Freedom Summer by Bruce W. Watson Page A

America have reached that point in our desperate culture when we must murder children, no matter for what reason or what color, we don’t deserve to survive, and probably won’t.” A less eloquent white man proved more prophetic. “There’s open season on Negroes now,” he said. Within four years, ten more Mississippi blacks were murdered by whites; no guilty verdicts were rendered. The reign of terror also revived lynching. In the tiny town of Poplarville, Mack Parker, accused of rape, was dragged from jail and later found in chains, drifting in a logjam on the Pearl River. But the Emmett Till murder galvanized blacks more than whites. “From that point on,” Bob Moses’ mentor Amzie Moore remembered, “Mississippi began to move.”
    And when it moved, the movement came from the bottom up. “It was the so-called dumb people,” a Holmes County farmer remembered. “. . . The school teachers, the educated people, they ain’t did a damn thang! The preachers ain’t neither. The so-called dumb people open the way for everybody. See, the table was set.” The Mississippi movement began with common laborers whose dignity would not be denied and with self-employed farmers whites could neither fire nor frighten. A chapter of the NAACP or the Regional Council of Negro Leadership, a place to meet, and a coalition of the brave—these were the sparks. And Emmett Till’s face, printed in Jet magazine and passed from hand to hand, was the fan reminding blacks that little had changed in Mississippi, and that everything had to.
    When vigilantes and the Citizens’ Council could not contain the movement, the state stepped in. In the wake of Brown , prospective voters were required not just to read but to interpret part of the Mississippi constitution, a document, as Senator Bilbo noted, “that damn few white men and no niggers at all can explain.” The state constitution had 285 sections. Each “interpretation” was left open to the registrar. No appeal was allowed. Black teachers, doctors, and Ph.D.s routinely “failed” the test most whites did not have to take, and statewide black voting rolls fell from 22,000 to 8,000. In 1956, state legislators declared Brown “invalid, unconstitutional, and not of lawful effect.” The vote was 136-0. After voting, legislators sang “Dixie.” That same year, the legislature created Mississippi’s own KGB, the State Sovereignty Commission. Chaired by the governor, funded by taxpayers and private donations, the Sovereignty Commission spied, paid informers, tapped phones, and convinced newspaper editors to plant false stories and kill factual ones. The commission’s most extreme actions now seem comical, such as when investigators examined a baby born out of wedlock, checking its hair, nose, and fingernails to discover if he was part Negro. But other tactics seemed more appropriate for Khrushchev’s Soviet Union than for Eisenhower’s America.
    During its first five years, the Sovereignty Commission spent much of its time fielding letters of support from segregationists across the nation. But members also found time to stir things up in Mississippi. The commission used black informers to imprison a man who tried to integrate the University of Southern Mississippi. It investigated NAACP leaders. Who were their friends? Were they Christian? What sexual habits might lead to their disgrace? Commission reports on racial violence inevitably blamed blacks and exonerated whites. Then Bob Moses came to Mississippi. An investigator interviewed Moses and concluded he was “working hand-in-glove with Communist sympathizers if not out-right Communist agitators. It is my opinion that Moses is himself a Communist.” Moses and SNCC deepened the siege mentality that set in across the state when, several years after the Montgomery bus boycott, the civil rights movement finally took hold in Mississippi.
    By the summer of 1962, SNCC was building a “beachhead” in the most impoverished and