Nikole Wet Willie

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Nikole Wet Willie

Dispatches from Freedom Summer
Ghosts of Greenwood
A reporter goes to Mississippi and encounters the echoes of family and the struggle for civil rights.
by Nikole Hannah-Jones July 8, 2014

In 1947, my father, along with his mother and older brother, boarded a northbound
train in Greenwood, Miss. They carried with them nothing but a suitcase stuffed
with clothes, a bag of cold chicken, and my grandmother’s determination that
her children — my father was just 2 years old — would not be doomed
to a life of picking cotton in the feudal society that was the Mississippi
Delta.
Grandmama, as we called her,
settled in Waterloo, Iowa, a stop on the Illinois Central line,
and a place where thousands of black Mississippians would find work on the
railroad or at the Rath
meatpacking and John
Deere plants. Grandmama took a job familiar to
black women of her lot: Working for white families as a domestic.
Almost every black person I
knew growing up in Waterloo had roots in Mississippi. Mississippi flavored our
cuisine, inspired our worship and colored our language. Still, when speaking
about the land of their birth, my dad and grandmother talked about family and
loved ones, but seldom about the place.
Mississippi was at once my ancestral land, and the sinister setting in any number of Hollywood movies, a villain in our national narrative, the place where a black boy named Emmett
Till was tossed into the Tallahatchie River with
a cotton gin fan around his neck. The only image of Greenwood I got from my
family was of my great-grandparents’ farm, scenes of chickens and picking peas
in the morning sun and my great-grandmother, Mary Jane Paul, refusing to take
any mess. It was only when I got older that I learned my family did not in fact
own the farm. Depending on who told the story, my family either leased or
sharecropped the land that was, in fact, held by white plantation owners. In
reality, the difference mattered little.
And though my parents would
load us all in the car every summer to head to a different state for our family
vacations, my dad never once took us to the state of his birth. Not for family
reunions or funerals. Not for graduations or holidays. My father and
grandmother both passed away without ever taking me to see their home.
As the nation prepared to
mark the 50th anniversary of Freedom Summer — that violent and heady 10
weeks during which Northern volunteers joined forces with Southern activists in
Mississippi, all working to meaningfully enfranchise black residents — I
felt pulled to finally visit this place that ran in my blood but that I had
never seen. Last month, at the age of 38, I visited Mississippi for the first
time.
My 87-year-old great-aunt,
Charlotte Frost, who had followed my grandma to Waterloo, happened to be visiting a granddaughter in Jackson at the same time I planned my trip. I picked up Aunt Charlotte and we headed north on U.S. Highway
49 toward Greenwood, into the heart of the Delta and Freedom Summer’s ground
zero.
The Mississippi Delta, named
after the river that gives it life, stretches 200 miles long and 60
miles wide , covering 19 counties in the Magnolia
State. The ebb and flow of the mighty river left behind some of
the richest soil on the face of the earth ( topsoil
here can reach more than 60 feet deep ). This
dark, fertile land, and the riches it could produce for the white people who
owned almost all of it, would also make Mississippi one of the most dangerous
places in the country to be black.
As we drove, I tried to get
my Aunt Charlotte to open up about what it was like coming of age in a black
family in the Delta. It was here, after all, that life for black people was so
grim that it spawned the blues.
But Aunt Charlotte, peering
out at the road through round glasses perpetually clinging to the end of her
nose, said she never had any problems with white people, that they had
respected her family and hadn’t done much to bother them. And then Charlotte
went on to talk about the good school she went to in town and all the crops her
family grew.
It was a familiar take. She
and another great-aunt in Waterloo are the last of my Grandmama’s siblings, and I had tried before to get their stories, but had been met with a
resistance to talking about the ugliness of Jim Crow Mississippi. I never push
too hard at this gauzy version, because I know that women like my great-aunts
— they pride themselves in their durable dignity, dress to nines, don’t
use vulgar language and keep impeccable homes with plastic-wrapped sofas
— have no desire to speak of the daily degradations they’d faced at the
height of Jim Crow.
A wooden sign coated in
brown paint announced our arrival:
Welcome to Greenwood, Cotton
Capital of the World
But it was clear from the
rows of lanky corn stretched out before the sign — not exactly squat June
cotton — that the greeting’s boast was mere nostalgia.
