A Right to Be There

By Constance Curry

Vol. 14, No. 1, 1992, pp.18-23, 25

It was Mae Bertha Carter on the phone. “I’m on my way to raise hell with the Mayor,” she told me. “The City Council didn’t reappoint Beverly to the School Board.”

In 1986, Beverly Carter, daughter of Mae Bertha and Matthew Carter, was the first African American to be appointed to the Drew, Mississippi, school board. Drew, with a population of 2,000, is in Sunflower County in the heart of the Mississippi Delta. Sunflower is the home of Senator James 0. Eastland and the birthplace of the White Citizens’ Council in 1954—two months after the Brown decision. In the 1950s, Sunflower black people comprised almost 75 percent of the total population of 56,000, but only 0.3 percent were registered to vote. The number of black registered voters has increased dramatically over the years, but old arrangements and the power of intimidation and violence linger. Even with a majority black population in both the town of Drew and in the county, registered black voters make up only 50 percent of the electorate.

“And just being registered doesn’t make the difference,” says Mae Bertha Carter. ‘People don’t know how important it is to vote. There’s strength in voting. Voting is hiring and firing power. But some of ’em can’t read the names or the offices. We need some voter education. People aren’t scared any more, they just aren’t in the habit.”

Beverly and Mae Bertha spent the month of June

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canvassing door-to-door and taking people to register. As a result of this year’s redistricting, a special election on August 4 sent the first black senator from the Sunflower area to the state legislature—Willie Simmons.

Bringing change to Sunflower County is not a new thing for Beverly Carter or her family. Matthew and Mae Bertha Carter joined the NAACP in 1955, a very risky act for the era that began with Brown. At the time, they and their families before them had been sharecropping on various Delta plantations for fifty years. By 1965, they were living on the Pemble Plantation, nine miles from Drew, and were the first black family to enroll all seven of their school-age children in the town’s previously all-white schools. Carl Carter, the youngest child, entered the first grade in 1967. The eight Carter children remained the only African American children in the system until the fall of 1969 when others entered the eighth grade, and when the elementary school was desegregated under court order.

Finally, after five years of litigation, in the fall of 1970, the complete Drew school system was ordered to desegregate. All eight of the Carter children graduated from Drew High School and went to college; seven of them graduated from the University of Mississippi.

Beverly majored in journalism and returned to Drew after graduation in 1979. Today she works, as she has for the past twelve years, as office assistant at the Kroger’s in Cleveland, Mississippi. She is a single mother of Kerry, age ten—who attends Hunter Middle School—and Shayla, age three. Since her return to Drew, Beverly has worked with her mother fighting for improvements in the public school system.

When a member of the Drew school board resigned in 1986, the black community realized that this was a chance to get a black person on the all-white school board. Beverly recalls telling her mother that she was going to write a letter of interest. “I didn’t really mean it at the time, because I just knew for sure that they weren’t going to pick Mae Bertha Carter’s daughter. I would be the last person they would pick. But I put my letter in just to show that there were black people interested. And believe it or not, I was appointed.” A City Council member later told Mae Bertha that they might as well appoint Beverly and make it official because they knew Mae Bertha would be at all the meetings anyway.

Beverly was the only African American and the only woman on the five member board. Several of the men on the board remained from the years when the Carters had filed suits against them ranging from dress code issues to workbook fee violations. Beverly arrived as the lone voice on many issues such as maintenance of high standards for teacher hiring and public advertising of jobs as required by law. Her consistent questioning and unwillingness to rubber stamp school board decisions is what led to her not being reappointed.

When Mae Bertha and Beverly talk about the problems with today’s Delta schools, I am taken back to the 60s when the Carters desegregated the Drew system. At that time I made many visits to Drew as Southern Field Representative for the American Friends Service Committee. Also, over a ten-year period, Mae Bertha Carter wrote weekly letters reporting on their ordeal. Then, as now, the issue was the struggle of parents to get a better education for their children. In the 60s, black parents were fighting against a hundred-year history of racism and segregation by law. Often, they were also fighting for their livelihood and their lives.

Under Title Vl of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, school districts were mandated to provide plans for desegregation, and the U. S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare was the designated agency for enforcement. There was general confusion on how to enforce Title VI. Local school officials were told to develop a desegregation plan, but they wanted to know exactly what constituted compliance.

