What should I do?”
“Well,” Steptoe said, “you can tell Mr. Doar what you told Bob.”
“I am,” Allen said. “I’m gonna tell the truth.”
“That’s good. I believe you should.”
I arranged for Allen to meet me in McComb.
“If I can be protected,” he told me, “I’ll let the hide fall with the hair an’ tell what I saw.”
I called John Doar. He said he didn’t think they could guarantee protection or a conviction if Allen changed his testimony.
“What about the FBI investigation?”
“They botched it, Bob,” Doar said with disgust. “By the time the Bureau in Washington had contacted the office in New Orleans and they reached their agent in Natchez, the body was already in the ground. I’m sorry.”
“So am I.”
When a grand jury was convened to look into the case, I had to advise Allen, for his own safety, to lie again. But the case still troubled him, and several months later he asked to talk to me a third time. We drove down to the FBI office in New Orleans, and he signed an affidavit that Hurst killed Lee “without provocation.” The FBI didn’t do anything about the murder of Herbert Lee, but somehow word reached Deputy Sheriff Jones about Allen’s second thoughts and small rebellion. He was now a marked man in Liberty.
I was wracked with guilt over the death of Herbert Lee. If I had never come to Amite County, he would still be alive to enjoy his wife and children. Now black people in Liberty were afraid to even leave town, let alone confront the sheriff and the registrar at the courthouse. No one would come to the citizenship school. Steptoe was cleaning his guns in anticipation of an ambush. No Negro felt free in Liberty.
For me, the murder of Herbert Lee stood for all the indignities and atrocities unsung black people had suffered in the South for centuries. I vowed that his death would not be forgotten: by me, by SNCC, or by anyone else in the Movement. I also reluctantly decided to withdraw from Amite County for a time, but I made a promise to Steptoe before I left: “I’ll be back.”
3
During the weeks I spent in Liberty, SNCC workers had been arriving in McComb to initiate “direct action” (as if the response to voter registration wasn’t direct enough!). The McComb high school students were eager to start sitting-in and picketing. Too young to register, they were frustrated and liked the idea of confrontation. Many of their parents, however, strongly disapproved of this new turn of events, especially when at the end of August three students—Isaac Lewis, Robert Talbert, and Brenda Travis—were arrested at the Greyhound bus terminal. Robert pleaded guilty and was fined two hundred dollars and given a suspended sentence. Isaac and Brenda, who said they weren’t guilty, were fined four hundred dollars and were sent to the Magnolia Jail for eight months. The harsh penalties outraged the black community. They were particularly upset that alert, vivacious Brenda Travis, who was only fifteen and very well liked, should receive such punishment. Some people were angry that the judge would send a young girl to prison; others blamed SNCC for getting their children in trouble. Curtis Bryant held me personally responsible.
“The agreement was for three weeks,” he told me, his already high-pitched voice rising higher as he became more upset, “and you were only to do voter registration. I cannot condone the use of children. That is contrary to NAACP guidelines.”
“It’s out of my hands,” I said. “McComb is where the action is and SNCC wants to be here. Besides, the students want to protest and will, whether we’re here or not.”
“Can’t you order them not to?”
“No. That’s not the way SNCC operates. It’s not my decision to make. In SNCC we ‘go where the spirit say go, and do what the spirit say do.’ Nobody gives orders to anybody.”
“Well, that’s no way to run an organization,” Bryant said, shaking his head. “You’ve got to have procedure, guidelines, rules. In the NAACP we file vouchers for all money received and turn in detailed reports. Whenever we go into anything, we have our legal office tell us what we ought to do and what we ought not to do. This use of students is clearly beyond the boundary line. I’m afraid we’ll have to disassociate ourselves to protect the integrity of our organization.”
“We can’t stop now,” I pleaded. “This is no time for hesitation. We have to go ahead.”
Seeing a chance to exploit our differences, Police Chief George Guy chose this moment to arrest Curtis Bryant—even though he had consistently opposed the demonstrations—for contributing to the delinquency of a minor. Ironically, this attempt to sabotage us failed. When Bryant got out on bail, he declared himself unequivocally on our side. “Where the students lead, we will follow,” he told an NAACP rally.
The police also tried to entrap me on a trumped-up charge. I was down at South of the Border, a black restaurant in Burgland where the SNCC workers hung out. Alyene Quin, the manager, sensed trouble when she saw a patrol car pull up. She planted herself at the front door to stall them while I slipped out the back and ran up the alley to Nobles Brothers Cleaners. Ernest Nobles, quickly sizing up the situation, took my arm and stood me up inside a rack of hanging clothes where I couldn’t be seen. When the police car came tearing after me, Ernest ran out and shouted to them, “He went out the front door, heading that way,” and they sped off in the wrong direction. Once they were gone, he parked his pickup truck in the alley, hid me under a tarpaulin in back, and drove to Steptoe’s farm where I would be safe.
After serving a month in jail, Brenda Travis was placed on probation and Ike Lewis was paroled. They asked Commodore Dewey Higgins, the conservative black principal who lorded it over Burgland High School, to be readmitted. He stated that because of their sit-in activities, they were expelled for the year. When the other students heard about this autocratic action, they stood up at midday chapel service and demanded an explanation; the principal refused to discuss the issue. A few students then took over the stage, fired up the others with freedom songs, and called upon everyone to walk out in protest. About a hundred of them left school and marched down to the SNCC office. We heard them singing “Woke up this morning with my mind stayed on freedom” as they came. They carried banners and signs and were ready to demonstrate downtown.
At first Chuck McDew and I tried to discourage them, but their spirit was so strong and contagious that we decided to join them. Bob Zellner, the only white SNCC worker in McComb, was determined to come too. We marched down Summit, through the heart of Burgland, and then took the viaduct under the railroad tracks to reach the white side of McComb. As we came up Main Street, an angry crowd began to gather, singling out Zellner for special abuse. Before long we were surrounded by a mob; they were in an ugly mood.
To show our peaceful intentions, the students knelt down one by one to pray on the steps of city hall. This was seen as an intolerable provocation; the police blew their whistles and began to arrest us. At the same time, the mob attacked, zeroing in on Zellner. A man in a sleeveless T-shirt went for his throat and another slugged him in the face. McDew and I threw our arms around him, trying to shield him with our bodies. To keep from being trampled to the ground, Zellner was hanging on to the iron railing for dear life. They pulled on his belt and beat on his hands in their effort to drag him out into the street. I saw one man grab him by the ears and try to gouge his eyes out with his thumbs. When Zellner threw up his hands to protect his face, he was immediately knocked down and kicked in the head until he lost consciousness. Only then did the police intervene, dragging us up the steps into city hall.
One hundred and nineteen of us were herded into the city jail. The mob gathered outside, milling around and shouting threats. When word of what had happened spread, the police began conducting guided tours for the curious “good citizens” of McComb. A contingent would enter the cell block, and invariably they would ask, “Where’s Moses? Where’s Moses?” until a student would point me out. They stared; I stared back—the Fiend at Bay.
“You don’t believe in Jesus Christ, do you, you sonofabitch?” a man who said he was a minister