We first headed to the
Little Zion Missionary Baptist Church just outside of town. The plain, white
structure was where our family worshipped. My great-grandmother and
great-grandfather, Mary Jane and Percy Paul, part of the first generation born
out of slavery, are buried in the overgrown cemetery, with its haphazardly
placed tombstones. It turns out that this church is the one featured in the
movie “The Help,” the place where the maids went to worship. I would come to
learn that though the movie is set in Jackson, it was mostly filmed in Greenwood because the town seemed largely frozen in time. Its
building and homes, and in some ways its culture, form a kind of time capsule
of the era when cotton was king.
According to Aunt Charlotte,
the church used to be a part of the Whittington
Plantation , the white landowners having built it
for the black sharecroppers. It’s still surrounded by crops, and Aunt
Charlotte, stooped over her cane, pointed to a distant spot in the fields,
saying their house, the house where my great-grandmother helped deliver my
father, once stood there on the Whittington lands. I soon learned that nearly
every black person here came from a family attached through labor (and
sometimes blood) to white families and to plantations with names like “Star of
the West.”
It was dusk and the Delta
heat settled about my shoulders like a wool blanket. Heavy and uncomfortable,
it made my notebook paper fall limp and my ink stop flowing. Gnats and
mosquitoes swarmed my legs. Aunt Charlotte, wrapped in a memory, paused to
listen to an owl hooting a melancholy warning.
“The old people would say
someone is going to die,” she said.
Located in Leflore County,
my dad’s hometown took its name from Greenwood LeFlore, the last Choctaw
Indian chief , who signed over much of the tribe’s
land for an
Oklahoma reservation while he himself lived
lavishly on 15,000 acres of Delta land that he worked with some 400
enslaved black laborers.
The Civil War, of course,
left much of the South crippled, but not long after Reconstruction, Greenwood
boomed. While white politicians in Jackson led the South in stripping black
residents of their elected offices and newly guaranteed
citizenship rights, white plantation owners rebuilt
the levees on the flood-prone and swampy Delta .
Cotton once again stretched as far as the eye could see, and Greenwood took its
place as one of the cotton capitals of the world.
But this boom was made
possible only by a reconstituted slavery, a system of coerced labor known as
sharecropping. Vagrancy laws were passed, making it illegal for black people to
stand around “idle.” Often the only defense was to prove one was in the employ
of a white person.
White Mississippians,
outnumbered by the African-Americans needed to work the land, implemented a
violent and absolute form of social control. The nation’s most heavily black
state, Mississippi lynched
more black people between 1882 and 1968 than any
state in the country.
Greenwood’s Yazoo River is
formed by the meeting of the Tallahatchie and Yalobusha rivers, and as we crossed
the Yazoo River and headed to the heart of Greenwood, the ghosts of Mississippi
grew close, and Aunt Charlotte finally loosened.
Aunt Charlotte told me that
she was baptized in the Tallahatchie. She went on to speak of another river
baptism, into the perils of the Delta’s color line.
She said her brother Milton
— my dad’s namesake — and a cousin had once committed the sin of
walking through a white neighborhood for a reason other than to simply go to
work. Two white teenagers in a car gave chase, trying to run them down. Her
brother and cousin were forced to jump into the murky river to escape. They
returned home, muddy and wet, chests heaving from panic and exertion. Her
mother, she said, was livid with fear.
“They got a hard scolding,”
Aunt Charlotte said. “She said, ‘You’re going to get yourself killed.’”
We drove past the regal white courthouse , with its requisite Confederate monument standing guard
out front. Aunt Charlotte told of another brother running home, chest heaving.
A cousin who leased farmland from a white plantation owner had the gall to
stand up to a white overseer who didn’t like him having taken a rest. Everyone
knew that simply asserting one’s manhood could get a man strung from a tree, so
her brother raced to get my great-grandfather to help guard his cousin against
the lynching mob.
“My daddy grabbed his
Winchester and rifle and his .38 long-nose pistol,” Aunt Charlotte said, and he
headed to the cousin’s house to keep vigil. This was a well-practiced event:
Family members often gathered arms to protect a loved one following a social
breach, usually keeping watch until the loved one could be whisked out of town,
almost always to the North.