Sunflower County Population

	1960	1970	1980	1990
Total	45,750	37,047	34,844	32,000
White	14,730	13,619	13,089	11,604
Black	31,020	23,428	21,591	21,092
Black %	(67)	(63)	(62)	(64)

Town of Drew Population

	1960	1970	1980	1990
Total	2,143	2,574	2,528	2,349
White	1,287	1,380	1,212	1,019
Black	835	1,194	1,301	1,322
Black %	(39)	(46)	(51)	(56)

School systems, particularly in poor southern rural areas, knew that they could not operate their schools without the help of federal funds, but many of their board members were convinced that integration would destroy public education in their district. Systems capitalized on the confusion and lack of clarity in Washington and submitted “freedom of choice” plans which provided that all parents could send their children to the school of their choice.

Lloyd Henderson, an HEW staff person assigned to Mississippi in 1965, for a time believed that “if they were given the opportunity to choose, and if the plans were administered honestly, black children would enroll in the white schools in droves, thus causing white children to be assigned to the black schools.

In fact, ‘freedom of choice’ was conceived as a means of achieving tokenism in the rural areas. Washington officials knew that they would get no more desegregation than had been gained through the ponderous process of the courts. Ten years later, in 1975, Lloyd Henderson wondered aloud how federal officials could expect black families caught in a century of racism and violence to choose to send their children to an all-white school. “How could anyone have seriously believed that an economically dependent class of people could assume the burden

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of bringing about compliance with the federal law. Under such circumstances choice could never be free.”

The five white men who constituted the board of trustees of the Drew Municipal Separate School District in 1964 knew that failure to obey the federal law would mean the loss of several million dollars. They knew that the Drew system could not operate without this money. Throughout the 1964-65 school year, they calculated a plan that would result in the least amount of desegregation and yet be acceptable to HEW.

The first signs of impending change in Drew came in May of 1965. Black children brought notices home from school which their parents were to sign and return if they wanted their children to attend class straight through from September to May. This would mean the end of the split sessions in which school was scheduled according to the needs of the cotton crops. The children of sharecroppers were let out of school to chop cotton in the early spring; they returned to school in the “laying-by time” of summer months, and then went back to the fields in September and October to pick the cotton.

Mae Bertha and Matthew signed the notices with little hesitation. Later the children told them they were the only parents to do so. Other parents said their children had to chop and pick cotton.

If their seven children did indeed attend school for nine months straight, Mae Bertha did not know how their family was going to survive the following year. It would severely limit their capacity for chopping and picking the cotton on their twenty-five acres.

The family heard nothing more from the school system. The summer heat returned to the Delta. Then, on July 12, the Drew school board unanimously adopted a resolution outlining the desegregation plan accepted by HEW. Federal guidelines mandated that the plan be published in the local papers and that parents be given adequate notice. The full text of the July school board resolution appeared in the Sunflower County News on Thursday, August 5, 1965. It began:

“WHEREAS, as the result of judicial decisions and statutes enacted by the Congress of the United States, it is without question that enforced racial segregation in the public schools of Mississippi and other States is illegal, and that compulsory separate but equal school systems for the white and negro races will no longer permitted….”

The rest of the resolution outlined the Drew Plan in detail. Parents or guardians of pupils must exercise their choice by returning a registration form to any of the five schools in the district. So sure was the Drew School System of their control of the situation that they opened up all twelve grades to freedom of choice, rather than the minimum of three required by HEW.

August came, and Drew waited like dozens of other Delta towns. Main Street was only a few blocks long with its one-story businesses only on one side of the street. Fifteen diagonal parking places stretched in front of Timberlake’s Pharmacy, Fred’s Five and Dime. two office fronts, Western Auto, and Miller’s Furniture. The other side of the street was the frontage for the tracks where the trains came to pick up the cotton at the Sunflower Gin. Drew’s few residential streets, segregated by race, originated at Main and played out like Main Street itself in cotton fields surrounding the town. Seemingly unchanged by any Washington directives, or by the tumult of the Freedom Summer Project the previous summer, Drew and Sunflower County dozed under a blanket of heat.

Mae Bertha Carter understood politics well. “You have to live in Mississippi to really know about Mississippi. Now the white folk think they know black people and the black people think they know the white people. Now the black people know what the white man likes before he tells them and some things he don’t even have to be told. White man didn’t even have to go to the black’s house and say don’t send your child to the school, cause we know what the white man likes. So we know one another. And they were sure that they had everything around Drew so no blacks would be coming around their schools. They were so sure of that. But they didn’t know about us out there on the farm.”

