (68)
They nearly killed seven people in one attack. Mrs. Magruder’s house? That’s Stacy
[White]’s grandmother, one part of Stacy’s family, and they burned that. They hit it with
Molotov co*cktails on all sides, and a whole bunch of people were asleep inside, but luckily
got out. Boy, it burned to the ground. I took pictures of it, Stacy has them. In a box, the
camera was in a cardboard box so it didn’t look like a camera, and I took pictures during
the fire and after the fire. People disappeared, never seen again. I remember a family, I
can’t remember the name of the family now but they were in the Neshoba county. A
family of like four or five, a young family. They were all involved in the movement, all of
them, and the whole family disappeared. There was a meal on the stove, a car was
parked outside. There was a family living within a couple of blocks in the black
community. Gone, just gone. When they were looking for Chaney, Schwerner, and
Goodman, they found the bodies of eight black men that had been tortured and killed.
Allen Cooper (1)
But then, the night of the shootout, they were making Molotov co*cktails, and Ms. Brewer
was in the kitchen, too, trying to pour the gas in the bottles. Her hands were shaking and
she was wasting gas everywhere. I’m going, okay [laughter]. Ed Brown was looking at me,
and he says, do you know, if she had set this house on fire, they’d have swore the Klan
killed us, burned us out, and it would have been Mr. Brewer wasting all this gas up in
here.
Margaret Block (6B)
One of the things that was a moment of success for me—Dr. Stacy White and I, about ten
years ago, were driving out of Greenville and we went up into the hill country, because
she wanted to show me a blues house. But, in the hills country? I’m sorry, that’s Klan
territory: weeping willows and the kudzu and the roads going like this, and my, distances
between—I was scared. I was a civil rights workers by thirty-five or forty years, I was
scared. Here we are, riding in an integrated car. Now, Dr. White—who had been a little
girl [during the movement]—and I finally said to her, are you scared? She looked at me,
she said, why? That speaks volumes. You know? We’re driving through Klan territory, or
what was, and she’s not at all scared. She’s a citizen driving through a portion of her
state, and violence is not a factor. Great. So, it’s two sides of the fence, though, as to what
is great and what’s yet to become great.
Bright Winn (11C)
And with everyone, the other whites who—three other whites confined there who were
talking about the damn Freedom Riders. I passed myself off, I had some—I didn’t look like
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a typical Freedom Rider. At that time, my hair was short. I didn’t have a beard, I didn’t
have a mustache. I was wearing—I think I had a Army Surplus or military fatigues and a
light military jacket, something. So I kind of passed, I believe, I passed myself off—as
what, I cannot remember. But I remained silent, particularly whenever the local—it wasn’t
the Chief of Police who came to see how everybody was doing, I think it was Sheriff, it
was Bill Hollowell. He would come and not even blink at me, but he knew who I was, and I
think, from what I learned about Hollowell later on since, he had FBI training and was
supposed to represent this new, more, what can we say? Responsible breed of
Mississippi lawmen, believe it or not.
Hershel Kaminsky (25)
At that time, I had left SCLC and was working for SNCC. I came and was going around to
people—I noticed every time they'd see me coming and go in the house and close the
door, and they didn't have air conditioners. It was extremely hot [laughter]. But I kept
going. I went, oh, they're just scared. I'm going to keep on. If they see me every day, then
they'll come, they'll start talking. The third day I was there, somebody came and found me
and told me I got to run back over to the funeral home. I'm going, what happened?
Where? I got there, everybody's sitting up there looking so crazy, and I'm going, damn,
what I do? [Laughter] But the Klan had put the word out that they were going to get me. I
had to get in the back of that hearse and go out on Creek Road with Ms. [Birdia] Keglar
until somebody from the Greenwood office came and picked me up.
Margaret Block (6C)
28. A man stands inside the ruins of a church building in McComb, MS. 1965. Wisconsin Historical Society.
I mean, I couldn’t see a white person down here without—I wouldn’t even go on the
white part of town. That’s the only time in my life I had long hair, because all the blacks
“I Never Will Forget” 84
would say—I’d say, cut my hair. No, I can’t deal with white people’s hair. I said, well, I’m
not going over there [laughter]. They’ll cut my neck.
Linda Seese (23)
I was at the meeting that night, and we saw an airplane flying around and everything. I
don’t know, lucky they didn’t drop the bomb or whatever on us while we were there, but
about an hour or so after we left—and we left there about 10:30, we heard fire whistles
and things blowing. I said, mm. I wonder where that’s at. And see, Baptist school really
wasn’t too far from where we lived, less than a mile. I got up and went out there and got
in the car and just made a circle, going to go up through town and see what could I see. I
saw the Baptist school on fire. I didn’t know Mrs. Magruder’s house had been burned till
the next morning; neither did I know Mr. Giles’ store had got burned until the next
morning. But I knew the Baptist school had been burned.
Elmo Proctor (27B)
29. A photograph showing what appears to be a demonstration of non-violence techniques. Photographs in this
collection credited to Danny Lyon. Wisconsin Historical Society.
And so the only way to go to our office was to go past the Ford store. So if we had
enough people, we kept a guard person at the office and one at the store, when we had
the full staff during the summer of [19]65, we had several people up. And Otis’s rule was,
you had to be there from twelve to four. Anything that happened was gonna happen
“I Never Will Forget” 85
then, if it didn’t happen then, it wasn’t gonna happen. You’d go to bed at four o’clock in
the morning. So I took my turn. And he took us out on a shooting range, and we’d
practice shooting, and I realized that I didn’t like handguns at all. So I had a rifle, we sat in
the car and I had the rifle down in the back seat of the station wagon, and sometimes I
would just do it from twelve to two, and somebody else would relieve me from two to
four, and sometimes I’d just go from twelve to four.
Margaret Kibbee (16B)
They had said to us not to go to the COFO office—we were with COFO—and they told
us not to go to the COFO office, because of the threat of the Ku Klux Klan being in town.
We were getting ready for the rally in the evening. So, I had gone to my friend’s house,
and I didn't know that they had said not go to the COFO office. I was walking down the
street and these two guys, these two white guys with rifles on the back of their truck,
started to follow me. You know, one of the things is that you can go up on somebody's
porch and pretend that you're going in the house and that would deter them, so that's
what I did. I went and put my hand on the knob and pretended I was going in the house,
but the door was locked, so I couldn't open the door. I stayed there and they went
around the corner and I ran around the back of the house, but I went on to the COFO
office, and I went inside. There wasn't anybody there. So, I decided that I was just going
to sit there, and somebody came and said, you're not supposed to be here, because the
Klan is in town. You have to get out of the office. Now, I'm not even afraid; I'm trying to
take a nap, you know?
Tommie Novick Lunsford (43)
You knew, I explained it, this was a police state, they had a certain vested interest in you
not succeeding, and they were trying to sabotage whatever you did, and ultimately their
last-ditch thing would be to kill you. Now, as to whether they had a full-scale plan to
eliminate all of us all the time, no. It turned out, Otis, they really did target Otis. But it was
kinda funny, you had funny little things like this, where you’d have people, snitches, I
mean, white snitches, who would say, you know, just call on the phone real quick and tell
him, don’t go to a certain place, and he listened. And he doesn’t know exactly who it was,
but it kept him alive.
