March 7 – March 21 From Bloody Sunday Selma Alabama to Solitary Confinement, Jackson Mississippi

We crowded into a worn out 1950 Buick, five tired and discouraged veterans of the second battle of Selma. Two days earlier, on what became known as Bloody Sunday, the country had been shocked and outraged when primetime television coverage revealed premeditated brutal attacks on hundreds of Negroes of all ages who were engaged in nothing more than a peaceful walk from Selma to Montgomery for the right to vote. Mounted sheriff’s posse snapped bullwhips, vicious mobs swung chains and pipes, and cops bashed heads with clubs and fired teargas. When I joined the next march, I was ready to put my life on the line as we tried to cross the bridge again. But the march had turned around. Now I was headed back to the trenches in smoldering Mississippi.

I had my work cut out for me there. A week before Bloody Sunday, the Jackson Youth Movement had decided to take the bull by the horns. They planned to violate the injunction which had barred demonstrations in the City of Jackson ever since Medgar Evers, the President of the Mississippi NACCP, was brazenly gunned down in his driveway a year before.

The SNCC office in Jackson had been in a state of confusion when I arrived out of nowhere from Berkeley a short while ago. I immediately got to work manning the state-wide Watts line on the night shift, taking emergency calls from beleaguered freedom projects scattered throughout Mississippi, and painting the office by day. So when I was invited by an eager young guy named Ben Brown, and an energetic and upbeat 15-year-old girl named Aretha, to join them at a meeting of the Jackson NAACP requesting support for the upcoming challenge to the injunction, I jumped in wholeheartedly.

I was blown away by these kids. They walked, talked and slept freedom; they took what we taught in Freedom schools seriously. They were ready to fight, hoping their actions would light a spark and reawaken the movement in Jackson. Already streetwise, they decided to reach out for help, to raise bail, to provide lawyers, and to seek blessings from key pastors whose good words would broaden support into the community.

The NAACP’s endorsement was the first step.

The meeting quickly turned into a disaster. The ministers, funeral directors, businessman and teachers who made up the core of the NAACP were not expecting us. Like so many Jackson middle-class Negroes, the brutal assassination of Medgar Evers on his doorstep in front of his wife and children had a chilling and paralyzing effect on their lives. They weren’t about to put themselves on the line with a bunch of ragtag youth who were intent on challenging the white power structure.

The Chairman’s harsh and disrespectful tone and his curt dismissal of Ben’s attempt to speak: “Sit down, young man, you’re not on the agenda” along with his refusal to bend even a little and permit a short, face saving presentation, “We don’t have time tonight to take up this serious action you’re proposing”, elicited our mutterings of “Uncle Tom” and “sellout.”   Our heartfelt pleas that “we only want your endorsement, not your bodies on the line”, were met with “You’re a bunch of know nothing kids”, “You don’t have anything to lose”, “You’re playing with fire. Someone’s going to get killed.”

Tempers rose. The gavel pounded. “The meeting is adjourned.”

The Chairman rushed out the door followed by Ben trying to salvage something: “Please, all we want is a meeting.” His quarry jumped into a big shiny Buick, slamming the door in Ben’s face.

Aretha immediately challenged the Chairman by sitting down in the driveway singing, “We shall not, we shall not be moved.” Before I knew it, I was sitting beside her. I looked into the driver’s eyes as he started the motor and saw a mixture of anger and fear. He stepped on the gas. “Uh, oh” I thought, “this is way out of hand.” Quick witted and agile from my childhood days on the street and in the gym, and my army training, I grabbed Aretha. We rolled out of the way in the nick of time as the car sped by us. What an irony if my tombstone read: “RUN OVER BY A NAACP MEMBER” rather than, “BLOWN UP BY THE KLAN”.

We would be taking on the injunction by ourselves.

We managed to dig up a few cars, so 14 of us with a dozen signs headed down to the Jackson Courthouse. I thought to myself what a difference a few days make and what a contrast: Selma with Martin Luther King, a united Negro community, ministers, teachers and ordinary working folks along with hundreds of young people and supporters from across America bearing witness, the national press everywhere, and LBJ on the telephone; here in Jackson, only our brave little band of brothers and sisters. Well, it had to start somewhere.

We threw up a picket line and were joined by a few young newcomers. Ted, a lean, well-dressed, decorated Korean War veteran had volunteered to be our point person and attempt to register voters.   It was a sunny morning and the courthouse steps had its usual traffic.

