Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice (Pivotal Moments in American History) by Arsenault Raymond

Author:Arsenault, Raymond [Arsenault, Raymond]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2006-01-15T05:00:00+00:00

Bob Moses, 1962. (Photograph by Danny Lyon, Magnum)

Joined by John Hardy, a Tennessee State student from Nashville, and Reggie Robinson, a SNCC activist from Baltimore, Moses spent two weeks combing the local countryside for prospective students before opening the school on August 7. Only a handful of students showed up that first night, but four of them bravely agreed to try to register at the county courthouse in Magnolia the next day. To their and Moses’s surprise, three of the four were allowed to register. After a second night of classes, two more gained registered voter status. Encouraged, Moses accompanied nine more potential registrants to the courthouse on August 10, but this time only one new voter was registered. Alarmed by this unusual surge of interest in voting, the registrar contacted the editor of the McComb Enterprise-Journal, who promptly ran a story informing local segregationists that something sinister was afoot.

Over the next few days, news of Moses’s school spread throughout the local white community. Ironically, the story in the Enterprise-Journal also alerted hundreds of local blacks, most of whom had been unaware of Moses’s recruitment activities. Suddenly, Moses found his citizenship classes swelling with new recruits, including a number of black farmers from the neighboring counties of Amite and Walthall, areas that had even fewer black voters than McComb. Compared to the semi-urban setting of Pike County, Amite and Walthall were rural backwaters that posed an even more daunting challenge to Moses’s fledgling voting rights project. Extending the project beyond Pike County was both dangerous and logistically difficult, but, after consulting with C. C. Bryant, Moses concluded that his credibility rested upon his willingness to tackle even the toughest challenges. Thus, less than a week after opening the school in McComb, he temporarily moved his base of operations to Amite, where there was only one black voter in the entire county and where the local NAACP branch had been driven underground by the local sheriff. When E. W. Steptoe, the fearless leader of the defunct Amite NAACP, offered Moses room and board at his farmhouse, the SNCC organizer gratefully accepted. And by Tuesday morning, August 15, the same morning that saw the opening of the ICC hearings in Washington, Moses found himself accompanying three prospective black voters—an elderly man and two middle-aged women—to the Amite County Courthouse in Liberty.

The four black visitors caused quite a stir at the historic courthouse that had graced the Liberty town square since 1840. Constructed of bricks “fired by slaves” and flanked by a twenty-foot-high Confederate monument, the building symbolized the white power structure of a Black Belt county that was unaccustomed to contact with outsiders of any kind. To the registrar and the other county officials who came to gawk at Moses and his three local charges, the notion of a black voter registration project led by a New Yorker was almost beyond comprehension. Still, after making his visitors wait for several hours, the registrar allowed the three applicants to fill out the necessary registration forms.

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