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On August 6th, the Drew Municipal School District mailed out “freedom of choice” notices to all parents of school-age children in the district. Ruth, entering the eleventh grade, was the oldest of the school-age Carter children. She knew it would be difficult to leave her friends in the black school, but she jumped at the chance to go to the white school. Not only could she get away from the cotton fields, she believed that eventually her family’s choice might change a social order that she had hated since she was a young girl. Larry and Stanley, also entering the high school, along with Ruth, sensed what their actions could mean. They discussed going to the “white school” with the four younger children. The children kept telling each other it was the right thing to do.

Mae Bertha was visiting relatives in St. Louis in August of 1965 when the freedom of choice papers arrived. She received a letter from Ruth. “Come home. You have some papers to sign saying what school we want to go to. We want to go to the all-white school.” When she came home, all seven of the children said that they indeed wanted to go. Matthew and Mae Bertha told their children, “If you want to go, we want you to go.”

It was clear to Mae Bertha. “Why I decided that I wanted them to go was I was tired of my kids coming home with pages torn out of worn out books that come from this white school. I was tired of them riding on these raggedy buses after the white children didn’t want to ride on them any more. I was just tired, and I thought if they go to this all-white school they will get a better education there. The school board was all white and over both the white and black schools, but it was concerned about their kids more than they were about black kids.

“In fact, when you would go to the black school, the kids were eating lunch once or maybe twice a week. The teacher would get just so many tickets to issue out, and I would hear my kids saying something like, ‘Well maybe I’ll get a ticket today to eat,’ and then sometimes they’d come home and say ‘Well I was lucky today. I got a ticket to eat.’ And see, them white children was eating lunch every day. So that’s why we signed the papers. We had seven children to go, three to the elementary school and four to the high school. So we integrated both of those schools.”

News of the enrollment of the Carter children spread throughout Sunflower County. The next morning, Mr. Thornton, the plantation overseer drove up in his pickup truck and blew his horn in front of the Carter’s house.

“Mae,” Matthew called as he went out to the truck, “it’s starting.”

He went out to the pickup truck. Thornton told Matthew that he’d heard about the enrollment. He proceeded to say why it would be best to go back to Drew and withdraw the children. They could get a better education at the black school. They would have no friends at the white school. Neither black folks nor white folks would have anything to do with the Carters any more. Besides, those poor whites who lived over on the federal land unit real near the Carters could cause them a lot of trouble. Then he offered to go to Drew with Matthew and “withdraw ’em out.”

Matthew said he didn’t need the help and that if he decided to withdraw the children, he would go himself.

Meanwhile, Mae Bertha who had been standing on the porch listening, went into the house and got a record of the June 11, 1963 speech that President Kennedy had given on national radio and television calling for what became the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The speech was delivered just a few hours before Mississippi NAACP leader was slain outside his Jackson home shortly after midnight on June 12. Mae Bertha put the record on a little player on the porch and turned it up…. “And when Americans are sent to Vietnam or West Berlin, we do not ask for whites only. It ought to be possible, therefore, for American students of any color to attend any public institution they select without having to be backed up by troops…. We are confronted primarily with a moral issue. It is as old as the Scripture and as clear as the American Constitution.”

Mae Bertha stood by the door. Kennedy was talking as Matthew stood out by the truck. Finally Thornton said he would go down to the barn and give Matthew time to talk to Mae Bertha. “You go out there,” Mae Bertha said with resolution, “and you tell Mr. Thornton that I am a grown woman. Them are my children and he cannot tell me what to do about my children, like withdrawing my children out. And I’d be a fool to try and tell him where to send his kids.”

“Well, Mae, I’m not going to tell him all that.” They

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told Thornton that they had decided to keep the children in the white school.

The next morning about three o’clock, Matthew heard a noise. He looked out the window and by the time he said “What are all those cars doing coming in here,” gunshots were being fired into the windows, on top of the house and across the porch. Bullets hit above a bed where children were sleeping. No one was hurt. Everyone moved to the floor below the window in the back room to wait for daylight.

In the morning, Mae Bertha went to Cleveland to see Amzie Moore and Charles McLaurin, SNCC project director. They called the FBI office in Jackson. When the FBI and the high sheriff arrived, they wondered why Mae Bertha had gone all the way to Cleveland to call when she could have gone to some of the white people’s houses nearby.

“Go where?” asked Mae Bertha. “Let me tell you one thing, man, I ain’t go no confidence in a white man living in Mississippi.”

Today, she laughs, “I wasn’t going to no white folks’ house calling. That’s probably the ones who shot into the house.”

“So, they looked all around, and Mr. Thornton came in the house to help ’em look for the bullets. They took bullets out of the wall, and that’s the last I heard from the FBI or anybody about that shootin’.”