It wasn’t long before we had company. A line of police appeared suddenly, followed by a converted World War II armored vehicle with a water cannon mounted on its turret – the infamous Thompson Tank named after Jackson’s mayor. No more messy fire hoses that people might dodge. Just one huge, powerful stream. Butterflies fluttered in my stomach. I blinked my eyes and for a moment I saw a huge squat poisonous toad, its flickering tongue eager to gobble us up.

A burly guy in a gray suit with an officious air approached us: “Who’s in charge here?”

I stepped forward. “I am,” I had been chosen by the group the night before to be their spokesman.

“Young fella, you have no business being here with your goddamn signs. We got an injunction against any form of demonstration. Now get your ass out of here before you end up in jail,”

“Sir, do you mind identifying yourself.”

He stepped forward, grabbed my shirt and leaned closer, his bad breath matching his words: “Don’t smartass me punk. I’m the Chief of Police and you have a few seconds to get you and your nigger kids outta here.”

“This is America. We have a constitutional right to be here and peacefully picket in support of our friend’s right to register.”

“That’s it for you, boy.” He grabbed me by my sleeve, shoving me into the arms of the waiting cops. Everyone let out a yell as I disappeared into the building. I had a tight feeling in my gut. This wasn’t Berkeley and I was all by my lonesome.

Top of the Mark

The other two white civil rights workers and I were put in separate cells in a segregated high-security L shaped section. The main entrance to the cell block, with the porthole the cops and trustees used to spy on us, was right in front my cell door.

It wasn’t the Top of the Mark or the Ritz, but it was a private room in the penthouse of the tallest building in town – the City Jail perched atop the Hinds County Court House. It gave me quite a view of the Jackson skyline, with its Confederate flags waving in the wind, and of the stars each evening. I got plenty of fresh air from my open window, a bit chilly at night, but a necessity to escape the ever present stench from the toilet. My metal bunk was hard with a scrawny, lumpy, and stained mattress and a couple of threadbare blankets.

My first night I was jolted out of a sensual dream about my girlfriend Aubin by something skittering across my body. I sat up and swatted at one of the largest cockroaches I’ve ever seen. I looked around and spotted another one as big as my thumb, fat and sassy from feeding on the undigested remains of jailhouse slop, crawling out of the toilet, a metal bench set in the wall with a wooden top and an uncovered hole in the middle.

There was a big commotion the next morning. I caught a glimpse as two loudmouthed middle-aged hard-nosed white guys were thrown in the two cells next to mine.

They were quick to size up Ron, a red bearded, curly locked Jewish gnome from the Village, and Pete, a tall Ichabod Crane looking wasp from New England, as out of towners.

“You boys don’t look or sound like you all is from around here. Whatcha in for? Speedin’?”

Pete cut to the quick. “No we’re civil rights workers. We were arrested for demonstrating.”

The shit immediately hit the fan. These guys were country cousins of the mobs who had attacked men, women and children with chains, whips and cattle prods on Bloody Sunday, and of the vicious cowards who beat Reverend Reeb to death on the streets of Selma a few days later.

They could barely believe it. We were real live Yankee outside agitators.

“You oughtta be strung up by your scrawny chicken livered necks. My granpappy, my pa and me is proud Klan. We’ll cut your nuts off if we catch you messing around in our backyard.” On and on it went. I was sure glad they weren’t in the same cell with me.

Eventually things quieted down as we ignored their grisly words and they ran out of things to say.

The guy in the cell next to mine seemed to be the smarter of the two. He started talking after dinner.   I guess he was curious. “I don’t get it. Don’t ya have anything else to do, but come down here and stir up shit?”

We spent the next couple of hours talking. He and his partner were descendants of Scotch Irish immigrants, sharecroppers so desperate that they turned to robbing banks. Just plain, poor whites whose families were wiped out by the depression.

“I was busted the first time for stealing chickens from the boss man to feed my brothers and sisters. We wuz hungry. My pa was doing time for moonshining to make a little money. That’s what them government boys did for us.” He had a Bonnie and Clyde attitude. He robbed from the rich. “I hate them bankers in their fancy suits.”

I asked him why he was in the Klan and hated Negroes so much.

“Man, the Klan was a big thing growing up. Everyone was in it. We was all together, we all belonged. Weren’t no snobs. Even them rich guys were all the same in white sheets. My uncle took me to see my first nigger dangling from a tree when I was six. That’s just the way we grew up…” It boiled down to, “We have to keep them in their place, keep them away from our women.”

We started talking about Selma.

“What’s it you all want marching to Montgomery? Nothin’ gonna change.”

“Hey man, we’re marching because Negroes want to be treated like every other American. They want a vote, and to have the chance at a decent life, a job, a home, an education and a hopeful future for their kids. That’s what it’s really about. ”

He was silent for a few minutes and then whispered, “Say maybe when you start marchin’ for us poor whites, I’ll think about joinin’ you.”