“They usually had to leave
before nightfall or the lynching mob would come,” Aunt Charlotte said quietly.
The lynching mob did not come that night, but Aunt Charlotte never forgot the
fear. That fright was as routine among black people in the Delta as heading to
church on Sunday.
It was just a few miles
outside of town, after all, where they
found the body of Emmett Till . The tossing of
black bodies into the muddy rivers for breaching the social order wasn’t
unusual. The only reason people across the nation knew Till’s name was that his
mother insisted on an open casket and allowed the ghastly photos of his bloated
and mutilated corpse to be published in the nation’s
leading black publications .
It was eerie being down here
where it happened, just a few miles from where my dad grew up, and realizing
how easily he could have been Till. We somehow convince ourselves that this is
ancient history. But I am not even 40, and my dad was but four years younger
than Emmett Till. Like my dad, Till’s mother had also left as one of hundreds of thousands of black Mississippians who fled their homeland during the Great Migration.
Mamie Till ended up in
Chicago, and like my Grandmama,
sent her son back down South during the summer months. My dad even shared
Emmett Till’s light eyes, as well as that bravado that came from living in the
North — that bravado that brought out the worst in white Southerners. One
of my Dad’s cousins told me that when he came back to Greenwood for the summers,
my dad liked “progueing,” a local word for strutting around and being seen. He
told me my great-grandparents kept Dad close.
Fear and economic
exploitation were the twin elements that defined the Delta. Both were made
possible by the complete disenfranchisement of the majority black population.
North Greenwood, with its wide, tree-lined avenues and “Gone with the Wind”
mansions, once prompted the U.S. Chambers of Commerce to name its main thoroughfare one of the nation’s most
beautiful streets. Divided from the rest of the town by the Yazoo River, it
showcased the vast material wealth under King Cotton. The shotgun shacks in
southeast Greenwood, with its unpaved roads and lightless blocks at the time,
revealed who paid the price for that wealth.
A cousin had once committed the sin of walking through a white neighborhood for a reason other than to simply go to work.
“You had to sharecrop, you
couldn’t sell your own cotton, you had to go to them,” the white people, “for
everything,” the Rev.
Willie Blue , a Mississippi native who took part
in Freedom Summer, told me. “You didn’t make anything, you were always in the
hole and at the end of the year there was never anything left. They controlled
your life. It was the same thing as being a slave.”
An entire family could work
all year — children as young as 2 had to go to the fields — and
walk away with $100. Even though other Southern states embraced mechanization,
Mississippi avoided it. As a local historian told me, it was cheaper to “pay”
sharecroppers.
White people in Greenwood made up 33 percent of the
population but owned 90 percent of the land. Just
2
percent of eligible black voters were registered .
Black residents held not a single elected office. In 1964, 10 years after the
Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision, Mississippi was the only
state in the country where not a single black child attended a school with a
white child.
Still, black Mississippians
weren’t just cowering in fear, awaiting saviors from the North.
In 1954, a young
man named Medgar Evers attempted, without success, to integrate the University
of Mississippi Law School. That same year, the NAACP named him Mississippi’s
first field officer and he spent the next decade
enduring death threats and violence as he tried to register black voters.
Black Mississippians
attempted to desegregate schools and lunch counters, movie theaters and
swimming pools. But sit-ins to eat at an integrated restaurant were one thing.
Pushing to access the vote in such a heavily black region was something else.
“If we get the right to
vote, we become captains of our own ship,” Blue told me. “I believed that then,
I believe that now.” He added: “You are not a first-class citizen if you are
not registered to vote. That’s the backbone of being American. The vote is the
perfect example of free speech.”
Hank Klibanoff, a journalist
and co-author of the book “The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle,
and the Awakening of a Nation,” explained to me the promise and threat of black
enfranchisement. Not only did voter registration lead to political representation,
Klibanoff said, but it also determined who sat on juries. “You become
instrumental in ensuring criminal justice is effective and fair,” Klibanoff
said. Access to the vote “really made it possible for blacks to finally get
justice in the courts, not just criminal but civil as well.”
White Mississippians
understood this as clearly as anyone. The toll on black bodies during the
effort to ensure voting rights is, for people of my generation, inconceivable.