Margaret Kibbee (16B)
And other civil rights workers are outside, and a car full of white men pulled up and they
jumped out and they started beating—I think it was beating Charlie Scattergood, and the
FBI just sat in their car. I was standing next to their car and I was saying, do something
about it, and they said, this is not in our jurisdiction. That was a very radicalizing moment
for me, because I went down there, it was to teach reading and to make a statement, and
I felt that with a moral statement, people could be educated and the federal government
would step in when they realized that all these things were wrong down here and make
things right. Then, at that moment, I realized that the federal government was part of the
problem and I could no longer look to them to be part of the solution.
“I Never Will Forget” 86
Karen Jo Koonan (30)
Dr. Bowell, Reverend Lee . . . a few of the blacks that wasn’t afraid to come to the
meeting. Well, I couldn’t get there because I had a major examination that Saturday at
college, and I told him I won’t be able to get there. But that was the same Saturday that
there was a bunch of white people out, I’m pretty sure they were Ku Klux Klan, because I
wasn’t down there, Dr. Bowell just told me about it. They came up with shotguns and just
blasted Reverend Lee right there on the courthouse steps. Dr. Bowell, he was showing me
where he had about three pellets of a shotgun hit him, because they’re shooting at him.
He said, I’m kind of glad you had an examination and you weren’t with me, because you
probably would have got killed.
Charles Featherstone (33)
Well, now, the White Citizens Council were the people that you saw every day; people
who were merchants, preachers, and all kinds of people. The Klan would be henchmen.
See, you have to understand the difference. The difference is that, some of the people
that you saw every day may have been in the Klan, but most of the people weren't. The
Klan was their employees. They were the ones who did that work of making sure that
people were fearful and that they didn't step over the boundaries that they had set for
them. But the Council were the people who gave orders to the Klan. See, we have to
understand that there was a real difference. Not everyone in the Klan was a councilman,
you see? But the Klansmen could be a councilman. You see, there's a real difference, to
me, that those people who ran certain businesses were not the people on those horses
and with their heads covered up. Some of them maybe have been, but most of them
were not. They were the people that you see every day, smiling at you in the particular
businesses. You may be paying your rent to them, you may be buying your cars from
them, you may be buying your groceries from them, you see?
Tommie Novick Lunsford (43)
“I Never Will Forget” 87
30. 'Greenwood, Mississippi, March 1963.' Originally printed in the SNCC pamphlet entitled, 'A Chronology of Violence
and Intimidation in Mississippi since 1961.' by Jack Minnis. Wisconsin Historical Society.
I was on when [Killens] was tried for the killing of Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman. The
Attorney General of Mississippi and I were on Court TV together, talking nationally about
this trial. He said, well, you know, anybody could have brought this case at any time. I
said, that’s just not true. You needed to have a climate in the state where people could sit
down in a jury, listen to the facts, come up with an opinion, and not go home and expect
crosses to be burning in front of their houses. We’re past that. But the way we got past
that was by changing the contours of who and what the electorate is.
Lawrence Guyot (78A)
I finally did get nailed; I got ambushed in Inverness one morning. Otis Brown and I
were—it was a Saturday, I’m almost positive. It’s Saturday morning and it was quiet and
we were driving over to Inverness to pick up a couple of people, we were going to have a
meeting up in Ruleville or Drew, I can’t remember which, organizing a union. We walked
into this little converted house, a little shack. They sold cigarettes and coffee, sandwiches,
stuff like that. The people we were picking up wouldn’t look at us. We walked into the
house in this building in Inverness, and they wouldn’t look at us, wouldn’t talk to us, they
were looking down. I looked at Otis, Otis looked at me, and I said, oh sh*t. Something’s
coming down. We went outside and there they were. It’s like they came out of an
apparition, Jesus came. Except it wasn’t Jesus. Whoever Jesus is, by the way. Otis made a
break for it, and got through and ran, and I didn’t. They axe-handled me for a while,
busted up my right knee pretty bad, fractured my skull right here along that line. I lost a
kidney, and fractured my wrist. I was pissing blood for about six weeks. After the beating I
kind of lost my nerve, took the steam out of me for a while. By that time I was pretty
messed up anyway. It’s like living in a state of terror all the time.
“I Never Will Forget” 88
Allen Cooper (1)
Well, we called for a mass meeting. They’ve done a hit to us, we’re going to rally, and
we’re going to yell and scream and make sure people didn’t stay scared, because that
was a very scary thing. So, we put a table out in front of this brick building, and we got a
kerosene lamp. We lit it and people came. Of course, this was apropos; This little light of
mine, we sang to a lamp and we made our speeches, the subject of the day, and
whatnot. Well, all of a sudden we realize, there was about sixty cops surrounding us. They
brought out the auxiliary because they thought we were going to riot because the
Freedom School had been burned. Well, rioting or anything like that was the furthest
thing from our mind, but they thought that.
Bright Winn (3)
“I Never Will Forget” 89
Figure 31. Source: Jewish Currents, Mississippi Freedom Summer Fifty Years Later
http://jewishcurrents.org/mississippi-freedom-summer-fifty-years-later-part-two-28099
“I Never Will Forget” 90
• 10 •
“I NEVER WILL FORGET”
By the end of the ten-week campaign known as Freedom Summer, volunteers felt weary,
terrorized, and out-strategized at every turn. The Freedom House and the Freedom School in
Sunflower County were leveled by overnight bombings. The leadership of SNCC was evolving,
and many volunteers moved on to new campaigns. Freedom Summer brought attention to the
persistence of Jim Crow segregation and racial violence in Mississippi. The struggle for justice in
Mississippi contributed to the political momentum leading to the passage of the Voting Rights Act
of 1965, and helped birth new social movements across the country. Volunteers and Delta
residents alike maintain that Freedom Summer activities were empowering for themselves and the
communities in which they worked. In the 1980s and 1990s, Mississippi elected more black
officials than any other state. Veterans of Freedom Summer went on to participate in numerous
social movements throughout the world. Many continue to be community organizers, educators,
and social justice activists.
It’s very important to preserve the history because so many of our civil rights veterans are
passing on, and when they pass on their stories pass along with them. So it’s important to
preserve their stories, and I think what you all are doing is a great, great service to us.
Because the students need to know what took place many years ago, and that people
came down, Freedom Summer volunteers and also local people who were active in the
movement, in that they weren’t always able to go to McDonald’s and eat or ride in an
airplane or sit in a restaurant. People paved the way to make this possible.
Stacy White (7)
I don’t know, it’s just, I’m the type of person who thinks that injustice in any form is wrong
and I’m going to try to do something about it. If it’s injustice, it’s not good for the person
that’s perpetrating the racism, and it’s not good for us that’s on the receiving end,
because the person that’s perpetrating the racism, they are ignorant and they need to get
an education. Then, on the other hand, we need to get an education. I'm not a leader.
Somebody try to follow me, they're going to be in big-time trouble [laughter]. I don't
consider myself a leader. I'm outspoken, and if I see something wrong, I'm going to say
something about it, because that's my nature.
Margaret Block (6B)
“I Never Will Forget” 91
32. An integrated group sing-along at a Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) function. 1964. Wisconsin
Historical Society.
