Forgotten Greenville

...This time it was Bob Moses's turn to do the same...

...They pointed out that when the colonial powers ruled, the key positions were held by whites...

...We've got the problem of American values in white society—values we're trying to change," he pointed out...

...The real opposition to the Summer Project stemmed, Moses believed, from a general anger toward whites, and he attacked this anger head on...

...They'd learn not to let their fears and emotions get the better of them when they talk[ed] to whites...

...More than two decades after Moses spoke the words that would commit SNCC to the Mississippi Summer Project of 1964, Shelby Steele, in an essay provocatively entitled "I'm Black, You're White, Who's Innocent...

...It's all one way...

...I'm not going to be part of an organization that says, 'No white people are going to be head of a project because they're white,' " he told the meeting...

...SUMMER • 1990 • 337...

...Then it changes the whole complexion of what you're doing so it isn't any longer Negro fighting white...

...We almost suffocated them," Moses declared...

...As he later put it, "You're conceding that you're not able to deal with the situation...

...My alternative is I'll gladly leave if that's the kind of 336 • DISSENT Debate at Greenville organization you want to run...

...The first consciousness that Negroes have is the thing of whites, and I don't think it helps to have the whites here...

...Donaldson had become involved in SNCC when, while a Michigan State student, he helped deliver a truckload of food to blacks in Leflore County, Mississippi...

...They were in the office...

...But with the media on hand to report the story, the violence remained limited...

...As he later put it, "It's very hard for some of the students who have been brought up in Mississippi and are the victims of this kind of race hatred not to begin to let all of that out on the white staff...

...In language almost identical to Cobb's, Mendy Samstein, a Brandeis graduate who joined SNCC after teaching at Morehouse College in Atlanta, observed, "If thousands of whites come down, there is the problem of relationships between blacks and whites...

...Steele's answer ("The Recoloring of Campus Life," Harper's, February 1989) is for us to emphasize our commonality as a higher value than our diversity...

...Moses did not dispute such a reading...

...Moses's starting point was the impasse that SNCC had reached in 1963...

...We're losing the one thing where Negroes can stand first...

...I find myself doing this all the time...

...The only way you can break that down," he concluded, "is to have white people working alongside you...

...Polling booths were set up throughout the black community, and blacks were encouraged to cast protest ballots in the gubernatorial election for Aaron Henry, the black president of the Mississippi NAACP, and the Reverend Ed King, the white chaplain of Tougaloo College...

...They were washing dishes...

...I came to SNCC, and I saw Negroes running the movement, and I felt good...

...Then in 1963 a major change occurred...

...Cobb wanted to know...

...Now, instead of being limited to local campaigns, it could function on a statewide basis...

...I question the value of the publicity we gained from the Yale students," said Donna Moses, who throughout the Greenville talks clashed with her husband...

...Moses would not quote Camus directly at Greenville, but the fears his reading of Camus aroused were implicit in his final plea for the Summer Project...

...What both black and white Americans fear are the sacrifices and risks that true racial harmony demands...

...That was the way of the future in Africa, and for SNCC, which sought to develop black political power in Mississippi, a Summer Project that relied on whites was a step backward...

...The talk, however, is just what makes Greenville worth turning back to...

...But the success also meant that SNCC's heroic age of innocence was over in Mississippi...

...These feelings might be irrational, they might be wrong, but I have to live with them...

...I think one way and act the other," he confessed...

...We don't have that much to gain from Negroes meeting whites," an angry MacArthur Cotton observed...

...They really were doing all the dirty work...

...This is a tremor in the middle of the iceberg—from a stone that the builders rejected...

...By middle November there was no putting off dealing with these issues...

...Like those who favored a Summer Project that would make extensive use of whites, those who opposed the Project began with the lessons of the Freedom Vote...

...People can't just come down to Mississippi and say we're here to help you," Cobb insisted...

...Cobb did not believe that whites came to Mississippi intending to take over SNCC, but he was convinced that tradition made it all too easy for blacks to turn over power to them...

...My position all along, and I think I've said this several times, you try to get as many Negroes as you can to do the job, [then] get whites to the extent that it can't do harm to the Negro community," he declared...

...To look back at Greenville is to see how even in the best of times building a multiracial civil rights movement troubled its most committed participants and, particularly if they were black, made them vulnerable to the charge that they were substituting a white agenda for authentic racial change...

