Brenda Travis, who was only fifteen and very well liked, should receive such punishment. Some people were angry that the judge would send a young girl to prison; others blamed SNCC for getting their children in trouble. Curtis Bryant held me personally responsible.
“The agreement was for three weeks,” he told me, his already high-pitched voice rising higher as he became more upset, “and you were only to do voter registration. I cannot condone the use of children. That is contrary to NAACP guidelines.”
“It’s out of my hands,” I said. “McComb is where the action is and SNCC wants to be here. Besides, the students want to protest and will, whether we’re here or not.”
“Can’t you order them not to?”
“No. That’s not the way SNCC operates. It’s not my decision to make. In SNCC we ‘go where the spirit say go, and do what the spirit say do.’ Nobody gives orders to anybody.”
“Well, that’s no way to run an organization,” Bryant said, shaking his head. “You’ve got to have procedure, guidelines, rules. In the NAACP we file vouchers for all money received and turn in detailed reports. Whenever we go into anything, we have our legal office tell us what we ought to do and what we ought not to do. This use of students is clearly beyond the boundary line. I’m afraid we’ll have to disassociate ourselves to protect the integrity of our organization.”
“We can’t stop now,” I pleaded. “This is no time for hesitation. We have to go ahead.”
Seeing a chance to exploit our differences, Police Chief George Guy chose this moment to arrest Curtis Bryant—even though he had consistently opposed the demonstrations—for contributing to the delinquency of a minor. Ironically, this attempt to sabotage us failed. When Bryant got out on bail, he declared himself unequivocally on our side. “Where the students lead, we will follow,” he told an NAACP rally.
The police also tried to entrap me on a trumped-up charge. I was down at South of the Border, a black restaurant in Burgland where the SNCC workers hung out. Alyene Quin, the manager, sensed trouble when she saw a patrol car pull up. She planted herself at the front door to stall them while I slipped out the back and ran up the alley to Nobles Brothers Cleaners. Ernest Nobles, quickly sizing up the situation, took my arm and stood me up inside a rack of hanging clothes where I couldn’t be seen. When the police car came tearing after me, Ernest ran out and shouted to them, “He went out the front door, heading that way,” and they sped off in the wrong direction. Once they were gone, he parked his pickup truck in the alley, hid me under a tarpaulin in back, and drove to Steptoe’s farm where I would be safe.
After serving a month in jail, Brenda Travis was placed on probation and Ike Lewis was paroled. They asked Commodore Dewey Higgins, the conservative black principal who lorded it over Burgland High School, to be readmitted. He stated that because of their sit-in activities, they were expelled for the year. When the other students heard about this autocratic action, they stood up at midday chapel service and demanded an explanation; the principal refused to discuss the issue. A few students then took over the stage, fired up the others with freedom songs, and called upon everyone to walk out in protest. About a hundred of them left school and marched down to the SNCC office. We heard them singing “Woke up this morning with my mind stayed on freedom” as they came. They carried banners and signs and were ready to demonstrate downtown.
At first Chuck McDew and I tried to discourage them, but their spirit was so strong and contagious that we decided to join them. Bob Zellner, the only white SNCC worker in McComb, was determined to come too. We marched down Summit, through the heart of Burgland, and then took the viaduct under the railroad tracks to reach the white side of McComb. As we came up Main Street, an angry crowd began to gather, singling out Zellner for special abuse. Before long we were surrounded by a mob; they were in an ugly mood.
To show our peaceful intentions, the students knelt down one by one to pray on the steps of city hall. This was seen as an intolerable provocation; the police blew their whistles and began to arrest us. At the same time, the mob attacked, zeroing in on Zellner. A man in a sleeveless T-shirt went for his throat and another slugged him in the face. McDew and I threw our arms around him, trying to shield him with our bodies. To keep from being trampled to the ground, Zellner was hanging on to the iron railing for dear life. They pulled on his belt and beat on his hands in their effort to drag him out into the street. I saw one man grab him by the ears and try to gouge his eyes out with his thumbs. When Zellner threw up his hands to protect his face, he was immediately knocked down and kicked in the head until he lost consciousness. Only then did the police intervene, dragging us up the steps into city hall.
One hundred and nineteen of us were herded into the city jail. The mob gathered outside, milling around and shouting threats. When word of what had happened spread, the police began conducting guided tours for the curious “good citizens” of McComb. A contingent would enter the cell block, and invariably they would ask, “Where’s Moses? Where’s Moses?” until a student would point me out. They stared; I stared back—the Fiend at Bay.
“You don’t believe in Jesus Christ, do you, you sonofabitch?” a man who said he was a minister snapped at me. “I’m going to personally see to it that you’re in hell real soon.”
“Say something in communist,” a prim little blond said to McDew.
“Shiksa schlepp mensch shtick,” he replied, looking completely serious.
We were brought upstairs one by one for a kind of kangaroo court. I warned the students to say they were under eighteen. If they could convince the court they were minors, they would probably be released. When my turn came, the air was thick with tension. To avoid having to say “Yes, sir” and “No, sir,” I answered every question with a complete sentence. Fifteen of us were charged with breach of the peace and contributing to the delinquency of minors and taken to the Amite County Jail in Liberty.
“Why didn’t you take us to the Pike County Jail in Magnolia?” I asked.
“This is a better place for y’all to think about what happened to Herbert Lee,” the deputy said.
We were placed in the drunk tank, a solid concrete room, cold and damp, with nothing to sit or lie on but more concrete. In spite of the lack of heat, bad food, and no showers, spirits remained high in the cell; we sang freedom songs and told jokes. I made chess pieces out of matchsticks, with a cigarette butt as the queen and taught my cellmates how to play. Whoever captured the queen got to smoke the butt. After three days we were released on bond.
When the 114 students who had taken part in the march tried to return to school, the principal, under pressure from the white superintendent, refused to admit them unless they signed an agreement not to stage any more protests. The students refused, and walked out. This procedure went on for the next week. Each day the students would come to school; each day they would be ordered to sign the agreement; each day those who refused would walk out. The parents, meanwhile, were deeply divided on the issue: some whipped their children and told them to stay away from that mess; others resented the agreement, but wanted their children back in school; a few were urging their sons and daughters to keep up the pressure and shut the school down if necessary. Even the teachers, usually an impossibly conservative group, became involved. “I wish I was a student,” one said, “I’d walk out too.”
I was pleased to see the spirit of democracy spread as the students learned to stand up for their rights. They drafted a petition for fair treatment that urged “all our fellowmen to love rather than hate, to build rather than tear down, to bind our nation with love and justice without regard to race, color, and creed.” Finally, the principal set a deadline of October 16 at three o’clock: any student who hadn’t signed the agreement by then would be expelled. Fifty signed; sixty-four
