LITMIR.BIZ

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      At first, children stopped playing hopscotch and huddled together as I walked by. “He’s a Freedom Rider,” they whispered. Their wary parents would pass me on the road without meeting my eyes, but I could feel their stares and questions jabbing into my back. Many were frightened; I meant nothing but trouble. I would tell them, “Get ready, the Movement is coming your way,” but that wasn’t anything they wanted to hear. One man stooped down behind the tomato plants in his garden to avoid me. Another time, a little girl came to the front door and said, “Mama say she not here.”

      It was hard work, but a few listened. I would take out a registration form and ask, “Have you ever filled one of these out?” They would shake their heads and look uneasy. Voting was white folks’ business. “Would you like to sit down now and try?” I would encourage them to imagine themselves at the county courthouse in Magnolia actually answering the twenty-one questions, interpreting a section of the Mississippi Constitution, and stating in a paragraph the duties and obligations of citizenship. Whether they passed or not was at the discretion of the registrar, whose job was to see that they didn’t.

      People listened and gave what they could—a nickle, a dime, a quarter—to support a handful of SNCC workers. Soon I was joined by John Hardy, Reggie Robinson, Travis Britt, and a few others who had been in jail in Jackson for taking part in the Freedom Rides. Also, several of the local students got involved. One in particular, Brenda Travis, always bright-eyed and brimming with questions, would sit on a family’s porch talking to them for hours if necessary until they were convinced of the need to register. Thanks to Curtis Bryant, who, in addition to being head of the local NAACP, a deacon in his church, a Sunday school teacher, and a scoutmaster, was also a high official in the Freemasons, we were able to set up a Freedom School in the Masonic Hall over the Burgland grocery store. Saint Paul’s Methodist Church, across the street, agreed to let us hold meetings there too.

      One day in early August I was at the Freedom School preparing for class when a slim, serious-faced young man, who was about twenty, came in. He scrutinized me with wide-eyed intensity.

      “Are you Martin Luther King?”

      “No. I’m Bob Moses. Why did you think I was King?”

      “I heard talk about some big secret thing goin’ on, so I come to see for myself.”

      “Where are you from?”

      “Summit.”

      “What’s your name?”

      “Hollis Watkins.”

      “Are you in school?”

      “No. But I got plans.”

      “I’ve got plans too.”

      I told him about the voter registration project, and even though I wasn’t Martin Luther King, he wanted to help. His friend Curtis Hayes would help too. They began to recruit. People related to them as the sons of local farmers who dressed and acted in down-home ways. I soon learned to scrap my suit and tie for boots, bib overalls, and a chambray shirt; the other SNCC workers did the same. Those of us from the North learned to slow down to the rhythms of the South.

      The people flocked to our school. When we explained the power of the vote, they squirmed in their chairs and glanced at each other. One heavyset woman up front fanned herself harder every time I mentioned the word freedom. Within a few days we sent several students to the Pike County courthouse in Magnolia. When they learned that they had passed, we held a party that lasted long into the night. It seemed for the moment as if everything would be easy. Then the local paper, the Enterprise-Journal, ran an article on what we were trying to do. Whites became alarmed. The next day, the registrar rejected our students, and that evening one of them, in an incident apparently unrelated to voter registration, was shot at. As the news spread, I noted the panic in people’s eyes; they saw a connection. Fewer and fewer came to the Freedom School.

      Meanwhile, farmers in nearby Amite and Walthall counties heard about SNCC and asked if we could help them, too. As dangerous as McComb was, the surrounding areas, with long histories of violence, were much worse. In Amite only one black was registered; in Walthall, none. If we had serious difficulties in McComb, what chance did we have in those places? But I knew that if we turned down the farmers, we would lose the trust and destroy the hope of the people. If we shied away from the toughest areas, everyone would know we could be intimidated, and the fragile project would fall apart. We decided that John Hardy should take on Walthall while I went into Amite, a name that meant “friendship” in French and “trouble” to me.

      On Saturday evening Curtis Bryant drove me to the farm of E. W. Steptoe, a small man with prominent ears, a wide smile, a weather-beaten face, and as I was soon to learn, an indomitable spirit. A few other farmers were there. One was Herbert Lee, short, self-effacing, with a touch of gray in his hair. He had grown up down the road, married a girl from nearby St. Helena Parish, raised a large family, and made enough money planting cotton to buy some land, a house, and a car. Only men like Steptoe and Lee, with the self-sufficiency of the independent farmer, had the courage to stand up to the threat of white reprisals.

      In the fifties, Steptoe had single-handedly started an NAACP chapter in Amite County. He bought a batch of membership cards and sold them to the local farmers for two dollars each until more than the necessary fifty signed up. When the sheriff found out, he and twenty men surrounded the meeting place, confiscated the secretary’s membership list, and frightened people so much that even Steptoe’s friends turned their backs on him.

      “You’re goin’ too fast,” one said. “Why don’t you quit that mess?”

      “Ah, we are one hundred years too slow now,” Steptoe replied.

      “But you’re just gonna go get yourself killed.”

      “I know my life is at stake,” he said. “I know they wants me dead. But if they kill me, I would hate to know nobody else was workin’ for the young peoples, for the unborn generation, but me.”

      Steptoe made an immediate and lasting impression on me. Sometimes he spoke so slowly it seemed it would take him all day to finish one sentence, but I always felt sure it would be worth the wait. No one convinced me more that the common man knew through hard-earned experience truths that few politicians heeded.

      “I spent years tryin’ to win the friendship of white folks,” Steptoe told me. “I drove them places and waited hours until they was finished; I swam in creeks to rescue their cattle; I chopped wood for an old widow woman. Anything folks wanted done, I done it. I didn’t ask for no money; all I wanted was thanks and appreciation. But folks just took advantage. The more I helped them, the more they hated me.

      “These people here don’t have no conscience. The only thing they wants is to keep the Negro down. I come to the conclusion that it wasn’t no friendship that you could gain from the white people by tryin’ to do what they say, or tryin’ to obey their laws, and rules, or whatnot; one day I said, ‘Now, look, Steptoe, you must take a stand and try to gain the vote, that seems to be the importantest thing that you can do.’”

      “Do you think these people will work with me?” I asked Steptoe. “Do you think they really want to register?”

      “Oh, yes, they wants to redish. I know that they are very anxious to redish so they can vote.”

      “Okay then, if you think we’ll be successful, I’ll come back tomorrow at ten o’clock and go to church with you.”

      “Good. I’ll be expectin’ you.”

      Sunday morning we drove down to a small church where several of Steptoe’s cousins were deacons. It was an old clapboard church with gingerbread trim and wooden benches for pews. The people clapped and A-mened and shouted “Yes, Jesus!” and “Praise the Lord!” to everything the preacher said. He got so pleased with himself he began to dance in place, the signal for everyone to stand up and dance and sing and make some glorious noise. After the service, Steptoe asked to speak; the preacher looked doubtful. Finally they let him make a plea for the voter registration school starting seven-thirty Monday morning at the Mount

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