The news of the shooting spread as quickly in the black community as word of the enrollment had spread in the white. When the forms first arrived, black families had discussed the matter of transferring their children to the white schools.

They had been afraid of reprisals. The shooting incident ruled out the choice completely.

The Carters had no money. The peonage of the sharecropping system meant buying food and supplies on credit from the plantation store, paying when you had a little money and always staying beholden to the plantation owner and in debt to the store. A few days after the enrollment, Matthew went to Bob’s, the store that usually gave him credit. Had he heard right, the owner asked. Had Matthew been over to Drew and enrolled his kids in the all-white school? He said Matthew had until three o’clock that afternoon to take the children out of the school. Rather than the weekly order of staples needed to feed ten people, Matthew went home with only a little package of food.

“Mae,” he said, “I’m catching hell everywhere I go.”

“But you know, we was crazy,” Mae Bertha recalls. “We was going to stand up for it. I didn’t care and I didn’t know what the end was going to be. We was so afraid after the shooting. We slept on the floor for three nights and then I thought about wheat the preacher had said at one of them mass meetings in Cleveland-that everybody’s afraid and it’s okay to be afraid but you can’t let it stop you. And a coverin’ came over me, and we got up off the floor and we have never been on the floor no more.”

SNCC worker, Prathia Hall Wynn, who was monitoring school desegregation in the Delta for the American Friends Service Committee, sent a report on the Carter family to Jean Fairfax at the AFSC office in Philadelphia. Fairfax called John Doar at the Department of Justice to ask for help.

Friday, August 31, 1965, was the first day of school in the Drew Municipal School District. Matthew was up at 5:30 to get water from the pump, heat up the kettle and the big dishpan on the stove, and fill the tub in the bedroom. He bathed and dressed Deborah and Beverly, the two youngest girls.

The older children quietly got themselves ready. Mrs. Carter lay in bed wondering if she had the strength and will to face the fear that pressed in upon her. It was the first day in Drew that black children would attend public school with white children. Those seven children were hers. They would be desegregating both the Drew High School and the A. W. James Elementary School. But the principles of “freedom of choice” and “desegregation” seemed high-flown and irrelevant as Mae Bertha thought of the day that faced her children: Deborah, 6; Beverly, 8; Pearl, 9; Gloria, 11; Stanley, 13; Larry, 15; and Ruth, 16.

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After breakfast, the children got their quarters for lunch and went with Mae Bertha out on the front porch to wait for the school bus. By 7:30 the sun was out in strength. The bus that had picked them. up in previous years normally wended its way through the cotton fields, down dirt roads stopping at the sharecropper houses. Would this bus driver know where to pick them up? Would he stop? Would they be the first on the bus? Where would they sit? How would they know where to go when they got to school?

The bus stopped at the house and the children left the porch and got on. They were the first to be picked up. They sat two by two near the front, with Ruth taking a seat by herself. Mae Bertha watched until the bus was out of sight. Her eyes filled and she took baby Carl back into the house.

“When the bus pulled off, I went in and fell down cross the bed and prayed. I stayed on that bed and didn’t do no work that day. I didn’t feel good and stayed cross the bed and when I heard the bus coming, I went back to the porch. When they came off one by one, then I was released until the next morning. But the next morning I felt the same way, depressed, nervous, praying to God. I wasn’t saying a whole lot of words; just saying, ‘take care of my kids—no time for all those other words. And I didn’t do housecleaning until the children came home. After about a month, I started easing up a little bit. I had prayed to God so much! I had been going to church and talking about trusting in Jesus, but I never trusted Jesus until my children went to that all-white school. That school brought me to God!”

Each of the eight children have a story to tell about their experiences in school, but a constant theme in each is Mae Bertha’s reminder, “That’s not a white school. It’s your school as well as theirs. You have a right to be there. Always remember that.”

Today, four of the Carter children, besides Beverly, remain in Mississippi. One son lives in Longview, Texas, another is in the Air Force in Turkey. Ruth, the oldest, who was the most discouraged by the experience moved to Toledo, Ohio, after graduating from Drew High School. Mae Bertha has thirty-six grandchildren and thirteen great grandchildren, including the offspring of her first five children who left before school desegregation.

Matthew Carter died in 1988 at the age of seventy-eight. Mae Bertha still lives at 166 Broadway. Drew is now a very poor town with a majority black population most of whom are on welfare. Main Street in Drew looks much the same except for the boarded-up stores. Cleve McDowell, the first black man to enroll at the University of Missis-

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sippi Law School, hangs his shingle in front of a Main Street office. Burner Smith, who grew up in Drew, is the first black chief of police.