I woke up early the next morning, thinking about our conversation. Images of my family’s poverty, eating stale bakery goods, chowing down on poor people’s steak sandwiches (heavy on the butter and A1 sauce, hold the steak), the cops dragging my dad out the door for bouncing a check to buy food. Someday, somehow it’s got to be better for everyone

I wondered how my brothers and sisters and mom were doing without me. The image of my twelve year old brother Bobby coming home with a bloody nose just before I left for Mississippi popped up. A gift from one of the O’Malley kids–a new family on the block, just off the boat from County Cork, nine kids, shanty Irish just like us, not a pot to piss in, screaming “nigger lover” at Bobby because mom had a Sunday barbecue for her good friend Minnie, and her co-workers and their families from the night shift on San Francisco General Hospital’s locked wards.

The words from one of the songs we sang in Selma, “We love everybody, we love all the Ku Klux in our hearts,” stuck in my throat. “It ain’t me babe” was more like it.

My response to the constant vicious heckling and threats from the crowds surrounding Browns Chapel the day after Bloody Sunday was to rip a confederate flag out of one of our tormenter’s hands, and to the glee of my gang and the outrage of the cracker hoards, set it on fire. So much for turning the other cheek.

Brother Ben      

Voices shook me out of my daydreams. I heard screaming and yelling from the Negro cellblock. “The march just left for Montgomery.” I recognized Ben’s beautiful strong voice echoing through bars. “Ain’t gonna let nobody turn us ‘round, turn us ‘round. We’re gonna keep on a walking, keep on a talking, marching up to Montgomery land.”

Voices rose, growing stronger. It sounded like every Negro in the jail was singing. I joined in.

The door to the cellblock flew open. A couple of jailers rushed in. “Shut the fuck up or your ass is in solitary.” I kept on singing. Next thing I knew, I was sitting in a windowless stuffy little black box.

I heard Ben’s voice, “Hey, you don’t have to be so rough I’m not fighting you.” The door slammed. He was in the closet next door.

“Ben, are you okay?”

“Yeah, they didn’t seem to have their hearts in it. Maybe they sense a change is in the air.”

“Man I’m glad for the company. Keep my mind off my claustrophobia. When I was 15, I woke up from a nightmare with my fist through the window. I guess I was sleepwalking and tried to punch my way out of a black hole.”

“You shoulda thought about that before you got on the freedom bandwagon, or else learned to keep your mouth shut better.”

“I’ll try to remember that next time. But I’m just like you, so here we are.”

“Mike, I can’t believe it. We kicked their racist asses. We took over the State of Alabama. Yeah, we needed the Army, the Alabama National Guard and a prime time nationally televised massacre to do it. But we did it. The Voters Rights Act passed. No more poll taxes. No more literacy tests. We have a chance now, a chance to change our lives. I ‘ve not been fighting just to pee in the same toilet as white people or sit next to some cracker having a hamburger. We got a fighting chance. We got the vote.”

“I don’t know, Ben. We have the vote up north and lots of folks still don’t have a pot to piss in. The Impressions may sing, ‘People get ready there’s a train a coming don’t need no money you just get on board.’ But in my life, when my family didn’t have the money, we couldn’t get on board. I think we all have a long fight ahead.”

“Mike, back in ‘63, we had thousands of people in the street after Medgar Evers was murdered.   We were ready to die. John Doar from the Justice Department convinced us to avoid bloodshed and disperse. SNCC staff calmed the brothers down and talked them into putting their guns away. All we have to show for it is the Thompson Tank and the fucking injunction that landed our asses in jail. Selma was a great victory.”

“Ben, I was pissed off on the bridge. I was fired up that morning in Browns Chapel when King brought us to our feet with his ringing words: ’We’re not going to let no police dogs, no whips, no chains, no tear gas turn us around. We’re marching to Montgomery.’

“When I looked around that morning and saw nuns and priests, Union leaders, students, retired folks and just ordinary folks pouring into Selma from all over the country, I felt like this was the America I loved. The America that united to defeat Fascism in World II. Mario Savio even showed up with a contingent of FSM veterans. I believed it was time to make a stand.

“It was a close call when I got there on Bloody Sunday. Lots of guys were talking about getting guns but cooler heads prevailed. Non-violence trumped the bad guys once again.”

We had been so busy up to now, never slowing down, never taking time to find out much about where anyone else came from, how we each got here. Solitary gave me and Ben plenty of time to swap stories.