...They were not at all sure that the presence of northern students had worked to SNCC's advantage...

...But it was the Freedom Vote that dominated discussion...

...Steele's point was not that anyone, especially black men and women of his generation, should ignore the racism in American life but rather that our current politics of victimhood in which the races compete against each other has created a no-win situation...

...Earlier in the year he had voiced the fear that the growing automation of cotton picking, in conjunction with the efforts of the White Citizens Councils to force blacks out of Mississippi, put SNCC in a bind...

...Cobb's opposition to a Summer Project that relied on white students did not stop with the issue of political control...

...Now he returned to the same subject...

...I said that Negroes take whites out of the field, then put them up in leadership roles," Cobb declared...

...It was a position that left Moses vulnerable to the charge of ignoring the needs of the SNCC staff and playing down the encroachments of whites...

...So what you've got is hundreds of white people all coming South, and they can do things better than Negroes, and the question is, What do you do with them all...

...The type of person you have is much more important than whether he's white or not...

...Water comes from a faucet and goes into a hole...

...She and the others opposed to the Summer Project feared that an expanded version of the Freedom Vote would leave SNCC face to face with an aroused white community but without help once August ended...

...The steps leading to Greenville began in 1961 when Bob Moses, the man who would later head the Mississippi Summer Project of 1964, went to Mississippi to start organizing voter registration...

...They couldn't go out on the street...

...The whites who worked for SNCC did more than pull their weight...

...Afterward, the idea was to train blacks to replace them...

...On election day the precautions taken to make sure the Freedom Vote took place paid off...

...There was, as Charlie Cobb would later acknowledge, an inherent contradiction in the stance he and the opponents of the Summer Project took at Greenville...

...We've got too much to lose if they come down here and create a disturbance in two or three months, and they're gone...

...As the Greenville meeting drew to a close, Ivanhoe Donaldson carried Cobb's self-sufficiency argument one step further...

...If SNCC shifted to a strategy that made white volunteers the key to its future, the influence of these field secretaries would be diminished, for they would then be forced to share control of the movement in Mississippi and to admit that by themselves blacks could not determine their own fate in the Deep South...

...The core of field secretaries on whom SNCC depended in Mississippi were, as Bob Moses put it, twenty-five or thirty young Negroes "who viewed themselves as some kind of unit...

...At a time when SNCC was arguing that Mississippi should be desegregated, they were arguing that integration posed a danger for SNCC...

...As expected, their efforts met with violence...

...The inroads Moses was able to make in Mississippi were not, however, enough to spare him and SNCC from constant arrests and heavy fines...

...At Greenville it fell to Bob Moses to spell out that vision...

...This fear is the measure of our racial chasm," Steele wrote...

...Additional comments on Greenville are taken from a 1966 interview Anne Romaine conducted with Bob Moses, also found at the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, and from Howell Raines, My Soul is Rested: Movement Days in the Deep South Remembered (Putnam, 1977...

...I didn't say whites take over...

...That fall, Moses, working with Al Lowenstein, a SUMMER • 1990 • 333 Debate at Greenville thirty-four-year-old liberal lawyer, brought a hundred students from Yale and Stanford to Mississippi to help in an undertaking that became known as the Freedom Vote...

...His doubts about the Summer Project, in conjunction with those of Charlie Cobb, also a northerner, were revealing...

...For Greenville was talk, and in Hollywood you don't make a television docudrama, let alone a film like Mississippi Burning, about talk...

...If whites were part of the Summer Project, it would, Moses argued, change the way blacks saw them...

...What was needed to move SNCC beyond such feelings was not a debater's skill but a more compelling vision of the future...

...He also worried about SNCC's ability to deal with white versus black values...

...But SNCC's overall experience with whites in Mississippi was, he insisted, the opposite of what the Summer Project opponents claimed...

...Negroes would have to take them as people...

...People say of white workers in the field they're more articulate and they're going to do the talking, and then if you get them in the office, they're better typists, and so they get into leadership positions," he observed...

...If it goes like it's going, they're going to beat us back in five or six years, because the cards are stacked in their favor," he argued...

