Children Bob Moses Led by William Heath

Author:William Heath [Heath, William]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Civil Rights, Mississippi, Segregation, Southern Historical Fiction, Bob Moses, Southern Fiction, Freedom Summer, Freedom Riders, SNCC, CORE
ISBN: 9781603063364
Publisher: NewSouth Inc.
Published: 2014-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

Bob Moses

Greenwood and Liberty, Mississippi

July 1963–May 1964

1

For the past two years I had been seeking a tactic that would force the government’s hand. If we kept demonstrating, everybody would be arrested, and the local people weren’t willing to spend months in a cell. If the SNCC staff by itself continued to take risks, some of us would surely be killed; that was too high a price to pay, especially if our deaths didn’t change anything. We needed to cultivate local leadership, that was clear, but some new factor in the equation was needed. We couldn’t survive the stress and strain of the struggle for much longer if all we had to show for it was our own personal growth.

One sweltering day in July a group of us were sitting around in Greenwood discussing strategy when a preoccupied-looking guy came in, carrying a battered briefcase with papers jutting out the seams. His suit looked slept in; he wore white sweat socks and saddle oxfords. He pulled up a chair, poked up his thick glasses, passed a hand through his thinning, rust-colored hair, and said, “Go on with what you were saying.”

We shrugged at each other and kept talking. New York Jew, I thought. He won’t keep quiet long. I had the feeling I had seen him before.

“My name is Allard Lowenstein,” he said after a few minutes. “Ed King sent me.”

Ed King, the chaplain at Tougaloo, was one of the few white men in Mississippi we trusted. A couple of months before, a car chase in Jackson had forced him into a collision; he survived, but one side of his face was left permanently disfigured. We looked at this stranger with new interest. He proceeded immodestly to make it known that Frank Graham, Norman Thomas, and Eleanor Roosevelt were friends of his; that he had organized sit-ins in North Carolina and worked against Franco in Spain and apartheid in South Africa.

“Have you read my book, Brutal Mandate?” he asked. “Marlon Brando’s going to star in the movie version.” He retrieved a copy from his briefcase as proof and told us how he had smuggled a “Cape colored freedom-fighter” out of Johannesburg to testify at the United Nations. While he spoke, I had the eerie feeling that there was a ticker tape in his head converting it all into headlines:

LOWENSTEIN ARRIVES IN NICK OF TIME

MISSISSIPPI: NO GAINS WITHOUT PAINS

Allard was pushy, but he wasn’t all bluff; he really did have political contacts in important places. He was also a shrewd observer who quickly sized up the situation: SNCC was physically exhausted, spiritually flat, and literally bankrupt. Nothing we tried—picketing, marching, protesting—was working.

“This is intolerable,” Al said, echoing my sentiments. “Something must be done.”

I told him that a SNCC law student had discovered an obscure Mississippi statute dating from Reconstruction that permitted anyone unfairly denied the vote to cast a ballot “under protest” and that we wanted to test its validity in the upcoming gubernatorial election by running our own slate of candidates

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