However, the greatest sense of change once again is coming from the public school system. While the public schools have remained almost all black since 1971, by the 1980s some white parents could not afford tuition ($1800 per child) at private segregated academies, and their children began entering back to public education. In the 1991-92 school year, 40 percent of the children in the city system were white.

As white parents realized the shocking state of the Drew schools, they began to join with black parents to work for change. The failure to reappoint Beverly without giving any reasons is one of the causes taken up by an integrated group who call themselves The Drew Concerned Citizens Group (DCCG).

Janet Free, a young white woman, is one of the DCCG leaders. Janet’s maternal grandfather was a sharecropper in Sunflower County. Janet’s parents have always believed that the public school system belongs to everyone and that Christian duty commands people to work together. Although in 1970, Janet was the only white student in her seventh grade class, she and her three sisters never fled to the private academy.

Today, she works as a bookkeeper in a Cleveland bank. She is married to Reverend Lonnie Free, pastor of the Church of God in Ruleville, four miles from Drew. Lonnie Free also stayed in the public schools when they integrated. Now, their two children attend public school in Drew.

Since most of their concerns could be remedied with proper expenditures, the Drew Concerned Citizens Group is trying to learn how school tax money and federal funds are being spent. For three years, there have been no new library books. Substitute teachers are used in place of regular teachers. Band uniforms are ten years old. Restrooms are unsanitary and often without toilet paper. School buses are old and unsafe, and the school buildings are not in good repair.

In the past, several school board members had sent their children to the all-white private academy, yet they continued to control the public school system. DCCG members seek to be part of the decision-making process affecting the education of their children. In the past a lack of knowledge of the workings of the political system has hampered change. Three of the school board members are appointed by the City Council and two are elected from the rural areas surrounding Drew. These selections are made at staggered times and with rules that remain confusing to many parents. DCCG wants to educate and mobilize parents for future city council and school board elections.

“Sounds just like the 60s sometimes,” Beverly and Mae Bertha say, as they talk about the task before them. “But you know, we won and kept our children in the white schools in the 60s by the help of God and hard work. Now we’ll just have to set these schools straight.”

Constance Curry lives in Atlanta where she is currently writing a book about the Carters of Sunflower County.

Freedom Election Campaign

By Constance Curry

Vol. 22, No. 1, 2000 pp. 24-27

Early in 1963, the Voter Education Project had been firmly established in Greenwood, and local participation was increasing satisfactorily. The Negroes of Greenwood and Leflore County were facing the anticipated reprisals and intimidations, but general morale seemed to be holding up. Then on the night of February 28, as they drove out of Greenwood, Bob Moses and two coworkers noticed that they were being followed. Earlier, they had spotted a late-model Buick with no license plates parked in front of their headquarters and had seen several white men in it. Jim Travis, a local worker, was driving along with Moses and Randolph Blackwell, a representative of the Southern Regional Council in Atlanta. As they were talking about the trailing car, it pulled alongside of them, and thirteen .45 caliber bullets came shattering into their car. Two struck Travis in the shoulder and neck. The Buick sped away, and Moses, who was sitting in the middle, guided the car to a stop as Travis slumped down in the seat. Neither Moses nor Blackwell was hit.

Moses called me later that night to tell what had happened. He said that Travis was seriously injured but that doctors at the Greenwood hospital expected him to recover. He was being transferred to the hospital in Jackson. Moses had alerted the local authorities, but the assailants’ car, without plates, could only be given a general identification.

The day after the shooting, Wiley Branton, director of the Voter Education Project in Atlanta, made a statement to the press asking that all of the voter registration workers scattered across Mississippi converge on Greenwood and show the people that there would be no backing down. He noted that it was of paramount importance that no degree of violence cause the workers to lose their initiative. His statement concluded, “Leflore County, Mississippi, has selected itself as the testing ground for democracy, and we shall meet the challenge there.”

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Branton was a descendant of Greenwood Leflore, the French-Indian millionaire slavetrader for whom the county and town are named. The whites in Greenwood probably thought Branton’s ultimatum was a foolish stand for a native Mississippi Negro to take, but the county did become a testing ground. Workers from SNCC, CORE, the NAACP, and SCLC flooded the town and county to the saturation point, and soon the area was bubbling with voter registration activities on every corner.

The patterns of action, reaction, and counterreaction continued, and a wave of violence swept Greenwood as the white response to the influx of civil rights workers. The most serious incident was the bombing of the building where the COFO office was located. Everything in the office was destroyed, including all voter registration records. Authorities said that there was no evidence of arson.