“Mike, as a kid I just wouldn’t do the shuffle. That got me in trouble with the police. They got my number early. They been hassling me for years. I did alright in school. I was a pretty good half back and I sang in the choir, but I was looking for something to believe in. When the freedom riders arrived on the first bus to Jackson, I skipped school. I got hooked on freedom. I forgot about football and the choir and started reading Jet magazine and following the sit-ins. The movement is my life.”

A warm feeling flooded my body as I realized Ben and I were truly soul buddies.

“Ben, got any plans for when you get out of here?”

“I hear there’s a new group being formed – the Delta Ministry. Maybe I can get on staff. I could use some money, and it’s time to get out of Jackson.”

“Great minds think alike, Ben. George Green asked me to go to Natchez. There’s just a couple of white volunteers down there and nothing much is happening. Maybe they think I’ll shake things up.”

“Whew, Mike nothing like jumping from the frying pan into the fire. Natchez is bad news. It’s a Klan town. Last fall, they burned down the Freedom House. The only minister in town who opened his church for SNCC meetings was dragged out of his home and badly whipped on his front lawn. I hate to say it, brother, but sounds like   you might be bait.”

“Ben, so many people have died, so many people have suffered, seems our blood is the price of freedom. If it’s my fate to die with my boots on, so be it.”

We heard footsteps. “Okay boys, it’s dinner time. Back to your cells.”

Jailhouse Jitters and Then Some

It was day 15 and I was the last one left. The policy was to get local folks out first from whatever bail was raised, and then SNCC staff or volunteers like me, even if someone’s family or friends from up north earmarked their bail. This made sense to me. The kids busted with me had a lot more to lose than I did. Still, I felt apprehensive being by myself. If I let my imagination run wild, it could be kind of scary. No one was here to cover my back.

Elmer, the head trustee, a wizened, bent over old white man who was missing an eye, liked to get a rise out of us from the get go with tales of the old days when the boss jailer would take a troublesome nigger out fishing and somehow come home with plenty of fish and one less problem inmate. They always mysteriously fell out of the row boat and drowned. That particularly eerie story didn’t bother me much at first because a good catch on a weekend fishing trip meant fried trout for Sunday supper. Now it started to loom heavy in my thoughts.

“Say boy,” Elmer said while picking up my dinner tray, “I hear they’re gonna ship you out to the farm because you been here too long. The Sarge says if you ain’t outta here in few days, you gonna be earning your keep picking cotton with a bunch of nigger hating crackers. The Captain out at the farm he don’t like freedom fighters either.. If he don’t give you a whippin’ hisself, he’ll let some of those white trash Ku Kluxers do the job. You gonna get your ass kicked, or some horny guys gonna get your ass one night. Ha, ha.”

I didn’t think his joking was funny. During my six months as a guard at San Quentin State Prison, I had learned a lot about jailhouse rapes and beatings. Convicts would also taunt me from their cells while I made my nightly rounds – me alone with 1,500 inmates and only a flashlight and a whistle. “Hey pretty boy, I’d sure like you for my bitch” or “You’ll be one sore assed kid when I get through with you.”

I knew my fears weren’t likely to come true with all the national attention on the South and after the murderers of Cheney, Goodman and Scherner last summer. But the spotlight on Bloody Selma hadn’t stopped the Klan from beating Reverend Reeb to death on the street just a few blocks away from where we were meeting. This was still the Land O’ Cotton – vicious and unpredictable. I remembered stories told around the Freedom House about white civil rights workers who were never quite the same after doing some time alone in Parchment Penitentiary or some other southern penal cesspool.

I woke up early the next day, uneasy about being the last of the Mohicans in a Mississippi jail. A cold breakfast of lumpy porridge and a burnt piece of stale, dry toast did nothing to raise my spirits.

Not much to do, but daydream about my girl, Aubin, a real steak sandwich, and getting out of this stinky steel closet. I thought moving around might help, so I started pacing my eight by eight pen like a caged tiger singing, “I’ll overcome fear ‘cause I want my freedom. I’ll overcome jail ‘cause I want my freedom.”

The door swung open: “Hey boy, you finally got a letter.” Elmer waved it in the air with a silly grin.

“Just give it to me and stop screwing around.”

It was in a pale blue envelope. I recognized Aubin’s handwriting. My first and only letter. It couldn’t be any better, coming from the woman I loved. I gently opened it, heart racing with excitement.

“Dear Michael,

“I hope everything’s going well with you. Jail sounds terrible. I have been doing a lot of soul-searching. As I sit in my room in Piedmont and think about you behind bars, caught up as always in some movement, I realize we live in two different worlds. You’re a good person and I respect you. But it’s just not going to work for us.