I think it’s like going to war, it’s like going to Iraq now. You’re scared, and much of you
doesn’t want to, because—and I think for young men—and you might have some
relationship with this idea, at least—for young men, manhood, and have I got the nerve,
and all that sort of stuff is a part of your life. In a sense, coming here is something that I
felt was necessary; necessary for my soul and for the souls of my country. But more than
that, there’s some adventure to it. You’re getting out of your hometown. You’re getting
out of Little Pond, Washington, into something. That it was history; it wasn’t something
recognized in the sense of, oh, you’re off to do historical work, but that it was important
work, and that I wanted to test my mettle against the deadly serious life of Mississippi. It’s
a long ways to come. To drive back through to Indianola and there’s the beautiful
museum, and then there’s the boarded-up downtown. You want more for this place. And
[John Louis’s] speech reminded me that it is the last—the last mile of a marathon that’s
hard work, but if you don’t keep going, you don’t run the marathon. The civil rights
struggle and my own struggles is the soul that we each are; means that you got to
keep—what I took home, and what was worth coming for, was being determined that we
need our soul in saving the soul of this nation. I don’t think anybody who saves souls—
and I’m not in that business—says, I’ll stop, I done enough souls today. So, that’s what I
learned.
Dennis Flannigan (8)
One of the things that I think we as a people miss most is basically helping each other
out. Because I can remember my parents canning pears and giving them to the neighbor
“I Never Will Forget” 92
up the street, and the neighbor up the street had some figs and they gave them—you
know, we swapped back and forth. So we were never without anything to eat, even
though we swapped clothes. If you had some clothes that someone could wear, you
passed them around in the neighborhood, and everybody in the neighborhood worked
together.
John Tubbs (10)
If you just sit there and not say nothing, then you giving them your consent to do
whatever it is they're doing. So I'm trying to tell all these young people, don't be apathetic
about nothing, and live out loud. Let people know that you have a voice and you're
going to express your opinions and you're going to fight for what you believe in. But
make sure you pick the right fight. Don't just go around fighting, just nonsensical stuff.
Margaret Block (6D)
The passage of time is, again, a dichotomy. What we wanted—and we only understood—
we thought, you get the vote, everything will be fine. We got the vote, and I’m very, very
proud of that. We integrated public facilities, and I’m very proud of that. I’m disheartened
that Mississippi’s school system still is a segregated school system. I’m disheartened by
the fact that black Mississippians do not have the access to economic vertical mobility to
the point that I would like, but here, oh, my goodness. All of the cafes have black
employees, the motel has black employees. This didn’t happen. Black folks picked cotton,
and that damn near was it.
Bright Winn (11C)
[My mother] would be thrilled to death. She would be thrilled to death. She would say,
you know, all the work that we did has not been done in vain. You know, people died for
this, I mean people went to jail for it, beat and all kinds of things. She would say, finally,
we’re seeing some of that work pay off, and we have to be thankful to our ancestors for
what they did for us, and that’s one reason I like to do work myself because there are
others out there who have paved the way for me and I have to honor my ancestors. I’m
obligated to honor my ancestors with giving back what I can give back, because
somebody gave back so that I could have. So she would be thrilled to death.
Gloria Carter Dickerson (12)
I was elected on Fannie Lou Hamer’s birthday the first time I was elected, and so it was a
powerful day. It was a powerful movement. Being the first African American, and at the
time, the youngest to ever be elected mayor in Greenville—I was elected when I was
twenty-seven. It was a lot for people to take in all at one time.
Heather Hudson (17)
I had planned to go back home and go back to California at the end of the summer
myself. And at the end of the summer, everybody else left. And I saw all the things that
Otis was trying to do, and all the things that were still going on, and things hadn’t
“I Never Will Forget” 93
changed that much. I mean, we still had all this stuff to do, all these people to register, the
community center to build, and all these things going on, and I said, I couldn’t leave all
this on Otis, and so I didn’t go back home. Then I called my mother and told her to go to
College of Marin and cancel my classes.
Margaret Kibbee (16B)
Then, I walked into a Freedom House on Fillmore Street with my girlfriend, who was a
black Mississippian and came home with me. I said, hi, my name is, and we’ve just come
to Mississippi, and what are you guys doing and where can we fit in? They said, you can’t.
My heart was broken. I did not continue in the movement because I was told to get out
of the movement, and in a very negative way. So there are things that I carried on in my
life that were movement-bound.
Bright Winn (11C)
I know somebody told me one time, I was speaking wherever, but they told me I sound
angry. Well, I am . . . I was somewhere, maybe in Cincinnati, wherever, but anyway, they
told me I sound angry. A black lady walked up to me and told me I sound angry. I’m
going, well, damn, when are you going to get angry?
Margaret Block (40)
33. A group sings freedom songs at the Freedom School Convention during Freedom Summer. 1964.
Wisconsin Historical Society.
“I Never Will Forget” 94
There are more black women that are elected officials in Mississippi, especially in the
Mississippi Delta, than any other state in the Union. In fact, at last count, there were
twenty-three African American mayors in the state of Mississippi alone. So, you see, we
bring a presence, but what does that say when we’re the ones who are in leadership and
in power, and people still suffer? What does it say about what we’re doing and the setup
that I believe—I do believe a conspiracy theory, if you will allow me to say such—for us to
be in such harsh economic times but we’re in and acting as elected officials. Healthcare in
this particular region: we have the highest rate of heart disease, highest rate of diabetes,
highest rate of high blood pressure in the Mississippi Delta than any other part of the
state and the entire United States of America. Who does it impact? It impacts the African
American community. So, as we talk about continued struggle and continued things that
we need to do, it becomes now teaching this next generation about basic human rights
and things that we know we should all be standing for. The fight and the struggle to get a
good education and to be able to go to the schools—it’s a shame when children don’t go
on a daily basis. The fight and the struggle to be able to go to any doctor that you
wanted to go to, and now we can’t even allow our people to go because they can’t afford
it. So the struggles that previously were based upon race have now been changed to
economics. So, as the game has changed, so we must change also and learn what it is
that we need to do. Learn that we have to continue to struggle, that we have to continue
to fight. Learning what the new fight is and involving everybody in that. Your role in that
is important and it’s critical: that is to teach.
Heather Hudson (17)
Well, the movement itself gave me a greater understanding of justice, gave me a greater
understanding of the need for equality. Gave me a greater respect for the individual and
what we can do, the realization that just a few can make a little bit of a difference and a
few more can make a greater difference. You know that We, the People, and in this
democratic process we can make a difference. The movement itself did that to me,
helped me along that road.
Bright Winn (11D)
I got a call at school and she said, Liz Aaronsohn, were you Liz Fusco in Indianola? My
heart stopped because no one knew me in my new life in that way, but it was such a
pivotal experience for me. Ever since that moment of talking to Stacy [White] on the
phone I was very excited to come back. Then I started thinking about all the toes that I
had stepped on and I called Stacy and I said, you know what Stacy? I’m reluctant to come
because if a couple of people are coming whom I really know I gave pain to, I don’t want
them to have to suffer my presence. She said to me something that I knew in my head
from Nelson Mandela, but I hadn’t put together in terms of me. She said; you’ve been
carrying that burden for forty years, we’re a forgiving people. If those people are here,
they will forgive you, and you come on down. So I just felt so welcomed, but it’s been a
pilgrimage to tell you the truth . . .