Another COFO car was blasted with a shotgun, but without injuries. Shotguns were fired into several homes, but again providence spared us injuries. These forms of intimidation and reprisals against local Negroes continued, then increased, and it was difficult to retain the following that had been established. Less than a month after the Travis shooting, Bob Moses led a voter march to the county courthouse. They were turned away with police dogs, cattle prods, and riot sticks.

The Freedom Election

The most ambitious and perhaps most worthwhile COFO effort of 1963 was the mock participation of an interracial slate of candidates in the state gubernatorial election in November. The two leading regular candidates were trying their best to outdo each other in racist statements. It also came at a time when Senators James O. Eastland and John Stennis were in Washington telling Congress that the only reason Mississippi Negroes did not vote was that we were too slothful and unconcerned to register.

Allard K. Lowenstein came down in July 1963 to offer his help to COFO and our voter registration efforts. My friendship with Al went all the way back to 1949 when I was a delegate from Xavier to the United States National Student Association Congress. He later became president of that group and was respected by students on many campuses throughout the country. The plan that emerged was that we would attempt to show the nation that we would indeed vote if allowed to do so. It would be the first big test of our concentrated program of voter education and registration. We hoped to show how meaningless Mississippi’s lily-white campaigns were and to show that each major candidate promised to do more than the next to deny us political rights.

James P. Coleman had been eliminated in the Democratic primary for governor, mainly because of his support for John Kennedy, so the November race was between Democrat Paul B. Johnson, Jr., and Republican Rubel Phillips. The crucial issues were clouded by a thick haze of racial prejudice. Johnson’s main campaign issue was that he “stood in the doorway at Ole Miss” when James Meredith was trying to enroll. His supporters said proudly, “Paul stood tall at Ole Miss,” adding, with reference to his stand against legalized whiskey, “Paul will stand tall against alcohol.” Johnson also said that a strong and united Democratic party would make it easier to keep a sharp eye on Negro activities.

Rubel Phillips maintained that Johnson had been willing to “sit down and play cowboys and niggers with the university.” He said that with a Republican governor and two strong parties, the state could keep two sharp eyes on the Negroes. He was saying that, with his election and the election of Republican Barry Goldwater to the presidency in 1964, the Negro problem would be solved. So these were our top contenders for governor. They both referred to Mississippi’s being the greatest state in the union, but neither was openly concerned about the economic issues–our gravest problem. Thirty-two percent of the people earned less than three-thousand dollars a year, 26

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percent earned less than two-thousand dollars annually, and, in the Delta, 51 percent of the people–black and white–earned less than two-thousand dollars a year. This was real poverty. The candidates made superficial allusions to bringing more industry to the state, but the campaign standard was seeing who could yell “Nigger” the loudest.

We could do nothing “official” to combat these forces, so COFO decided to have an “unofficial” election of our own. I would be the candidate for governor, and Edwin King, a white Methodist minister from black Tougaloo College in Jackson, would run for lieutenant governor. Ed King was a Mississippian from Vicksburg. Bob Moses would manage the campaign, and we would stress the important issues that Phillips and Johnson were ignoring, as well as show the potential strength of our vote.

Among our many problems, the lack of a good political speechwriter was the greatest. We also needed national publicity and coverage that would reflect the significance of our effort. We needed people who knew about political organizing-we had had little experience in this field. Once again, we turned to the outside for help. Joe Lieberman, editor of the Yale Daily News, was in Mississippi at the time doing a series of reports on the activities and programs of SNCC. He became interested in our plans and assured us that he would spread the word at Yale about the type of help we needed. He thought our needs would have strong appeal to students majoring in journalism and political science.

Within a few weeks the students came–from Yale, Harvard, Dartmouth, and Fordham–forty strong, and their interest in the campaign was as keen as our own. They knew how to write campaign literature and how to organize meetings and rallies. They were able to get the news media to almost every mass meeting that we held in the state. Our main instrument for spreading the word was a little newspaper, “The Free Press,” and Bill Minor and R. L. T. Smith helped us get it printed.

I toured the state making speeches and waving my hands and yelling, and I guess some of the Negroes thought they had their very own Bilbo or Barnett. I spoke in Holly Springs, Oxford, Greenville, Clarksdale, Jackson, Gulfport, and Hattiesburg. We had good campaign tours in Clarksdale and Greenville, because whites left us alone and did not try to break up the rally. In Greenville, they even let us use the Washington County Courthouse and–most amazing–the police even arrested several whites for harassing participants.

