Jack, you say?”
“Do you know him?” I asked.
“He’s my first cousin.” The sheriff put a hand up to his mouth to hide the smirk on his face. “If you want to waste your time filin’ a complaint, go see the county prosecutor. I can’t help you.”
“Can I use your phone?”
“Can’t help you there either. I’d advise you to get out of town and forget the whole thing.”
Dawson, Knox, and I left the sheriff’s office to the sound of snickers and a burst of laughter.
“What was so funny?” I asked as we stepped outside.
“You know those other two men?” Dawson explained. “One of them was Billy Jack’s brother, and the other was the sheriff’s son.”
“Nice.”
I found a phone booth across the street and asked the local operator to call the Justice Department; it seemed she couldn’t make the connection. There was nothing to do but return to Steptoe’s farm and lick my wounds. I wasn’t about to let the black people of Liberty and McComb see me covered with blood.
When he heard our car rattling up the dirt drive, Steptoe came out of the barn carrying a pail of milk. He took one look at me and grimaced.
“Bob, is that you?”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m not hurt that bad.”
Unconvinced, he patted my shoulder, gazing at me with troubled eyes.
Two of his daughters came out of the house, saw my blood-soaked shirt and started screaming. They ran to their father, clutching him and crying, “Do something! Do something!”
Steptoe helped me off with my shirt and wrung the blood out, which made the girls gasp and cry harder. Then he led me to the kitchen, washed me off with a wet cloth, found a change of clothes, and drove me to the office of the only black doctor in McComb, who stitched me up while Steptoe wiped my face with his handkerchief.
Early the next morning, Steptoe approached me as I was dressing and looked apprehensively at the three bandages on my scalp.
“Bob,” he asked with deep concern in his voice, “where are you goin’?”
“To Liberty.”
“Bob, you can’t go back there.”
“I have work to do,” I said. “There are people who are counting on me to help them register, and I need to see the county prosecutor.”
“The people will understand,” he said, “and the county prosecutor won’t help you.”
“It’s something I have to do.”
“Bob, listen to me. I know those people. Don’t go back there. They will be expectin’ you today. They will kill you up there today. Don’t go.”
“If I don’t go back,” I said, “I’m finished. They’ll figure they’ve won. The people want to register; they’re counting on my help.”
“I don’t want to see you dead.”
“Look, don’t worry. If anything happens to me, someone else will take my place.”
“I feel like you’re one of my own kids,” Steptoe said with tears in his eyes and his voice choking. “You’re just that close to me.”
“I know,” I said, putting my arms around him. “I’ll be back.”
In Liberty I told the county prosecutor I wanted to swear out a complaint against Billy Jack Caston for criminal assault. He looked at me as if my brains were oozing out from under my bandages. Then he explained that no Negro had ever done anything like that around there and that all I would probably accomplish would be to get myself killed, but he agreed to file a complaint and call the justice of the peace.
N. T. Bellue, a tottering, toothless old gent with watery eyes, showed up an hour later. When I told him I had filed assault and battery charges against Billy Jack Caston, his tobaccoless pipe nearly fell out of his mouth.
“I want a trial,” I said. “I’ve got witnesses.”
“You’ll get one,” he grumbled, tapping his cane for emphasis, “as soon as I eat my lunch.”
Two hours later I brought Curtis Dawson and Alfred Knox into Liberty. Pickup trucks lined the town square; an angry crowd milled around on the courthouse lawn; the second-floor courtroom was packed with men brandishing shotguns to ensure that the niceties of southern justice were observed.
“Oooah, I never see so many peoples,” Alfred Knox exclaimed. “This ain’t good. This ain’t a good sign at all.”
Dawson, Knox, and I were kept in a back room and brought out one by one to tell our story to the six-man jury. By pressing my ear to the wall, I caught a part of Billy Jack’s version: “We was just walkin’ along when this brash nigger bumped me off the sidewalk. When I told him to watch where he was goin’ he jumped into one of them Jap fightin’ stances and forced me to defend myself.”
While we waited for the verdict, some shots were fired outside.
“If I was you, I wouldn’t stick around,” the sheriff said. “Billy Jack is pretty well liked around here. Y’all better follow me out the back way.”
The sheriff took us to our car and escorted us to the Amite County line. The next day the McComb paper read:
Court Acquits White Man On Negro Beating Charge.
“There’s no turning back,” I told a rally at the McComb Masonic Hall that evening. “We have to keep going down to the courthouse until we get our rights.”
Tom Morton: Orientation
Oxford, Ohio
June 21–27, 1964
1
Oxford is one of those quaint college towns built by transplanted New Englanders, adding a grace note to Ohio’s endless farmlands, look-alike suburbs, and smokestack cities. The campus of Western College for Women, two hundred acres of designed serenity, was a landscaper’s dream of woodlands, lawns, and gardens, dramatically divided by an overgrown ravine spanned by a series of stone footbridges. The main building, Peabody Hall, a U-shaped, five-storied, cupola-crowned pile of brick and ivy, overlooked the scene from its commanding hilltop. Lenny and I pulled off to the side of the soft tar driveway and parked. Other than stalling at the occasional red light, my Edsel had made the three-hundred-mile catercorner jaunt across Ohio without incident. Crayoned arrows on cardboard slabs directed us to a long table where name badges, meal tickets, and room assignments were handed out, along with a thick packet of info about the Summer Project.
Why had I chosen this way to spend my summer? Mississippi, everyone agreed, was a nasty place, a hopeless case; it would be a fool’s errand to go there. My decision, no doubt, dated back to the March on Washington,