Liz Fusco Aaronsohn (21)
“I Never Will Forget” 95
34. A group of men and women talk outside on the steps of a building and in the open doorway likely attending a mass
meeting. 1964. Wisconsin Historical Society.
[Charles Scattergood] was killed just before this idea was conceived, was carried out; this
idea was to have a reunion of lives who came down and helped changed the Delta into
the way it is now. He wanted to meet with some of his colleagues, some of them just get
back together and possibly really, really energize things, because there was more work to
be done that was sought, and his name was Charles Scattergood. My friend's name is
Zellie Rainey Orr. She was married, her husband passed, so she and Charles got together
and they got engaged. They were engaged to get married. One day, he was on his way
home, got killed on the expressway in Atlanta, Georgia. She had moved to Atlanta,
Georgia from California. She would often come back and talk and we would talk about
different things, because when she was a young girl, a lot of us would be out singing
Freedom Songs and follow the, roll around with the civil rights workers when we were
trying to do it in the early [19]60s, as young teenagers. So, she carried out the plan after
he got killed. She came down, she organized, she got with Stacey and I and Charles
McLaurin, so we went online and looked up people, she would make phone calls and she
did the research. She would come there and check on things and go back to Atlanta. She
finally got the folk together, and some of it materialized. It's a great feeling, you know,
because I remember these guys coming in and liberating us. It's a great joy to me and a
comfort to me in my heart to help get these guys back together. It just seems like, you
know, it's one big family that has the long lost brother, for guys to come back.
Foster King (20)
“I Never Will Forget” 96
I had never been able to see it before I was in Mississippi. And when I came back to Mill
Valley, and—yeah! This place is racist! And they’re not even admitting it! At least
Mississippi isn’t fooling themselves [laughter]! So I felt more comfortable with the straight-
up honesty of Mississippi. So, as I said, at the end of the summer of [19]65, I realized that
I was not going anywhere. And that I was part of the movement and I wasn’t able to
extricate myself from it. So I didn’t try.
Margaret Kibbee (16B)
There’s a lot of work that has to be done in order for the next generation to understand
just how important and how critical where we are today is and how easily it can be lost.
That’s the reason why we’ve done what we’ve done, and why we’ve worked in the areas
in which we work. We could be anywhere in the world, but there is no place I’d rather be
than in the Mississippi Delta. It’s my home, I love it, and as the Bible says, the first shall be
last and the last shall be first. We have been last for so long, I know it is now our time
[laughter]. I just want to be there, I want to see it.
Heather Hudson (17)
Today, I stand before you as mayor of the city of Greenwood, Mississippi, where the
hands that once picked cotton picked me as their mayor. Today, I stand boldly, fully
aware of the importance and historical milestone of what my being elected mayor means
to this organization, and others who sacrificed their lives for me to be where I am. Today,
I boldly stand as the evidence of things not seen. During the 1960s, when the civil rights
movement was launched, I was only five years old, growing up in Gulfport, Mississippi.
Even at that age, I knew there were places I couldn’t go, places where I could not eat,
places and fountains where I could not drink.
Cheryl Perkins (18)
I want to share with you, to let you know how far we have come in Itta Bena. I grew up
there. As a little girl—and I want to share this story with you so you will know why the
tears are coming. As a little girl, growing up in that small municipality, one day my sister
and I decided that we were going to go across the track. All of you understand, when you
go across the track, you’re in another world. Well, my sister and I decided that we were
going to go across the track and look at the beautiful Christmas decorations. Of course,
you know we were poor; didn’t have those type of decorations. So we decided, oh, well,
we’re going to go across the track and look at all the beautiful Christmas decorations on
the other side of town. Well, by the time we got over there and kind of toured around
and got back across the railroad track, back to our side of town, the police officer
stopped us. He said very harshly, what are you all doing across there? Of course, we’re
just shaking. My sister said, we’re just across there looking at the Christmas decorations.
He said, don’t you ever, don’t you ever let me catch you across there again. And when I
think of that situation and I say to myself, you know, at that moment, God had already
ordained me in my mother’s womb that I would be the mayor of that entire city.
Thelma Collins (19)
“I Never Will Forget” 97
And I think the other thing that got me about everything—once I got in Mississippi and I
saw how things were working, and I saw that, I always felt like, well, if everybody knows
how Mississippi is, then we’re gonna do something about it. And then I realized
that…they’re not gonna do anything about it unless we make ‘em. It’s not a question of
not knowing. You’re just really gonna have to fight for everything you get. And I also
realized that there was a pervasive racism that the country as a whole was not committed
to ending. And they really liked the idea of, ooh, look at that awful Mississippi! I’m glad
we’re not like that! And – they were, you know? But it was different. But I could see it. And
It's just like that with some people. You have a few people that gets a job done, and it
was just a handful of them that came down and shook up the Delta, especially in
Sunflower County. Now, they were strategically placed across the Mississippi Delta, and
some of them in other states tried to accomplish the same goals. That's one of the
reasons we brought Congressman John Lewis in. He was from the state of Georgia,
working with Dr. King and others. But we felt it incumbent upon us to work with Zellie to
help her make her endeavor come true, to bring back these guys together. Like I say, it's
what one of their comrades, Charlie Scattergood, wanted to do, to bring back the guys
that he'd worked with here in Sunflower County, to bring them together. Now, he has a
housing complex named in his honor, all because of his fiancée, Zellie Rainey. She did this
for her fiancée.
Foster King (20)
When I learned about John Brown, I said I think I’m going to be a John Brown. f*ck
racism. I’m not going to do that. I think that’s one of the factors for me was that
discovery. Not taking it on as my own, because he did it, I didn’t. But I can do something
about it. My whole family is real straight, and they don’t like me. So I built a family, a
community, of my own based on friendship and struggle and working together. I’ve been
operating as an ally all my life. I think allies are really important as a way of breaking
down barriers between people. I never recall having serious problems with anybody,
either white or black, in the movement here in Indianola. I worked in Ruleville a little bit,
but mostly I worked in Indianola and Inverness.
Allen Cooper (1)
So it was a very exciting time in which I certainly grew a great deal, and getting some
sense of how—what can I say? How difficult, not just social and political change is, but the
enormous risks that some people are willing to take to make it happen. I mean, I think of
Elmo [Proctor] in particular and then—whose job was on the line all during that period. I
also viewed it from some of a historian’s perspective and that—and yet, at the same time,
I had certainly developed a sense of the costs of making a commitment to changing
one’s circ*mstances. We always said, well, we could leave; we could get up and go, and
leave, and the folks who were really the movement couldn’t. They were going to be
having to deal with the same, to a large extent, the same kind of daily humiliation that
they had known all their lives. And with, you know, behind that line; behind that
“I Never Will Forget” 98
oppression, there was enforcement of violence and, possibly, even possible death. And I
do remember, in particular, watching. You know, we watched Lyndon Johnson’s “We Shall
Overcome”—must have been Voting Rights Act speech—with a number of local people.
We watched that speech on television—there weren’t all that many television sets, as I
recall, in Indianola. Certainly, not as much as I was accustomed to having around—and
people expressing a great deal of skepticism.
Hershel Kaminsky (25)
35. A nighttime rally outside the Atlantic City Convention Hall in support of seating the Mississippi Freedom Democratic
Party. 1964. Wisconsin Historical Society.