...Up to this point you had a minority of whites working in the movement," Charlie Cobb, a Howard University student and the future head of SNCC's Freedom Schools, observed...

...The August March on Washington (where March sponsors forced SNCC chairman John Lewis to tone down his speech) and the September bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham (which killed four black children) formed the backdrop for SNCC's meeting...

...q Notes The record of the Greenville meeting is to be found at the State Historical Society Wisconsin in minutes compiled by Howard Zinn...

...For the opponents of the Summer Project, the answer was to become a tighter, more cohesive organization...

...Donaldson did not try to put his fears in the shape of a systematic argument...

...But most of all, Moses argued, SNCC needed whites because without them it was in danger of leading a "racist movement" in which color, not moral conduct, separated friend from foe...

...I doubt the word will have a new vogue, but the values, under whatever name, are worth working for...

...We lack eating and drinking utensils...

...Two years later, the Harvard-educated Moses, who had been teaching math at the Horace Mann School in New York before going to Mississippi, was a legend in the civil rights movement...

...If whites became dominant in the Summer Project, how could whites' values be challenged...

...Moses made a point of talking about the areas where SNCC was vulnerable...

...Moses, on the other hand, was convinced that SNCC should expand as it had done during the Freedom Vote, when "whites brought a searchlight from the rest of the country with them...

...Where was help to come from...

...The opponents of the Summer Project were prepared to keep working in a Mississippi in which, as one SNCC staffer put it, "with Negroes it's open season-365 days a year...

...Harper's, June 1988), would use very similar language to describe racism in the 1980s...

...The tendency is for the whites to articulate the demands of Negroes to the Negro person while the Negro kids stand quietly on the side...

...You're fighting yourself all the way across the board...

...But they were not prepared to support a Summer Project that, in their view, would jeopardize the gains they had made...

...Fannie Lou Hamer would later quiet the room by declaring, "If we're trying to break down this barrier of segregation, we can't segregate ourselves...

...More than 80,000 blacks cast symbolic votes for Henry and King, and the media, intrigued by out-of-state students working in Mississippi, gave SNCC the kind of publicity it had never received before...

...By the end of 1962 in Greenwood, where SNCC had had some of its greatest success, it was, by Moses's own admission, broke and little more than a holding operation...

...Whites convincing blacks of their rights—this entrenches the concept of white supremacy...

...What they do resonate with, however, is history, and what that history tells us is that without a sense of commonality the kind of black-white alliance is doomed that made possible the Second Reconstruction of the 1960s—and that will be needed again if we are to have a Third Reconstruction in which jobs, housing, schools are the target...

...Six of the Yale students were arrested within thirty-six hours of reaching Mississippi, and there were numerous beatings...

...What Cobb and those in SNCC who believed that civil rights "should be primarily a Negro movement" came back to as an example was the postcolonial experience in Africa...

...The dilemma was one that success had made possible but for which there was no painless solution...

...He had been threatened, beaten, shot at, but in a state where more than 90 percent of eligible black voters were kept off the rolls, he had gotten people to go to courthouses to register...

...This success brought SNCC new momentum...

...Would they not see the black SNCC staffers they identified with put in a position of inferiority...

...Integration has become an abstract term today," he concedes...

...In doing so, he had the support of Lawrence Guyot, who in 1964 would head the newly formed Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party...

...The tone I get is that white people came in and took over, and now we're going to put them in their place...

...They were sleeping on the floors...

...King called a beloved community—a truly integrated society of blacks and whites...

...But Donaldson's unwillingness to try to intellectualize his feelings made them all the more powerful when he concluded, "Whites are mobile, and Negroes aren't...

...During the Free334 • DISSENT Debate at Greenville dom Vote whites seemed to gravitate to positions of authority, and many in SNCC feared what would happen if over a whole summer the whites working in Mississippi outnumbered blacks...

...They had to stay in the office...

...I get the feeling the way things are going in two or three years the movement will be run by white students," Donaldson declared...

...Their skepticism showed that it was not just SNCC's Mississippi-born field secretaries who feared an influx of whites...

...Cobb's fears were also shared by whites in SNCC...

...But at Greenville the only concessions Moses was prepared to make were limited practical ones...

...The civil rights organizations were not prepared to make Mississippi a focus...

...The staff was exhausted, and they were butting up against a stone wall, no breakthroughs for them," Bob Moses would later recall...