Gulfport, Vicksburg, and Hattiesburg were another story. In Hattiesburg, the police barged into the civil rights headquarters the day of the rally and closed it down as a fire hazard. We had to go to a church. When a white girl tried to join the rally, the police arrested her and put her in a patrol car. She was screaming and kicking and biting, but they wouldn’t let her come in. And the rally had barely started when we heard seven or eight police cars circling the church with their sirens growling. Then came four or five fire trucks with their whistles screaming and their bells clanging. It was impossible to speak above the roar of the official harassment. In my speech I shouted to the audience that we were glad that the fire department was outside but that the fire within us could not be extinguished with water. Lawrence Guyot, then, director for SNCC in the Hattiesburg area, spoke right after me. While he was speaking, some firemen came charging into the church yelling that they were looking for a fire. Guyot yelled for the crowd to let the firemen through. A couple dozen firemen soon stood in the front of the group, in full regalia, some snickering and some actually looking around for a fire, but all looking like damn fools. There was a moment of silence, and the firemen were looking to their captain, Moore, to tell them what to do. Then Guyot told Captain Moore, “We’re going to have a meeting here tonight, and we don’t give a damn what you do.” Captain Moore did not reply but turned and led his men out of the church.

We had the same sort of official harassment in Vicksburg. The police and firemen surrounded the building making all the noise they could muster, but they had gotten the word from Hattiesburg that it was best not to go into the building and be laughed at by a bunch of progressive Negroes. In Gulfport we held the rally at the Back Bay Mission, which was staffed by and served both races. It was just between a Negro and a white neighborhood and had never had any problems over its integrated ministry. But during the rally, a large number of whites converged on the building, and we heard sirens wailing. The noise increased, and finally rocks and bottles started crashing through the windows. The police were there in full force. They stood and watched the whites throwing whatever they could at the windows. Every window in the mission was broken.

We were aware that we were trying to be politicians on this trip, so in a statement to the press we made the most charitable remarks that we could contrive about our reception in Gulfport. We said that we were sorry that some hoodlums had broken the windows and marred what would otherwise have been a pleasant visit. The next morning outside of the mission several white ladies came up to me and said, “Those weren’t hoods that threw those bricks. It was us.”

We covered as many communities and rural areas as possible and dipped into places as yet untouched by any civil rights activity. The campaign reminded us of how much remained to be done, as we saw thousands of new faces wrinkle with fear at the mention of total desegregation of the schools. We went to places where Negroes tried to escape even being asked to come to the rally. We added all of these places to our list of areas to reach in the future.

But there were some counties that we did not go to at all because of plain fear and good sense–like Issaquena, Amite, and Neshoba, where we were afraid we would be shot. Any Negro we might approach in these sections would have feared for his life, and the collusion between the lawless elements and law enforcement officers would have made our effort foolhardy.

We ended the campaign with a jubilant, backslapping fish fry at a country church in the backwoods near Lexington. We felt we had done well and were relieved that we had made it through with no deaths or serious injuries. Our public relations were remarkably successful, and, even as far out in the country as we were, a big passel of reporters, photographers, and television people were on hand for the event and enjoyed it as much as anybody.

We got as much attention during the race as either of the major candidates. No newsmen in the state had any doubt about what Johnson and Phillips were going to do and say, and they were delighted to have a little diversion. For the first time in over a century there was a real campaign, unofficial as it was, dealing with the real problems facing the state. We provided a chance to air these problems in the press, and no doubt white Mississippians learned a few things as well.

To tabulate the results of our efforts, we set up ballot boxes in churches, businesses, and homes. Ballots had all names of candidates for governor and lieutenant governor, which gave our voters a choice of three slates. Voting took place over a whole weekend from Friday until Monday. Many church congregations voted at Sunday services, and records were kept to keep people from voting more than once. In some places, such as Greenwood, there was trouble from the authorities when five voters were arrested and charged with disturbing the peace.

When the “freedom votes” were counted, it was found that more than eighty-thousand people had participated in an election which they knew they could not win. Quite a turnout for a people who Senator Eastland said were too lazy to even register. Those eighty-thousand votes for freedom quashed whatever hopes he and other segregationists might have had for continuing to sell our laziness as the sorry excuse for lack of Negro voter registration.

We knew that there were also a few write-in votes all over the state for Ed King and me, but we could never find out the exact count. Under Mississippi statutes, write-in votes invalidate a ballot unless the official candidates happen to die before the election. To my knowledge, Clarksdale was the only community to tabulate the number of write-in votes, and the election officials announced that write-in votes received by Henry and King had reached about six hundred, and then there were no more reports.