Now, the movement did something else. We all may think of it as a civil rights movement,
but it was more. Out of the civil rights movement came the equal opportunity thing, too.
And, after civil rights blossomed, then the equal rights started to persist more. And who
did it help? It helped the hundreds and hundreds of whites, especially women, as much as
it did anybody else. And why people would complain about what’s civil or equal or one
thing another—when, as a whole, the movement helped the entire United States come to
grips with itself and saw itself for what it really was.
Elmo Proctor (27A)
I feel very proud and privileged to be able to bring them in and see all this, and to give
you some insight on what it was and what it's like now, and what it needs, to be state-
enforced. Because a lot of our young people don't realize how well, just a few years
ago—that what we did have, what we do have now. When I tell them about certain
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things, they say, wow. It baffles them. It really amazes them, just a few years ago, the
things we had to deal with, things our foreparents had to deal with. So, it's really pleasing
to me and it's gratifying just to be able to bring them here, before this, and have the
opportunity to let him witness this.
Foster King (20)
I've always taught to kids that I am a young, black man from the Delta of Mississippi, from
a single-parent home, and I went from the cotton fields of Belzoni of Humphreys County
all the way up where I could stand in the halls of the New York Stock Exchange. And, if I
could do it, then the opportunity exists for everybody. Yeah, we had some hard times, but
they were learning times, you know? I know now that it can be done.
Wardell Walton (106)
Community is everything, and that’s what we have, and still have. Even people that
weren’t in it knew, had kind of a visceral sense of what the movement needs. I had friends
that hung around on the periphery of the movement, and the reason they were hanging
around is because we had community. We had each other’s backs. When you’ve got each
others backs, man, that means a lot. Trust is part of it, transparency and honesty, and all
those good words. That’s what community is, that’s what community was. It was a mutual
support system, a network coalition alliance, however you want to describe it.
Allen Cooper (1)
The Medgar Evers case, and other cases—recently, Belzoni, people going back that have
been murdered thirty-some years and they trying to bring old folks to trial now, that’s
history in the past coming back to haunt them [laughter]. Coming back to haunt them.
And my history—when I look back at my history, I look at a well-spent life. I did
something worthwhile.
Leon Minniefield (32)
He asked me the question, how did I feel teaching white children? I told him, I didn't
teach color. I taught science. Which was a real short answer to him, because he wasn't
used to black folks making no kind of statements. He was real upset about it, but he had
to live with that. I told him, I don't teach color; I teach biology, which is good for me and
you.
Charles Scott (34)
And if someone should happen to fail in his quest for knowledge, don’t down that
person. If there’s any way you can reach out and lend that person a helping hand, do
that; Because, after all, we’re all just plain human beings. All of us have different callings.
All of us are made up differently to do certain things. And it’s just a chain, where
everybody depends on everybody else. The doctor, the lawyer, the shoemaker, the man
that tilled the soil. We’re all just one segment that’s working in a chain and, when the
chain breaks and leave out any one segment of it, it refuse to be as long a chain as it was.
“I Never Will Forget” 100
Elmo Proctor (27A)
36. The Mt. Zion church burned down on June 17, 1964, prompting Freedom Summer volunteers James Chaney,
Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner to travel to view the remains. 1964. Wisconsin Historical Society.
This is the most important part of our history. The blues isn’t. It’s right up there with the
Emancipation Proclamation, just what we did. They decided that they’re going to create a
Blues Trail, and that’s to exploit the blues music now. Because I remember, back in the
day, when they called it race music and wouldn’t play it on the radio. Now, it’s the most
popular kind of music that’s in Mississippi. That’s because they can exploit it and make
money off of tourism, off of it.
Margaret Block (37A)
I'm interested in it today because we still in the same position that we was in forty, fifty
years ago. We still can't get the—banks won't do nothing for us, we can't get no money
from the banks, we can't get no help from nobody. We can't get no help, period, from
the government, from nobody else. For one reason, it's because it's not fair. What people
do is not fair. The people that controlling the money, the people that have the money,
they ain't being fair. I think, until folks that's running our system want to do better and to
improve our system, you're going to need somebody struggling and doing what they're
supposed to do.
Lee Roy Carter (39)
Well, we still have a long way to go; a real long way to go. The only thing we can do right
now is to make these bridges we’ve built stay there, because there’s a still a fundamental,
underlying cause of social and economic differences. When you got any—well, you
“I Never Will Forget” 101
studied sociology, I’m sure, haven’t you? When you’ve got two groups, if they don’t have
any interaction, they form their own little sets of rules and stuff. You’ve got two different
cultures operating here, basically, even though they share some fundamental things, you
got two different cultures. I don’t care what culture it is, there’s always going to be
tension.
Margaret Block (37A)
We’ve got progress. We’ve got a lot of problems here. I mean, it’s one of the poorest
places in the nation; the economy is bad. Primary source of income has always been
government transfer funds, and you still got this divide between some sections of the
black community and some sections of the white community, who don’t always think
before they do or say.
David Rushing (41)
So, we have to carry on this whole idea of equality, that all of us are equal and there's no
inequality in God. If we allow ourselves to continue to feel or act inferior, then we're
allowing the inequality that doesn't really exist, to exist.
Tommie Novick Lunsford (43)
Of course, you know, Boys and Girls [Club], our motive is to make a difference; to make
our children feel at home, safe in that, and make them aware of the opportunities that are
presented. We want them to be positive citizens, and that's what I'm doing as of today. I
retired from the area director, but I'm still working with Boys and Girls Club in Leflore
County. If I can make it to a facility where children are—I'm a diabetic, and some days,
now, I really have some bad days, but my worst day, if I can make it to a facility, and
those babies come in running, hey, Mr. Nance, hey, Mr. Nance, I promise, it's just like
insulin to me. I just pop right back. I'm ready to work.
Benjamin Nance (46)
I have read every civil rights thing that you could think of, was always in Chicago, I was
always in some kind of meeting with Dr. King or Jesse Jackson, I’m a member of PUSH
and stuff like that. I always think about when I come back home. There were times—I’ve
never really been scared. In [19]65, I came home, my grandmother died and my three
kids, we sat right on the front of the bus. The bus driver said to me, you cannot sit that
close, the children might get hurt. You know, I’m sitting right behind him. I says, I’ll watch
them. They won’t get hurt. We’re the only black people on the bus, 1965. My oldest son
says, Mom, why are they staring at us like that? They’re staring at us because the civil
rights thing had just started to happening, and they didn’t feel like we should have been
sitting there, that I was being militant.
Lilly Lavallais (47)
I hope, and I can tell you, as well as the board, we are so hoping that a civil rights trail is
equal, or maybe even better to the Blues Trail, is formed and becomes successful. It just
“I Never Will Forget” 102
will bring more people to the Delta to see, to learn about the history of the Delta, and
hopefully to help the Delta. Because things are still sad here. There's still a long ways to
go.
James Abbott (48)
Now, the things that’s happening now, I never thought that I would be around to see it,
especially with our president. I never thought that I would live to see a black president,
you know? But I wish now that a lot of my parents and older people could see this. This is
the way it should be. I don’t care what color a person’s skin is, you still have morals and
values and stuff, and want to be treated to the best that you can be. Right now, I ride
through the country and stuff, see a lot of things. My dad was a sharecropper and I
worked on a farm all my life; a lot of hard work. Now, my younger siblings, we put them
through college and stuff, through school. Now, my kids, now, is out of school. I’m sixty-
three years old, and I knew the change is going to have to come, where education is the
key to everything.