Good bye, Aubin.”

A sick feeling flooded the pit of my stomach. Tears came to my eyes. I felt like a G.I. getting a “Dear John letter” on a landing barge in the Pacific.

I drifted off into memories of our passionate relationship. I met Aubin while circulating a petition in the fraternities and sororities at U.C. Berkeley asking them to support the goals of the Free Speech Movement. She was a Kappa Kappa Gamma, the most blue-blooded of the sororities, and came from an old line, wealthy Piedmont family. I was a Zete, the fraternity equivalent of the Kappas, but the only politically active Zete, and she was also intrigued by my being from the wrong side of the tracks.

A spark immediately flew between us. After talking for a few minutes, I realized I had to leave to get more signatures before petitions were turned into the Dean in the morning.

“Aubin, I’ll see you around. I have work to do.”

She smiled, “You’re really dedicated aren’t you.”

A few weekends later we were both at a party at a fraternity brother’s sprawling mansion overlooking Carmel Beach on the Seventeen Mile Drive. I immediately fell madly in love with her, mesmerized by her soft emerald green eyes, her adorable nose, her tantalizing mouth, and her sharp mind. She was captivated by my FSM activities and my underdog background. Also, she didn’t just listen; she asked pertinent questions.

To my surprise and delight, she was lusty, fun-loving and creative in bed. We spent hours touching, looking, rubbing, exploring and exploding in each other’s mouths. To top it off, she loved to cuddle as much as I did. I was in seventh heaven, having found my true love.

Then I thought back to my last jail experience. I was the first FSM arrestee bailed out of Santa Rita because Jack Weinberg thought my clean cut appearance, my Greek fraternity/sorority connections, and the bruises I had received from the cops, and my experience as a prison guard would be newsworthy and give me credibility with the press. The campus was in an uproar when I returned. A campus-wide strike had shut down classes. I quickly moved between picket lines, rallies and meetings, telling my story. I was in front of the campus, standing on a stone pillar addressing hundreds of sign waving intense students, teaching assistants, professors and a dozen TV cameras and radio mics when I saw Aubin looking at me intensely as if I was her own war hero. My heart warmed. As soon as I answered the last reporter, I jumped off the pillar and made a beeline for my girl.

We fell into each other’s arms. First things first, I thought.

“Aubin, let’s get the hell out of here. I’ve done my job for now. She grinned, “Not so dedicated anymore.”

“The battle’s over for now, it’s time for love.”

We spent four hours in a nearby motel. No such luck this time when I return from the frontline.

What had happened? I thought back.

A month before I left for Mississippi, the Piedmont newspaper ran a story about Mario Savio’s closest lieutenant going with a prominent Piedmont debutante. Aubin’s mother went ballistic. She never liked me in the first place, but this was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I was banned from the house. I didn’t see the handwriting on the wall. I guess in the end, class got in our way.

A voice cut in on my meandering thoughts. “Hey Smith, looks like you won’t make it to the farm after all. A bunch of your buddies are here to bail you out.”

We all went to the best steakhouse in the Negro part of town that night. I ordered a porterhouse. It felt like old times when Dad would spend the last few dollars of Mom’s insurance check on steak dinners for all of us, while she lay in the hospital. Except this time, the movement lawyers were picking up our tab.

Then we went out dancing and drinking, hitting the juke joints, celebrating our freedom, shaking our booties, getting down.

Ben scored a big bottle of White Lightning which everyone else added to their drinks, and I belted down straight. I danced my troubles away, swaying and shaking with all sizes and shapes of beautiful black women. When the Temptations singing, “My Girl, thinking about my girl” came on the jukebox, I saw Aubin’s face. A wave of sadness swept over me which I quickly washed away with another swig of Moonshine and another ….

I came to in an empty lot surrounded by garbage. It was still dark and I had no idea where I was. I was alone and lost on the streets of Jackson. Somehow I managed to stumble back to the Freedom House. Head pounding, sick to my stomach, I fell into bed. I missed my family and was worried about what was happening to them. I remembered my little brother Bobby crying just before I left for Mississippi. “Mike please don’t go.” And Mom pleading “I need your help paying the bills. You can’t leave us.”

I curled up, more a scared little kid than a freedom fighter, and passed out.

I woke up to the sounds of Martha and the Vandellas singing “Mama said there’d be days like this, there’d be days like this my mama said.”

I sat up, the bright sunshine through the window warming my face. I said to myself with a grin, “Right on mama.”

Ben burst into the room “Get up Mike, George called. You’re leaving for Natchez today.”