In the years leading up to Freedom Summer, black
Mississippians agitating for civil rights were beaten by mobs, castrated,
dragged behind cars with ropes, bombed, jailed, beaten with belts and whips by
their jailers, shot at, and strung with 100 pounds of rocks and sunk to the
bottom of the river . None of this was done in
secret: Among the murderers was a state legislator and a county sheriff.
“We have unintentionally
reduced racial discrimination to images of white and colored water fountains.
And in that context, what passes for violence is somebody pouring mustard on
top of a civil rights demonstrator at a lunch counter, when in fact it was open
season on blacks,” Klibanoff said. “They could be killed just indiscriminately
and with impunity. And I don’t mean, now and then, but I mean fairly
regularly.”
And this is where it’s easy
to cast Mississippi as a grotesque outlier, and to feel a certain smugness
about how, as the civil rights veterans put it at the time, Freedom Summer was
about making Mississippi part of the rest of America. But the rest of America
— exemplified by the federal government — knew what was happening
in Mississippi. We knew that Mississippi was
nearly half black but had no black
representatives in Congress or anywhere, from state government on down. We knew
black Mississippians were being denied their citizenship rights and being
murdered for having the audacity to demand them. Despite obvious voter
intimidation and political assassinations, the FBI operated
no field office there . We knew, and we looked
away.
Every day, ordinary Mississippians
battled on.
Rev. Blue joined the
Mississippi civil rights movement in 1963. Blue, who returned home to
Tallahatchie County after a stint in the Navy, had been getting pressure from
whites to find work on a plantation or to get out of town. Blue instead headed
to Greenwood, where he hooked up with Bob Moses.
Moses, a Harvard-educated
New Yorker, had come to Mississippi in 1961 to work on voter registration for
the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, known as SNCC. Greenwood was,
according to SNCC documents, a “hard core resistance area.” Moses set up SNCC’s
headquarters in Greenwood — those headquarters would be bombed, burned
down and shot up — and Blue’s first task was to pick up Harry Belafonte
and Sidney Poitier, who were coming to Greenwood to offer their support.
Blue, still green as an
activist, arrived at the airport only to encounter a cadre of armed Klan
members. The two-car delegation picked up their Hollywood guests, and Blue, who
was driving the second car, soon found himself in a high-speed chase with the
Klan. The Klan backed off once the party made it to the black part of
Greenwood. Laughing ruefully today, Blue said he didn’t find out until later
that Poitier and Belafonte had been carrying tens of thousands of dollars in cash
to help the voting rights effort.
They controlled your life. It was the same thing as being a slave.
Outside of town, on a
car-strewn lot tucked between cotton fields, I met with Silas McGhee, whose
family, led by his mother, Laura, began fighting Jim Crow long before Freedom
Summer. They paid a heavy price. McGhee doesn’t much like to talk about those
times. I couldn’t get him to sit for an interview. All he would say was that he
was no hero, that he had just done what he was supposed to do. McGhee had been
jailed and beaten more times than he could count for trying to desegregate
downtown businesses and help register black voters.
But the sunken set of his
jaw told the story he would not. At the height of the Mississippi civil rights
struggle, a white man pulled up in a car and shot McGhee in his face when
McGhee was sitting outside of a Greenwood restaurant. The bullet barreled
through his mouth, taking his front teeth with it. Blue, who was with McGhee at
the time, told me, and McGhee confirmed, that the shooter was Byron De La
Beckwith — the Klansman who killed Medgar Evers. I could find no record
to prove or disprove it.
As I left McGhee working on
a tractor in his yard, I thought of how all but one of Grandmama’s seven siblings who
survived into adulthood left Mississippi in their youth. They sacrificed a
great deal in seeking a better life for their families. But it was in talking
to people like Blue and McGhee that I realized what an act of defiance it was
to have been a black Mississippian and to have simply stayed put. Staying to
change this state might well have been the greatest sacrifice.
So, no, black Mississippians
hadn’t been waiting for saviors — white or otherwise — from
outside. But they certainly welcomed them for the national attention they would
bring.
Moses — who civil
rights veterans say was blessed with the right name — is largely
considered the mastermind behind Freedom Summer. When I spoke with
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