...Some whites, Moses readily conceded, had overstepped their bounds during the Freedom Vote...

...Or did it want to switch to a political strategy that relied on the use of northern students...

...Charlie Cobb saw inviting whites to come to Mississippi for the summer of 1964 as an admission of failure...

...The one thing we can do for the country that no one else can do," he declared, "is to be above the race issue...

...They couldn't go to dances...

...Twelve of us are here, sprawled out along the concrete bunker," a 1961 Moses letter opens...

...A quarter-century after the last important civil rights legislation, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Steele's words don't resonate with hope the way Bob Moses's once did...

...This is Mississippi, the middle of the iceberg...

...We are smuggling this note from the drunk tank of the county jail in Magnolia, Mississippi...

...He raised the issue of how a SNCC that depended on whites to carry out its Summer Project would appeal to young blacks...

...Moses made approval of the principles of the Summer Project a test of his leadership, and on the second day of the Greenville meeting abandoned his normally deferential style of leadership to argue for a multiracial SNCC...

...But for him the facts were not the whole story...

...Bob Moses's letter from jail appears in Tom Hayden, Revolution in Mississippi (SDS, 1962...

...On the other hand, if progress continued to be as slow as it had been from 1961 to the Freedom Vote of 1963, there was a good chance that SNCC's Mississippi staff would soon become the guardians of a lost cause...

...The feelings SUMMER • 1990 • 335 Debate at Greenville that Cobb and Donaldson voiced were inseparable from the pride that kept SNCC going...

...SNCC was faced with the toughest decision in its short history: Did it want to continue the kind of organizing that had gotten it through its first two years...

...But Moses believed he had no choice...

...The question of whether or not the white students coming in would take over the movement, would dominate . . . was a risk, but not as important as the risk of not being able to do anything at all," he would conclude...

...The result was a decision that would bring over one thousand volunteers—most of them white— south for the Mississippi Summer Project of 1964...

...They couldn't go to this cafe or that cafe...

...Greenville was one of the last times in the 1960s when blacks and whites in SNCC thought of themselves as a "band of brothers" yet still questioned the value of an integrated civil rights movement...

...In an interview with Robert Penn Warren, Moses would later discuss how his reading of philosopher Albert Camus made him concerned with the ways victims are tempted to turn themselves into executioners...

...Greenville gets mentioned in histories of the 1960s, but unlike the Montgomery Bus Boycott or the Selma March or the murders of Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman, Greenville has sparked little popular interest...

...Now to be innocent someone else must be guilty, a natural law that leads the races to forge their innocence on each other's backs," Steele argued...

...This is not done on purpose by whites, but it is done...

...But having taken this stance, Moses went on to argue that SNCC's position in the civil rights movement gave it a special opportunity to show how blacks and whites should get along...

...He also had the backing of Fannie Lou Hamer, a grandmother who had endured the loss of her job and a savage beating by police to become one of the most revered figures in SNCC...

...As the debate heated up, it was its political rather than its physical dangers that its critics zeroed in on...

...SNCC bore no onus, Moses believed, for failing to cope with the racial violence of Mississippi...

...Two weeks before the election the SNCC staff and the students Lowenstein had recruited fanned out across the state...

...And he had brought into SNCC a group of young Mississippi blacks who, like himself, were prepared to risk their lives to change the South...

...Now the movement is national...

...Its aim was to provide dramatic proof that, if given half a chance, Mississippi blacks would vote in record numbers...

...Beyond this point, Moses was convinced, there was no room for compromise on the race issue...

...Moses understood all too well why such anger occurred...

...It's a question of rational people against irrational people...

...This pattern means that both races have a hidden investment in racism and racial disharmony, despite their good intentions to the contrary...

...How do we move beyond that hidden investment...

...But logic alone, as Bob Moses and those favoring the Summer Project knew, was not going to carry the day at Greenville...

...As such, it speaks directly to our present situation, when integration shows signs of becoming a word we are again willing to use and civil rights heroes, like Georgia Congressman John Lewis, SNCC's chairman during its heyday, insist, "We need to talk again about building what Dr...

...Like the Students for a Democratic Society's (SDS) famous Port Huron meeting of 1962, Greenville would change the political course of the 1960s...