to my hometown with a best seller to my credit, a sheaf of rave reviews in my pocket, and an exotic beauty on my arm, the local yokels would go slackjawed with desire and Michelle would bite her lip in envy. That was my American Dream, the I-told-you-so fantasy of a callow know-it-all who was a stranger to himself.
That was before I met Bob Moses.
Bob Moses
McComb and Liberty, Mississippi
August–September 1961
1
I am Bob Moses. I first came to McComb in August of 1961 with a simple purpose: to break the Solid South by applying pressure at its strongest point. I sought out the worst part of the most intransigent state, placed myself on the charity of the black community, located a few brave souls who would support civil rights workers, and set up a voter registration school. If enough people could find the courage to go down to the courthouse, confronting the system designed to oppress them, then blacks all over the South would take heart, the country would take notice, and maybe, one hundred years too late, the federal government would take action. Was my effort a success? I would be reluctant to say that. When I started out, I hoped that no one would be killed.
A few years earlier I was headed down a different path. With an M.A. in philosophy from Harvard and a job teaching mathematics at the prestigious Horace Mann School in Riverdale, New York, I was a part of what W. E. B. DuBois termed “the talented tenth”—a black man who could succeed in the white playing by white rules. I had had an elitist education since I was eleven, passing a city-wide competitive exam to attend Stuyvesant High School in downtown Manhattan. President of my senior class, I received an academic scholarship to Hamilton, where I was one of three black students at the college.
It was at Hamilton, thanks to my French professor, that I discovered Camus. I read The Rebel and The Plague and began asking hard political questions: “Can revolution be humane?” “Can the ‘victim’ overthrow the ‘executioner’ without assuming his office?” For a time I believed that the only change worth working for was a change of heart, and so I joined a group of campus Pentecostals who traveled on weekends to Times Square to testify to the coming of the Kingdom. I considered becoming a preacher like my grandfather, but my father had his doubts. “That’s not just any job,” he said. “You’ve got to be called.” The pacifism of the Society of Friends also impressed me. One summer I attended an American Friends Service Committee international work camp in France, where I met people who had been part of the Resistance during the Nazi occupation. The following summer I went to Japan, where I helped build wooden steps up a slippery hillside for the children of a nearby mental hospital. Before I flew home, a Zen Buddhist monk invited me to spend a week at his home. Through my travels and study I learned to think before I spoke and to mean what I said, but I wasn’t the serious brooder people took me for. What I loved best about the Quakers was their folk dancing and hootenannies. Back in my room I listened to Odetta, and out on a date I would strut down Amsterdam Avenue whistling show tunes.
In the fall of 1956 I began graduate work in philosophy at Harvard. I was convinced that the analytic method, with its insistence on clarity and precision, represented a significant advance in thought. Previous philosophers had relied on metaphor and rhetoric to make muddy water appear deep. I sat in the back of the class during Paul Tillich’s lectures, shaking my head and muttering, “It’s all poetry.” More to my taste was Wittgenstein’s axiom: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” If philosophy could streamline its language and define its terms, then it could attain the accuracy of mathematics with its postulates and proofs. Before long, however, I tired of thinking about thinking and the meaning of meaning. In that remote realm of tautologies, indexes, and surds, I was in danger of forgetting that the meaning of life was no abstract speculation but my immediate and concrete concern. I returned to Camus’s dictum “I rebel, therefore we exist” and to Lao-tse, who taught that the way to wisdom consists in living one life well—starting small, a step at a time, with what is near, with what is at hand.
Then in the spring of 1958 my forty-three-year-old mother died of cancer; my father was so distraught he had to be hospitalized at Bellevue for several months. I dropped out of Harvard, accepted a job teaching math at Horace Mann High School, and moved back to Harlem to look after him. My father and I had always been close; we used to have long talks about what America denied and offered. Like many of his generation, he had been hamstrung by the depression. Intelligent, articulate, and handsome, he sacrificed his talents for the sake of his family, accepting a low-paying job as a security guard at Harlem’s 369th Division Armory. He and my mother scrimped and saved to ensure that my brothers and I would get ahead. The stress and strain took their toll: my mother once suffered a minor breakdown, and my father would sometimes slip into fantasies that his name was not Gregory Moses but Gary Cooper—a man brave enough, in spite of his cowardly town, to stand up for what was right.
My only civil rights activity at that time was to participate in the Youth March for Integrated Schools that Bayard Rustin sponsored in Washington. Then, one day in February 1960, I saw a picture in the New York Times of the sit-ins that had just begun in Greensboro, North Carolina: a row of neatly dressed black students sat at a Woolworth’s lunch counter, while a crowd of white toughs in duck-tails and sleeveless T-shirts waved a Confederate flag and shouted at their backs. Some of the students tried to read books, others stared calmly at the camera. I was struck to the core by the determination on their faces. They weren’t cowed, and they weren’t apathetic—they meant to finish what they had begun. Here was something that could be done. I simply had to get involved.
Over spring break, I visited my father’s brother, a teacher at Hampton Institute in Virginia. One day I saw some students picketing stores in Newport News. I slipped into the line of march and suddenly felt a great release. All my life I had repressed my resentments and played it cool. Now the sense of affirmation and the surge of energy that came from this mere gesture at protesting were exhilarating. I had had a taste of action and wanted more. That evening I went to a mass meeting where Reverend Wyatt Tee Walker of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference spoke. He talked about the need to collect money to defend the Reverend Martin Luther King from legal harassment, mentioning that Bayard Rustin was directing a fund drive in New York.
When I got back to Harlem, I volunteered my services to the Committee to Defend Martin Luther King, and so every day after school, I devoted time to organizing a Harry Belafonte fund-raising rally at the armory where my father worked. But I didn’t feel right licking envelopes while others were putting their lives on the line. I confided my discontent to Bayard Rustin, whose advice I respected.
“Go down to Atlanta, Bob,” he told me. “I’ll write to Ella Baker to tell her you’re coming. She and Martin will find something for you to do.”
As soon as my teaching duties were over for the summer, I packed my bags and took a bus headed south.
The Southern Christian Leadership Conference office wasn’t much: a small room, three women, three desks, three telephones. They were in the midst of a voter registration project and wanted me to do the same boring tasks I had done in New York. I soon found myself talking a lot to Jane Stembridge, a short, peppy blond with piercing blue eyes, a fiery spirit, and a crazy haystack of unruly hair. She was a southern girl, a minister’s daughter, who had left Union Theological Seminary to become the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee’s first executive secretary, a job she carried out with dispatch from her desk stuck in a corner of the SCLC office. We spent animated afternoons discussing Kant’s categorical imperative, Tillich’s ultimate concern, Sartre’s terrible freedom, and Camus’s authentic versus inauthentic existence. More pressing were our debates about the civil rights tactics of Martin Luther King and the SCLC, which we called “Slick.” They were in the process of replacing Ella Baker with Wyatt Tee Walker—part of a larger plan to promote Dr. King as the leader and spokesman of the black revolt. Jane and I thought the whole approach was too hero-worshipping, media-centered, preacher-dominated, and authoritarian. We agreed with Ella Baker, the midwife of SNCC, which we called “Snick,” who had very definite ideas about organizing. She believed that the Movement ought to seek out the small farmers, sharecroppers, and plantation workers and start building at