envelopes while others were putting their lives on the line. I confided my discontent to Bayard Rustin, whose advice I respected.
“Go down to Atlanta, Bob,” he told me. “I’ll write to Ella Baker to tell her you’re coming. She and Martin will find something for you to do.”
As soon as my teaching duties were over for the summer, I packed my bags and took a bus headed south.
The Southern Christian Leadership Conference office wasn’t much: a small room, three women, three desks, three telephones. They were in the midst of a voter registration project and wanted me to do the same boring tasks I had done in New York. I soon found myself talking a lot to Jane Stembridge, a short, peppy blond with piercing blue eyes, a fiery spirit, and a crazy haystack of unruly hair. She was a southern girl, a minister’s daughter, who had left Union Theological Seminary to become the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee’s first executive secretary, a job she carried out with dispatch from her desk stuck in a corner of the SCLC office. We spent animated afternoons discussing Kant’s categorical imperative, Tillich’s ultimate concern, Sartre’s terrible freedom, and Camus’s authentic versus inauthentic existence. More pressing were our debates about the civil rights tactics of Martin Luther King and the SCLC, which we called “Slick.” They were in the process of replacing Ella Baker with Wyatt Tee Walker—part of a larger plan to promote Dr. King as the leader and spokesman of the black revolt. Jane and I thought the whole approach was too hero-worshipping, media-centered, preacher-dominated, and authoritarian. We agreed with Ella Baker, the midwife of SNCC, which we called “Snick,” who had very definite ideas about organizing. She believed that the Movement ought to seek out the small farmers, sharecroppers, and plantation workers and start building at the grassroots instead of posturing in front of cameras. Jane suggested that I should make a field trip to the Deep South to recruit students for an upcoming SNCC conference in October. I would pay my own way and see for myself what conditions were like.
At this time I wasn’t even on the SNCC staff. In fact, several of the SNCC people in Atlanta eyed me with suspicion. Who was this soft-spoken guy in horn-rimmed glasses with a Harvard degree? Why would someone so well educated (and with that name!) just happen to show up from New York? Was he an FBI spy? A Communist agent provocateur? Although I never tried to impose my views, from the start I made it clear that I thought the Movement in America was part of a larger world picture. Ella Baker, whose impact on all of us was enormous, argued that what we were after was much more than equal access to greasy burgers at the five-and-dime. That didn’t stop me, however, from joining any picket line I saw. I marched for hours with Julian Bond and the other Atlanta University students in front of a local A&P that served mostly blacks but refused to hire even one. Another time I was arrested while picketing for the Southern Conference Educational Fund.
“How did you get involved with the SCEF?” Julian asked.
“I heard about it at a lecture.”
“On what?”
“Ramifications of Göedel’s Theorem.”
“Oh,” he said, raising one eyebrow.
As a result of my arrest, Martin Luther King summoned me to his study at Ebenezer Baptist Church. I knew that some people in SNCC had been expressing doubts about me to King; he wanted to see for himself. Face to face, I felt less in the presence of a national symbol than of a troubled man a few inches shorter than I was and a few years older. After some painful silences and a smattering of small talk, King finally said, “We have to be careful. The FBI thinks the whole Civil Rights Movement is a Communist plot. I’d advise against picketing with the SCEF.”
I didn’t like his advice, but I took it. Then I changed the subject. Could I move my operations for the SCLC over to the Butler Street YMCA where I was staying?
“Of course, of course,” King answered, and we parted on that cordial note of agreement.
When Ella Baker heard about my visit to Ebenezer, she was upset.
“Why, Martin himself is friends with Anne and Carl Braden and several of the other SCEF people. What right does he have to tell you to stay away from them?”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “I’m heading south in a few days anyway.”
“Well, I wish I could join you. Wyatt Walker just evicted Jane from the SCLC office, and I’m being sent to New York. When you get to Mississippi, make sure you talk to Amzie Moore. Before I leave I’ll give you his address, and I’m going to give those snooty Atlanta students a piece of my mind about the dangers of red-baiting. I won’t have that. When I’ve finished with them, they won’t say another word against you, Robert.”
The next day Julian came by and apologized. I told him about my plan to tour the South.
“So ‘Moses’ is finally going to Mississippi,” he said, inspecting my face for signs of insanity. “I wish you luck.”
2
One day in late August I knocked on the door to Amzie Moore’s house in Cleveland, Mississippi. He was an NAACP organizer who had been working to change things in the Delta ever since he came home from World War II. The floodlights that radiated out from his brick house and the rifle he held on his lap as we talked testified to how precarious his position was. But he was dug in like a tree by the water and determined to defend himself. A strong, broad-shouldered man who looked like he could handle himself in a fight, Amzie made me welcome immediately, and for a week we reconnoitered the area and discussed strategy. We went from shack to shack, and he showed me scenes that I’ll never forget: children with swollen ankles, bloated bellies, and suppurating sores; children whose one meal a day was grits and gravy; children who didn’t know the taste of milk, meat, fruits, or vegetables; children who drank contaminated water from a distant well, slept five in a bed, and didn’t have the energy to brush the flies from their faces. We were in the Delta, but it might as well have been Haiti.
“What can be done?” he asked me simply.
I mentioned the sit-ins and demonstrations going on elsewhere.
“No. No. That won’t work here. They’d squash that like a bug and nothin’ more would be heard. It’s the politicians who control things in this state. If you can hurt them, things will change. The key is the vote.”
Amzie convinced me that the best tactic was not to attack segregation head-on, but to focus exclusively on voter registration. Unlike the other NAACP leaders I had met, he was enthusiastic about bringing in SNCC workers and recruiting local students to help.
“It’s the young people who are gonna carry this thing through,” he said. “The adults are too afraid. But if the students show enough courage and commitment, they’ll back them up.”
Amzie showed me a booklet put out by the Southern Regional Council that outlined the voting situation. Mississippi, as usual, was the worst: although 40 percent of the state was black, only 5 percent of those eligible were registered, and most didn’t dare vote. We taped a map of Mississippi on the wall and hauled out Amzie’s old Underwood. He extemporized on life in the Delta while I typed up a rough draft of a voter registration project to present to SNCC. A few years earlier, Amzie and a Catholic priest in Mound Bayou—Father John Lebouvre—had set up a voting school in his church. That would be our model. We would run off copies of the state constitution, and SNCC workers would teach the local people how to register. We knew we faced a tough, dangerous job, but my eyes gleamed with the vision of thousands of black people descending on local courthouses and gaining control of the Delta.
“Don’t