McKinley Mack (52)
37. A man holds a young girl in his arms. 1964. Wisconsin Historical Society.
We can talk about the justice system when it comes to crack cocaine versus powder
cocaine. They have a stiffer sentence for black men that’s selling crack cocaine—all of it is
poison, but they’re sentencing a black man to jail way, I mean, a long time, and white
men, whoever the drug dealers are that’s selling powder cocaine, get off sometimes on
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probation and community service. It’s still going on. We can talk about the juvenile justice
system, because I work with the juvenile center for justice out of Jackson. It’s bad when a
country is going to build jail cells around black boys. If they can’t read by the time they in
the third grade, then that’s how they’re building their new jail cells; that’s how they’re
estimating how many jail cells they’re going to need in the future. Something is wrong
with a country that say they’re all democratic and you got freedom. If one injustice might
not affect you or you, but it’s going to affect the whole community after a while, because
don’t think that you’re immune to it. It can happen to you anytime and anybody.
Margaret Block (40)
[My family was] scared to death. One time, now, earlier, I left this out—I left and moved
to Ohio because, at the time, the Klansmen came down to burn the house down, my dad
and one of my other brother’s screened in porch. They came at night, around three
o’clock in the morning, to burn the house down. Just happened they was out there on the
porch and saw them. Then, the next morning, police came down and saw they little old
bottles of gas with the thing in it, to throw it, but nothing was ever done about it. So I said
to myself, the best thing for me to do to keep my family from being hurt is just to leave
for a while. So, that’s why I left . . . I stayed there seventeen years, but I never forgot
about what I was doing here.
McKinley Mack (52)
I think a lot of things that happened should not have happened—that’s on both sides—
that should have not have happened. Like, it’s all hearsay, because like I say, I’ve never
been involved. I was born in [19]62, and I had to be a little girl to know exactly what was
coming. I just didn’t appreciate, after hearing what went on, I just didn’t appreciate it. No,
I did not get angry; I questioned why all this had to happen, why all this had to happen.
We all stayed in the same town. Why did this have to happen?
Mary White (53)
I think Ruleville people do not appreciate or do not know Ms. Fannie Lou Hamer as they
should know her. People like you know her and what she has done. But, as Jesus said, you
get no honor where? At home. Peoples at home don’t honor you like peoples away. So,
we want to educate the young people about what Ms. Fannie Lou Hamer has done. What
we want to focus on would be, what? Housing. Because, as you know, it is said that those
houses in this area, down Fannie Lou Hamer and adjacent to that, that she donated the
first two hundred dollars to help those people get lots. Another emphasis, as she
emphasized, would be economic growth. You may not know, but at first, she had a little
garment factory down to Doddsville, where any individual would go and sew. So, they
would teach individuals how to work. The Freedom Farm, which was land that she had—
and that gravesite is a part of Freedom Farm land—that she would raise gardens, she
would raise pigs and hogs, as we called them, and it is said that she would give you a
female and a male pig and you raise it. Then, when the pigs reproduce, then you would
give back to the pig farm. So, she fed individuals. Another thing that we would focus on
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would be education. The Fannie Lou Hamer Daycare is still here. So, she emphasized
education. I think that she is probably responsible for Ruleville Central High staying the
high school and not the Junior High, ‘cause she fought for education. So, we emphasized
education. Last but not least, political involvement. As you know, she believed in voter
registration and she believed that, if you could vote, then you had a part in the political
system. She emphasized voting. And I just wonder, what accomplishments have we made
to quality political advancement.
Hattie Jordan (60)
Whether you can read or write or not, you can organize. That, when you get people
operating in their self-interest, that’s one of the greatest motivators that there is, and that
it is impossible to find people, to get them to do something that doesn’t change them
forever. You like the old saying that you can’t step in the same river? Well, once a person
makes something happen, they’re different from the person they used to be the day
before. The day after they make something happen, they look around and say, well, what
am I going to do today? That’s completely different from, I wonder if somebody going to
help, come help do something for me today.
Lawrence Guyot (78A)
38. A group of adults and children at an impromptu concert held outdoors during Freedom Summer. 1964.
Wisconsin Historical Society.
At one point, Laurel was larger than Hattiesburg. It had a transit system that ran from
Laurel to Ellisville, but when the Civil Rights Bill passed and they had to integrate the
businesses and storage, Laurel almost folded completely because that mindset, they
couldn’t bend from it. And a lot of businesses actually left. So, we are trying to re-
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establish the history and let people know. A lot of parts of Mississippi have those histories
that we don’t want to talk about, but that’s in everybody’s life, and in every state there are
areas that had that.
Tanya Evans (59)
We're sitting just a couple hundred yards right now from the north door of the
courthouse where [Fannie Lou Hamer] walked after being turned away from the right to
vote, and next morning, she and her husband were kicked off of the plantation that they
worked on for, what? Fourteen years at one point. Somebody that inspired so many
people, and somebody who was mistreated terribly. I'll never forget the day that I went to
Drew on Sunday afternoon. I was with the funeral service in the Drew High School
auditorium—this is in 1971. A young girl named Joy Collier was walking with two of her
friends from high school graduation—they'd just graduated from high school—and three
yahoo whites were riding around Drew and shooting out streetlights. The guy with the
pistol shot her and killed her. That was a very . . . there was a . . . well, before the big trial
here in Indianola, they had this funeral service at the Drew High School auditorium. I went
up there to cover it. I think I was maybe one of the few whites in the building. I was up in
the balcony with a friend. Fannie Lou got up and spoke and sang and cried, and it was, I
can play that back in this, full brain, right now. That's one of my memories of her. I saw
her several other times as well. Important lady.
James Abbott (48)
But, from individuals that knew Ms. Hamer, individuals that had a love for Ms. Hamer and
wanted to see things happening, contributed [to the memorial]. Now, I did encounter a
problem because, as you know, peoples have always been selling, doing things for Ms.
Hamer, but nothing has come where people could say, I see this. I don’t know what they
did with the money, maybe they put it in their pocket or did something else with it. So, as
I began the campaign for finance, a lot of them here in Ruleville said, well, we have given
this, and peoples have been selling t-shirts, been selling books, been doing all of this in
name of Ms. Hamer and nothing has been done. So I had to tell them, well, trust me.
Trust me and we would do what we said we were going to do with the money. I was
under the impression, if people like you from Florida, from all over the United States—
even, we had a group coming from Alaska one time—if those people can honor a person
from Ruleville, certainly Rulevillans should have done something to say we appreciate
what you have done, and we are carrying on your life and legacy.
Hattie Jordan (60)
At first, I didn’t believe it, because I was born in [19]67; I was young. I said, it couldn’t have
been that bad. It’s all come off the books. It couldn’t have been that bad. My sister was
telling me stories, say, you all just don’t realize how hard it was for us. When I hear the
stories, I actually cry. It breaks my heart, and it always hurts. It’s like it’s a hurt that you
don’t understand why, it’s because of the color of your skin that you’re not liked; because
of the color of your skin. It hurts. It’s always a hurt, it never goes away.