The election had shown the country that Mississippi Negroes would vote if given the chance. It was established that the sacrifices of the people and the labor of the civil rights movement were not in vain, and this evidence was to spur groups on to even more industrious activity. And perhaps most important, white college students from the North had seen what a significant role they could play in the Mississippi struggle. Al Lowenstein, with his wide contacts at Yale, Stanford, and other colleges, had played a major role in bringing these students down. Within a week after the freedom election, plans were being made for a massive influx of college volunteers for Freedom Summer, 1964.

And there were other encouraging signs. Paul Johnson defeated Rubel Phillips using old issues, but, in his inaugural address, Johnson hinted at a change in the state’s official line on race. He may have been frightened by the strong expression of would-be Negro voters and had a legitimate reason to say, “I want my people to know that Paul Johnson is fully aware of the forces, the conflicts, that fashion our environment. Hate or prejudice or ignorance will not lead Mississippi while I sit in the governor’s chair.” He spoke of industrial development: “I would point out to you that the Mississippi economy is not divisible by political party or faction, or even by race, color, or creed.” Never before had a Mississippi governor uttered such bold words–a fine reward for our freedom election.

Constance Curry first met Aaron Henry in 1964 while combing the Clarksdale area for whites interested in peaceful school desegregation in Mississippi. Thirty-three years later, a group of Henry’s friends, after reading Curry’s first book, Silver Rights, asked her to write Henry’s biography. After reluctantly agreeing to the project, Henry died in 1997 just as the project commenced. Below is an excerpt from Aaron Henry: The Fire Ever Burning, published in spring 2000 by the University of Mississippi Press.

Crazy Caucus

By Constance Curry

Vol. 22, No. 1, 2000, p. 32

Harriet Keyserling. Against the Tide: One Woman’s Political Struggle. Columbia: University of South Carolina, 1998.

In 1944, Harriet Keyserling left New York City and moved to Beaufort, South Carolina, with her husband Herbert, a physician and native son. While raising their four children, she volunteered for local projects in education, health, and the arts and organized a chapter of the League of Women Voters. Thirty years later, in 1974, she jumped, or maybe waded, into political waters. She was a woman, a yankee in a southern world, and Jewish in a predominantly Christian society. She describes herself as “shy, not great at small talk, and not even assertive, much less aggressive.”

After her 1974 election and two-year service on the Beaufort County Council–the first woman–she won a seat as representative to the South Carolina General Assembly. She remained sixteen years until her retirement in 1992. Those years were a transition time for many southern state governments. Richard W. Riley, who wrote the Foreword for the book, was governor of South Carolina during that period and points out that he “plunged headfirst into the deep water of change, of reform, of shifting emphasis from power politics to the power of ideas.”

Keyserling was right beside him, and the heart of her very personal memoir is an insider’s view of the workings of the General Assembly. She brings the story to life by introducing the “Crazy Caucus,” the group that attracted her from the beginning–“bright, progressive funny and very energetic.” Their major opponents were the “Fat and Uglies,” a group of young conservative representatives and the “old guard” who often controlled leadership positions through the traditional seniority systems.

The “Crazy Caucus” took on reforms on every level–health, safety, education and the arts. Keyserling was recognized for her leadership in the debates on filibustering and she facilitated the 1982 passage of a bill with rules changes, one of which helped invoke cloture on filibusters. She feels sure that the rules changes helped pass controversial legislation on education improvement, living wills, accommodations taxes, court reform and solid waste and energy policies.

In 1992, Keyserling decided it was time to leave the legislature. Many members of the “Crazy Caucus” were gone, and she describes the changes that were draining her spirit, energy and good health: “We didn’t listen to each other and we didn’t respect each other. The civility was gone and was replaced by a tense, acrimonious confrontational atmosphere.” It was a far cry from the era of exciting and hopeful days of change and reform described by Riley. Fortunately, her son Billy won that seat and is a leader is his own right.

Since her retirement, Keyserling has discovered that there is indeed life after being a legislator and devotes time to environmental and arts issues, her family, and her friends. She is amused by her transition from the shy, non-aggressive woman of earlier days to a “new persona” that incorporates passion on certain issues and people and little fear of confrontation. “I want more women to have power,” she reflects, “to build their egos, to become passionate, to get involved in making this a better state and a healthier nation.” But this book is not just a call to women to join in political struggles. It is an inspiration on another level–as proof that one courageous person can bring about change in the face of overwhelming odds.

Constance Curry lives and writes in Atlanta. She is co-author of, Aaron Henry: The Fire Ever Burning, just published by the University Press of Mississippi.