Knox, and I were kept in a back room and brought out one by one to tell our story to the six-man jury. By pressing my ear to the wall, I caught a part of Billy Jack’s version: “We was just walkin’ along when this brash nigger bumped me off the sidewalk. When I told him to watch where he was goin’ he jumped into one of them Jap fightin’ stances and forced me to defend myself.”
While we waited for the verdict, some shots were fired outside.
“If I was you, I wouldn’t stick around,” the sheriff said. “Billy Jack is pretty well liked around here. Y’all better follow me out the back way.”
The sheriff took us to our car and escorted us to the Amite County line. The next day the McComb paper read:
Court Acquits White Man On Negro Beating Charge.
“There’s no turning back,” I told a rally at the McComb Masonic Hall that evening. “We have to keep going down to the courthouse until we get our rights.”
Tom Morton: Orientation
Oxford, Ohio
June 21–27, 1964
1
Oxford is one of those quaint college towns built by transplanted New Englanders, adding a grace note to Ohio’s endless farmlands, look-alike suburbs, and smokestack cities. The campus of Western College for Women, two hundred acres of designed serenity, was a landscaper’s dream of woodlands, lawns, and gardens, dramatically divided by an overgrown ravine spanned by a series of stone footbridges. The main building, Peabody Hall, a U-shaped, five-storied, cupola-crowned pile of brick and ivy, overlooked the scene from its commanding hilltop. Lenny and I pulled off to the side of the soft tar driveway and parked. Other than stalling at the occasional red light, my Edsel had made the three-hundred-mile catercorner jaunt across Ohio without incident. Crayoned arrows on cardboard slabs directed us to a long table where name badges, meal tickets, and room assignments were handed out, along with a thick packet of info about the Summer Project.
Why had I chosen this way to spend my summer? Mississippi, everyone agreed, was a nasty place, a hopeless case; it would be a fool’s errand to go there. My decision, no doubt, dated back to the March on Washington, when, amid that straggling army of shuffling feet, I had felt an overwhelming sense that biracial brotherhood was no idle dream. As I was being pressed on all sides by strangers, it occurred to me that maybe being a lone individual was not what life was about: the important thing was to be part of mankind. I wanted the world to be a better place because I had passed through it. Then came the assassination of Kennedy. For days I sat in a daze in front of the TV, watching and rewatching. If anything seemed clear in that chaotic time, it was that the work Kennedy started had to be completed. I made my decision to join the Mississippi Summer Project one spring weekend when I stayed up half the night listening to a long interview Lenny’s SNCC friend Hal Zizner had taped with Bob Moses. I was struck by his courage and resolution. While I was still seeking my identity, here was a person who knew what to do with his life. There was something compelling about a man named Moses walking into a town named Liberty where no one with a dark skin was free. I felt certain that he was doing what needed to be done, and I wanted to join him.
At the end of the registration table I was asked to sign over power of attorney and pose for two pictures—one front, one side—with numbers propped under my chin. Lenny hummed a few bars of the Dragnet theme, but I didn’t laugh. They even asked me to write down the name of my dentist.
“What’s that for?” I asked Lenny. “My cavities can wait.”
“Like if you were missing, they’d distribute your photo. But if they had to fish you out of some river . . .”
“That’s grisly!” a girl said in a squeaky voice. “Don’t even joke about it.”
“I agree,” I said. “Leave my body out of this.”
Suddenly I felt a lump in my throat.
“Don’t worry about Tom,” Lenny said, trying to sound cheerful. “He can take it.”
“I’m not so sure,” I said. “As a fighter, I’m capable of boxing’s first no-hitter.”
“That’s the whole point of nonviolence,” a guy with pale blue eyes said. “We turn the other cheek.”
His cheeks were too sunken to offer much of a target. He was as thin as a Giacometti stickman; one swift kick and he’d snap like a dry twig.
I wondered how much violence I could take. In high school there’d been the usual James Dean stuff. The guys from Poland would beat up the guys from Boardman and tell them to stay the hell out of their territory and leave our girls alone; the guys from Boardman would reciprocate. One night, after a sock hop, there was a near rumble outside our school. During the face-off, I positioned myself behind our champion shot-putter and hoped for the best. Luckily, some teachers broke it up. That only delayed the inevitable. The next night our corner gang (looking spiffy in their pegged pants, black leather jackets, and DA cuts) fought their corner gang to a draw on the Poland field. Belts and bicycle chains were the weapons of choice, and more than one guy was dragged face-first down the cinder track.
Lenny and I took our bags over to our dorm room in Clawson Hall and then joined a circle of people singing on the hillside in front of Kumler Chapel. Although my voice fit a frog pond better than a concert hall, I loved music. I had been brought up on droning Methodist hymns, deliberately pitched, it seemed, to constrict the vocal cords—only at Christmas did we achieve full-throated joy. Compared to that, even the corny crooners on Lawrence Welk and the bland renditions of the top twenty on Your Hit Parade sounded good. Our family felt genuine sadness when Rosemary Clooney signed off the show with “So long for a while, That’s all the songs for a while, So long for your hit parade, And the tunes that you picked to be played . . . “Then came Elvis the Pelvis, rock ’n’ roll was here to stay, and we no longer assembled around the TV. My sister and I were up in our rooms, portable record players at full blast, listening to our favorite singles.
In college, my taste ran to moody make-out music (Johnny Mathis, The Platters) and then to folk (The Kingston Trio, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez). In the evenings a group of us would troop down to the Hiram sugar camp in the woods, build a bonfire, sit in a circle, and sing “Come By Here” and “Michael, Row the Boat Ashore,” feeling vague cause for celebration. We all knew the words by rote, so we sat on our beach towels and blankets in the middle of Ohio and sang along as if they represented our deepest beliefs.
This music was different. A heavyset black woman with a limp was leading a gathering of volunteers in “It Ain’t No Crime to Have Our Minds on Freedom,” and thanks to a few blacks among the hesitant whites, they were belting out enough soul force to make the walls of Poland Memorial Methodist come tumbling down.
Lenny gave me a nudge. “That’s Fannie Lou Hamer.”
I looked at her with new respect. Her sunken eyes and puffy cheeks confirmed what I had heard about how badly she’d been beaten in the Winona Jail.
“Now y’all gonna hafta sing bettern that,” Mrs. Hamer said to us self-conscious whites. “They’s gonna be times this summer when these songs is all we got to hold us together. And as we sing them this week, we better think hard about what they mean and about what we doin’. My daddy taught me that ‘faith is the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen.’ Now if we can love a God we don’t see, then we had better learn how to love the neighbor we do. You got to understand we wasn’t raised on hate but on love, and love is the onlyist thing we got to keep us goin’. Now first off, if y’all gonna sing, y’all gotta suck in some air and open yo mouths like you meant it. And for God’s sake, white folks, don’t just stand there. This here’s a movement, so move yo bodies, clap yo hands, and come on now, sing with yo whole self.”
We sang “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around,” “We’ll Never Turn Back,” and “O Freedom.” With each song, I loosened up a little more, gaining tone and volume and rhythm, but I couldn’t get the knack