can be.”
At the conference in October, Amzie Moore outlined our voter registration proposal. SNCC, which could never resist a dare or a challenge, was impressed with Amzie’s presentation and decided to go ahead. I was named director of a voter registration project to start the following summer.
I taught one more year at Horace Mann, saving as much money as I could for what was ahead. Each night I read up on the South, studied the Mississippi constitution and maps of the state, planned, meditated, and then, before going to bed, listened to Odetta sing “I’m Going Back to the Red Clay Country.”
When summer came, I returned to Mississippi, but it looked like the project wouldn’t get off the ground. SNCC was in disarray over the question of whether voter registration wasn’t a diversion from “direct action” demonstrations against segregation; Amzie was swamped with personal problems. Then a letter came from Curtis Bryant in McComb. He had read about SNCC’s voter registration plans in Jet and wanted us to set up a project in Pike County.
“White folks around here are really upset about these Freedom Riders,” Amzie said. “Maybe things down there won’t be so tight.”
So one day in early August I moved my base of operations to McComb, a tough railroad town in the southwestern part of the state.
Bryant, a brusque, energetic man with a high-pitched voice and a warm handshake, was one of the stalwarts of the Movement. He ran a barbershop in front of his house in Baertown, a small black community the city fathers had deliberately zoned outside the town limits. He also operated a loading crane for the Illinois Central, whose tracks, along with the Gulf, Western & Ohio, cut right through the heart of McComb. On the west side of town were paved streets, a few blocks of retail stores, and the white suburbs, spread out under a canopy of shade trees and embroidered with flowers. On the east, Burgland, the all-black town with its shabby stores, ramshackle houses, and dirt roads. The general air of grinding poverty was broken by the occasional brick house of somebody who worked for the railroad.
Bryant took me in and introduced me to as many people as he could. “This is my friend, Bob Moses,” he’d say. “He’s here to help us, so I want you to help him.” Ernest Nobles, who ran the local laundry, said he’d keep me looking good; Aylene Quin promised food at her restaurant; Mama Cotton provided housing; and Webb Owens, “Supercool Daddy,” volunteered to go door-to-door with me to raise money for the Freedom School.
At first, children stopped playing hopscotch and huddled together as I walked by. “He’s a Freedom Rider,” they whispered. Their wary parents would pass me on the road without meeting my eyes, but I could feel their stares and questions jabbing into my back. Many were frightened; I meant nothing but trouble. I would tell them, “Get ready, the Movement is coming your way,” but that wasn’t anything they wanted to hear. One man stooped down behind the tomato plants in his garden to avoid me. Another time, a little girl came to the front door and said, “Mama say she not here.”
It was hard work, but a few listened. I would take out a registration form and ask, “Have you ever filled one of these out?” They would shake their heads and look uneasy. Voting was white folks’ business. “Would you like to sit down now and try?” I would encourage them to imagine themselves at the county courthouse in Magnolia actually answering the twenty-one questions, interpreting a section of the Mississippi Constitution, and stating in a paragraph the duties and obligations of citizenship. Whether they passed or not was at the discretion of the registrar, whose job was to see that they didn’t.
People listened and gave what they could—a nickle, a dime, a quarter—to support a handful of SNCC workers. Soon I was joined by John Hardy, Reggie Robinson, Travis Britt, and a few others who had been in jail in Jackson for taking part in the Freedom Rides. Also, several of the local students got involved. One in particular, Brenda Travis, always bright-eyed and brimming with questions, would sit on a family’s porch talking to them for hours if necessary until they were convinced of the need to register. Thanks to Curtis Bryant, who, in addition to being head of the local NAACP, a deacon in his church, a Sunday school teacher, and a scoutmaster, was also a high official in the Freemasons, we were able to set up a Freedom School in the Masonic Hall over the Burgland grocery store. Saint Paul’s Methodist Church, across the street, agreed to let us hold meetings there too.
One day in early August I was at the Freedom School preparing for class when a slim, serious-faced young man, who was about twenty, came in. He scrutinized me with wide-eyed intensity.
“Are you Martin Luther King?”
“No. I’m Bob Moses. Why did you think I was King?”
“I heard talk about some big secret thing goin’ on, so I come to see for myself.”
“Where are you from?”
“Summit.”
“What’s your name?”
“Hollis Watkins.”
“Are you in school?”
“No. But I got plans.”
“I’ve got plans too.”
I told him about the voter registration project, and even though I wasn’t Martin Luther King, he wanted to help. His friend Curtis Hayes would help too. They began to recruit. People related to them as the sons of local farmers who dressed and acted in down-home ways. I soon learned to scrap my suit and tie for boots, bib overalls, and a chambray shirt; the other SNCC workers did the same. Those of us from the North learned to slow down to the rhythms of the South.
The people flocked to our school. When we explained the power of the vote, they squirmed in their chairs and glanced at each other. One heavyset woman up front fanned herself harder every time I mentioned the word freedom. Within a few days we sent several students to the Pike County courthouse in Magnolia. When they learned that they had passed, we held a party that lasted long into the night. It seemed for the moment as if everything would be easy. Then the local paper, the Enterprise-Journal, ran an article on what we were trying to do. Whites became alarmed. The next day, the registrar rejected our students, and that evening one of them, in an incident apparently unrelated to voter registration, was shot at. As the news spread, I noted the panic in people’s eyes; they saw a connection. Fewer and fewer came to the Freedom School.
Meanwhile, farmers in nearby Amite and Walthall counties heard about SNCC and asked if we could help them, too. As dangerous as McComb was, the surrounding areas, with long histories of violence, were much worse. In Amite only one black was registered; in Walthall, none. If we had serious difficulties in McComb, what chance did we have in those places? But I knew that if we turned down the farmers, we would lose the trust and destroy the hope of the people. If we shied away from the toughest areas, everyone would know we could be intimidated, and the fragile project would fall apart. We decided that John Hardy should take on Walthall while I went into Amite, a name that meant “friendship” in French and “trouble” to me.
On Saturday evening Curtis Bryant drove me to the farm of E. W. Steptoe, a small man with prominent ears, a wide smile, a weather-beaten face, and as I was soon to learn, an indomitable spirit. A few other farmers were there. One was Herbert Lee, short, self-effacing, with a touch of gray in his hair. He had grown up down the road, married a girl from nearby St. Helena Parish, raised a large family, and made enough money planting cotton to buy some land, a house, and a car. Only men like Steptoe and Lee, with the self-sufficiency of the independent farmer, had the courage to stand up to the threat of white reprisals.
In the fifties, Steptoe had single-handedly started an NAACP chapter in Amite County. He bought a batch