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Catherine Bacon (97)
I see you got—not just here at the schools and stuff, it’s not separate. You got white kids
going to school with the black kids, black going to school with the white kids, you know.
It’s not as bad as it was, but it still have some of the people with hate and stuff in their
heart is still around here. Not as many as there was, but it’s still here, you know. It just do
me good to go through neighborhoods and stuff and go visit places. People have the
same rights that anybody else have, and nothing’s said about it. Makes a big difference.
McKinley Mack (52)
39. Used as the cover on a 14 page mimeographed pamphlet entitled, 'The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party:
Background and Recent Developments' by Steve Max, dated in manuscript. January, 1965. Wisconsin Historical Society.
They went through hell to bring about those changes. Some of them said, I won't live to
see it, but I want my children to have a better crack at life than I had. We broke down the
peonage system in Mississippi. We fought for the right of women to serve on juries in
[19]65; we acquired that. We fought to the right to vote and acquired that. We fought for
the right to be free politically; we acquired that. See, when Lyndon gives his, "We Shall
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Overcome" speech, if he hadn't fought us tooth and nail in [19]64, he could have used
Mississippi as the example of why he was going to pass the Voting Rights Act. He could
have said it like this, no state has lost more lives and been creative and resilient enough
to conduct their own elections. They fought to get into the Democratic Party in [19]64 in
Atlantic City; they fought to challenge the congressional delegation under Section Two of
the Fourteenth Amendment. We are going to award them and the rest of the country; I'll
pass the Voting Rights Act.
Lawrence Guyot (78A)
So, our problem in the United States is, we are so impatient. And some folk might not like
what I say, but we are hypocritical. We are really hypocritical . . . But it’s the truth. We are
just hypocritical. The Native American befriended the European when they came over
here. What did they do to him? . . . Queen Liliuokalani in Hawaii befriended the United
States. What did they do to her? Locked her in her own palace. So, this is what I’m saying.
We’re so hypocritical. We don’t like to admit our wrongs, but we see everybody else as
wrong, and that’s not right. We should fess up to what we do, too. You see what I’m
saying?
Jennifer Buckner (68)
Now I’m back from Vietnam, and the place that I work—I’ll never forget this—the first day
back, I had to go back through orientation. They used to have a cigarette machine up on
the second floor of this building, where I was in the orientation, and they ran out of
cigarettes. During the break, I went downstairs and went across the street. There was a
bar there, that’s quite far from the place where I worked. I went in and asked for a pack of
cigarettes, and they told me to go to the back. This is 1973, man, you know. I got so mad,
because I felt like I been halfway around the world fighting for so-called freedom and I
can’t buy a pack of cigarettes right across the street from where I work. Of course, I
refused to go around to the back and get them, too.
John Tubbs (10)
“The zeal and strength of our endeavors must be superior to the difficulties to be
surmounted. Discouragement should have no place where industry, persistency, and
ingenuity or faith eternal may at last bring the required results.” That is a quotation by
Charles Price Jones. . . the zeal, the inspiration- the fervor behind what I am trying to do
must be superior above more than the difficulties that I will face in doing it. And
discouragement should have no place where industry, persistency, integrity or faith
eternal should bring lasting results. In other words, I am working towards these results
that will be lasting, on-going, eternal and I can’t let the difficulties stop me from allowing
that to happen.
Anita Jefferson (76)
They have got all of these Blues Trail markers all over Mississippi. I'm going, well, the
blues—we're still having this debate about the blues as our culture. History, you know, we
“I Never Will Forget” 108
did significant stuff to change people's lives. Blues just make you feel either down or
happy, but it was not a movement, and it was not anything that we benefited from. Like
B.B. King gave all of his stuff to Ole Miss. Well, he was raised right over there in Itta Bena
and there's Mississippi Valley State over there. Why couldn't he have given it to
Mississippi Valley State instead of to Ole Miss?
Margaret Block (39)
I would get young people to read the literature and look at the tapes that SNCC had at its
fiftieth anniversary. The best organizers in America is the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee. I don't care what historian wants to take me on, on that
[laughter]. But what we've got to do is get them to learn that ordinary people like them
made this history. It wasn't geniuses and holy people and labor unions. They were
ordinary—I mean, there's no better case than Sunflower County, where ordinary people
did some astounding . . . the people in Sunflower County began a process that changed
the world.
Lawrence Guyot (80)
40. An elevated view of a large group of people standing in a circle around empty benches holding hands.
Vehicles are parked near houses in the background. 1964. Wisconsin Historical Society.
“I Never Will Forget” 109
Figure 41. Earl Newman: SNCC (mother and child). Oakland Museum of California.
“I Never Will Forget” 110
• FURTHER READING •
Aretha, David. 2008. Freedom Summer. Greensboro, N.C.: Morgan Reynolds Pub.
Asch, Christopher Myers. 2011. The senator and the sharecropper: the freedom struggles
of James O. Eastland and Fannie Lou Hamer. Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of
North Carolina Press.
Belfrage, Sally. 1965. Freedom Summer. New York: Viking Press.
Burner, Eric. 1994. And gently he shall lead them: Robert Parris Moses and civil rights in
Mississippi. New York: New York University Press.
Carson, Clayborne. 1995. In struggle: SNCC and the Black awakening of the 1960s.
Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.
Chafe, William H. 2001. Remembering Jim Crow: African Americans tell about life in the
segregated South. New York: New Press.
Cobb, James C. 1992. The most southern place on earth: the Mississippi Delta and the
roots of regional identity. New York: Oxford University Press.
Collier-Thomas, Bettye, and V. P. Franklin. 2001. Sisters in the struggle: African American
women in the civil rights-black power movement. New York: New York
University Press.
Crosby, Emilye. 2005. A little taste of freedom: the Black freedom struggle in Claiborne
County, Mississippi. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Currie, Stephen. 2006. Murder in Mississippi: the 1964 Freedom Summer killings. San
Diego, Calif: Lucent Books.
Curry, Constance. 2000. Deep in our hearts: nine white women in the Freedom
Movement. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press.
Danielson, Chris. 2011. After Freedom Summer: how race realigned Mississippi politics,
1965-1986. Gainesville: University Press of Florida.
“I Never Will Forget” 111
Dann, Jim. 2013. Challenging the Mississippi firebombers: memories of Mississippi 1964-
65. Montr al: Baraka Books.
Davies, David R. 2001. The press and race: Mississippi journalists confront the movement.
Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.
Dittmer, John. 1995. Local people: the struggle for civil rights in Mississippi. Urbana:
University of Illinois Press.
Emery, Kathy, Linda Reid Gold, and Sylvia Braselmann. 2008. Lessons from Freedom
Summer: ordinary people building extraordinary movements. Monroe, ME.:
Common Courage Press.
Erenrich, Susie. 1999. Freedom is a constant struggle: an anthology of the Mississippi civil
rights movement. Montgomery, AL: Black Belt Press.
Greenberg, Cheryl Lynn. 1997. A circle of trust: remembering SNCC. New Brunswick:
Rutgers University Press.
Greenberg, Polly. 1969. The Devil has slippery shoes; a biased biography of the Child
Development Group of Mississippi. [New York]: Macmillan.
Hamlin, Fran oise N. 2012. Crossroads at Clarksdale: the Black freedom struggle in the
Mississippi Delta after World War II. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press.
Hogan, Wesley C. 2007. Many minds, one heart: SNCC's dream for a new America.
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Holsaert, Faith S. 2010. Hands on the freedom plow: personal accounts by women in
SNCC. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Lyon, Danny. 1992. Memories of the Southern civil rights movement. Chapel Hill:
Published for the Center for Documentary Studies, Duke University, by the
University of North Carolina Press.
Marshall, James P. 2013. Student activism and civil rights in Mississippi: protest politics and
the struggle for racial justice, 1960-1965. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
University Press.
Mart nez, Elizabeth Sutherland. 1965. Letters from Mississippi. New York: McGraw-Hill.
McAdam, Doug. 1988. Freedom Summer. New York: Oxford University Press.
McClymer, John F. 2004. Mississippi Freedom Summer. Belmont, CA:
Thomson/Wadsworth.
“I Never Will Forget” 112
Mills, Kay, This Little Light of Mine: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer, (New York: Plume,
1994), p. 5.
Moye, J. Todd. 2004. Let the people decide: Black freedom and White resistance
movements in Sunflower County, Mississippi, 1945-1986. Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina Press.
Payne, Charles M. 2007. I've got the light of freedom: the organizing tradition and the
Mississippi freedom struggle. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Randall, Herbert, and Bobs M. Tusa. 2001. Faces of Freedom Summer. Tuscaloosa:
University of Alabama Press.
http://www.aspresolver.com/aspresolver.asp?SIXT;1000699487.
Reavis, Dick J. 2001. If white kids die: memories of a civil rights movement volunteer.
Denton, TX: University of North Texas Press.
Rothschild, Mary Aickin. 1982. A case of Black and white: northern volunteers and the
southern Freedom Summers, 1964-1965. Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press.
Sellers, Cleveland, and Robert L. Terrell. 1990. The river of no return: the autobiography
of a Black militant and the life and death of SNCC. Jackson: University Press of
Mississippi.
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (U.S.). 1981. Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee papers, 1959-1972. Sanford, N.C.: Microfilming Corp.
of America.
Theoharis, Jeanne, and Komozi Woodard. 2005. Groundwork: local black freedom
movements in America. New York: New York University.
Umoja, Akinyele Omowale. 2013. We will shoot back: armed resistance in the Mississippi
Freedom Movement
Wiles, Deborah, and Jerome Lagarrigue. 2001. Freedom Summer. New York: Atheneum
Books for Young Readers.
Williams, Juan. 1987. Eyes on the prize: America's civil rights years, 1954-1965. New York,
NY: Viking.
Winstead, Mary. 2002. Back to Mississippi: a personal journey through the events that
changed America in 1964. New York: Theia.
Zinn, Howard. 1964. SNCC, the new abolitionists. Boston: Beacon Press.
“I Never Will Forget” 113
• INDEX OF NARRATORS •
Abbott, James (MFP-48), 98, 102
Bacon, Catherine (MFP-97), 102
Block, Margaret (MFP-6), 11-12, 16, 20, 24, 28, 31, 34-37, 41,
44-47, 49, 59, 70, 76-81, 87, 90, 98, 100, 104
Boclair, Nathan (MFP-55), 28, 54
Brown, Earnest (MFP-77), 26
Brown, Otis (MFP-4), 51, 53, 61-62, 67, 85
Buckner, Jennifer (MFP-68), 46, 80, 104
Campbell, Betty (MFP-14), 41
Carter, Florine (MFP-74), 51
Carter, Lee Roy (MFP-39), 52, 97
Chandler, Gelda (MFP-45), 25, 28
Collins, Thelma (MFP-19), 93
Cooper, Allen (MFP-1), 36, 49, 55, 61, 78, 80, 85, 94, 96
Davis, Delise (MFP-15), 23, 52
Davis, James (MFP-56), 28
Dickerson, Gloria Carter (MFP-12), 17, 47, 62-63, 65, 89
Evans, Tanya (MFP-59), 48, 104
Featherstone, Charles (MFP-33), 18, 35, 80, 84
Flannigan, Dennis (MFP-8), 17, 23, 32, 34-36, 40, 70, 76-77
Fusco, Liz (Aaronsohn), 33, 46, 58, 62, 66, 68, 91
Golden, Emma (MFP-42), 19-20
Guyot, Lawrence (MFP-78), 12, 21, 31, 33, 39, 56, 69-74, 85,
101, 104-105
Hattie Jordan (MFP-60), 73, 101-102
Hudson, Heather (MFP-17), 89, 91, 93
Jefferson, Anita (MFP-76), 27, 104
Kaminsky, Hershel (MFP-25), 24, 43, 48, 58, 62, 67, 73, 81, 95
Kibbee, Margaret (MFP-16), 12, 23-24, 33, 35, 39, 42-43, 53-
54, 56, 66, 68, 71, 77-79, 83, 90, 93
King, Foster (MFP-23), 18, 43, 92, 94, 96
Koonan, Karen Jo (MFP-30), 44, 61, 83
Lavallais, Lilly (MFP-47), 26, 36, 98
Lee, Andrew (MFP-13) 18, 40
Lunsford, Tommie Novick (MFP-43), 20, 24, 54, 72, 83-
84, 98
Mack, McKinley (MFP-52), 16, 36-37, 41, 45, 54, 62, 99,
100, 103
McLaurin, Charles (MFP-80), 16, 31, 36, 37, 58, 70, 73,
92
Minniefield, Leon (MFP-32), 25, 64-65, 96
Moore, Darrell (MFP-38), 19
Nance, Benjamin (MFP-46), 98
Perkins, Cheryl (MFP-18), 93
Proctor, Elmo (MFP-27), 17-18, 32, 44, 52, 54-55, 67, 82,
94-96
Randle, Carver (MFP-24), 16, 22, 43, 58
Rushing, David (MFP-41), 44, 49, 59-60, 98
Scott, Charles (MFP-34), 16, 18, 20, 57, 96
Seese, Linda (MFP-23), 24, 33, 36, 58, 60-62, 79, 81
Shepherd, Mary (MFP-79), 26-27, 29
Shorter, Isaac (MFP-35), 65
Simpson, Valerie (MFP-51), 68
Spurlock, Willie (MFP-3), 22, 60
Tubbs, John (MFP-10), 21, 41, 63-64, 104
Walton, Wardell (MFP-106), 19, 23, 42, 59, 96
Ware, William (MFP-54), 27
Watkins, Hollis (MFP-5), 34-35, 47-49
White, Dorsey (MFP-50), 11, 67, 75
White, Mary (MFP-53), 100
White, Stacy (MFP-7), 11-12, 80, 87
Winn, Bright (MFP-3), 12, 34-35, 39-41, 52-53, 60, 76-
77, 79-80, 89-91
“I Never Will Forget” 114
“I Never Will Forget” 115
UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA CHAPTER
PHI ALPHA THETA
THE MILBAUER PROGRAM
IN SOUTHERN HISTORY
Supported by the Smathers Libraries Digital Initiative Fund
CONTRIBUTIONS FROM THE FOLLOWING ORGANIZATIONS HELPED MAKE THIS PUBLICATION POSSIBLE: