Freedom's Children (17 page)

Ben and I were the ringleaders of the young guys. They let us go where other kids couldn't go, or didn't want to go, cause we weren't scared of anything. At eleven and twelve years old, we weren't afraid. On Saturday Mickey had promised us that we could go with them, but later Saturday night he said, “No, you guys can't go. Something might happen. It just might not work.” So Ben and I got mad. Oh, we were angry.

We never saw them alive again.

Ben and I were waiting in the COFO office because they were supposed to have been back. We waited and waited and waited. Still no word. Then someone got in touch with the sheriff up there. The sheriff told them that he had arrested them, and then let them go. I thought they were dead, killed. I believed they were dead ‘cause I knew Philadelphia was mean, mean people there, very hateful and prejudiced people. In 1964 they didn't want to see no blacks riding together with no whites. They'd rather see anything than that. That's why Mickey told us we couldn't go.

The policemen and sheriffs were coming up, asking questions. All kinds of men with suits on, asking questions. The office was busy then. People were trying to find out what was going on. You heard so many stories. I think it was my grandmother said she remembered a man come in to eat and said that when it started to rain, he saw three streaks of lightning in the sky. I never will forget that as long as I live. I thought it meant they were dead and buried.

One white man used to bring bread and things to my grandmother's place. One day she said to him, “Sure was awful what they did to those three guys up there, isn't it?” My grandma said he dropped his head and he looked so funny. When they did get the men who killed them, he was in that group. Bringing her bread like that for years. He was a little short man.

After we found out for sure they were dead, it was chaos in the COFO office. There was a lot of crying going on. Everything went wild. Right after that it looked like the whole office just vanished. Like the heart of it was gone. Those guys were the backbone. After they left, everybody else started leaving. Never an office again. I wish somebody would have stayed here, keep that place open. Why did everybody seem like they had to give up because they were gone? There was a leader in the crowd somewhere. Somebody could have carried the torch on after all they'd been through.

I sure missed it. I missed it a lot. It was all of our friends, all of our fun. I miss Mickey and James. And I miss Rita. I miss the work, too, that we did there. It made you feel good. Like you were doing something that really meant something.

When we got older, Ben and I talked on making a new COFO office. I would like to get the same office that Mickey and James used. It brings back so many memories, that building. I'd do what Mickey and them did. We got a man here says he can't find nobody black good enough to stay working for him. I know that's a lie. I would get on his case first. Get him to straighten out, or we're going to boycott his store.

I would work with kids. I'd spend time with them like Mickey and them did with us, soften their hearts up. A lot of times it'll save you from being in trouble later in your life.

I believe if it weren't for Mickey and them now, I don't know what kind of guy I would have been. That's right. They really made a difference when I was growing up. I'm glad that I had the opportunity to meet those guys and to know them and work with them. I loved the work they were doing. I'd really like to be a part of it again.

We used to watch the Freedom Riders on television. In early ‘63 my brother got involved in the freedom rides. By him talking to me and my family, that's when I got an idea what the movement was about. To be a Freedom Rider meant sitting in the front of the bus. But it didn't only mean riding on a bus. Bucking the system, not getting off the sidewalk when white people walked by, not saying “mister.” Anything that would be a sign of rebellion, rebelling against the system, rebelling against the status quo, rebelling against segregation.

My brother was scolded and told not to do that anymore by my father and my mother. The older people were telling him not to get involved, but he continued. I thought about being a Freedom Rider. Whatever my brother wanted to do or did, I wanted to do.

Mickey and Rita [Schwerner] organized the community center in the spring, and I went every day. I was in school at the time, and usually after school I would come by the center. Sometimes my brother would bring me home. I was eleven years old. I played with the typewriter, played Ping-Pong, sang freedom songs. “Keep Your Eyes on the Prize” was my favorite. The one I disliked the most was “We Shall Overcome.” It was so slow.

There were no organized activities for black kids in the community, and the Freedom Center offered some. We were kept pretty busy. It was also a learning experience. There was a Freedom School where we received tutoring in English, arithmetic, writing, those things. There was always something happening then. You never got bored.

We would sit around on the floor in a group and everybody would sing. There was always a discussion going on. Mostly adults would talk about voter registration, and what was happening. They talked about the latest attack, who got whupped recently by the racists. And we were listening. It was usual for a black person to get beaten up by southern segregationists. It was unusual for a white person to get beaten up by other whites for being with blacks. But over a period of time, you understand, the whites hated those other whites just as much as they hated the blacks.

 

We was picketing some five-and-ten stores, Woolworth‘s, Kress's, and others that wouldn't hire blacks behind the counter. Outside there would be a circle, marching in front of the store. Depending upon how many people you had, the circle might stretch for a whole block. If there were not too many, then it would just be around the entrance of the store. You would march around, carrying your sign and singing freedom songs.

I think the worst demonstration I was on was where this big redneck, this big racist, took my picket sign away and tore it up. Then he grabbed me up in the collar, threw me down, and told me to leave and that he'd better not see me again. I walked around the corner and I was scared. I didn't know what to do. So I went to the COFO office, got another sign, and went back on the demonstration. That's where I got hit in the head. I was bleeding, but it was okay. It was okay to be hit. It was okay to go to jail.

I was arrested more than twenty-one times before I was twelve years old. “Demonstrating without a permit.” That was what they locked everybody up for. Because I was a juvenile, only eleven for most of my arrests, I would go to jail, and then they would put me in a holding cell, or they would set me on a bench right outside the courtroom. We would wait until an adult came and got us out.

In a couple of demonstrations, Mickey Schwerner would come and get me out. Most of the time it would be my brother. He was pretty quiet, but I remember waiting one time for him to come and get me. I could hear his steps in the hallway, and he was saying, “I come for my brother.” I was glad. He was proud of me. I was glad to be there too. That's where the action was at in the sixties. That was it.

My brother and Mickey and Goodman left on a Sunday morning [to go to Philadelphia, Mississippi]. The next morning I woke up, expecting my brother to be back. They had promised to take me somewhere, and they didn't come back. The minister who lived down the street from my house came up and told my moms that nobody'd heard from them all day. He was going to Philadelphia to look for them. That's how we got the word. Reverend Porter came up and told us.

During the summer, during the disappearance [from June 21 to August 4], I was very much involved. That's when I got arrested quite a few times. Before the summer, I could go off by myself sometimes and do things on my own. But during that summer, I always had to have an adult. My momma said that.

She was more and more nervous about the whole situation. She grew up in an environment where from a very early age she had seen others in her family disappear, and no one knew anything.

I think that my mother believed that my brother and the others were dead. I think she believed that because she's been there longer and that was the way of life with her. I think my sisters believed that they were dead. But I can pretty much say that until the funeral, I didn't think so. I just knew my brother. I knew that he would find a way to come through. He always came through. And I just knew that if there was any way for him to come through, he would be driving up the driveway in the morning. No doubt about it.

I had been told a thousand times by people who shaped my whole thinking pattern that they [Rainey and Price] killed my brother. I thought, How can I get back? What can I do to them to hurt them also? At the memorial somebody asked me what I thought, so I just said what I thought at the moment. After I made that speech, my father gave me a hard time. He was talking, “Forget it. Let bygones be bygones.” I guess he was saying mercy, or forgiveness, and all that stuff.

What I remember most is how sad the whole affair was. Throughout the funeral and the memorial service, I kept wondering why didn't people do something. Why didn't my father, my grandfather, my great-grandfather? Why wasn't things made different? Why wasn't change taking place then, so that this event wouldn't be taking place now? I felt a desire to do something to hurt the people that hurt my brother. At that time I couldn't do anything. Even now I can't do anything. But now I'm mature enough to realize that there are things in the work I'm now doing with the James Earl Chaney Foundation about voter registration that I think is not for revenge. It's like a continuation of what happened in the sixties.

I didn't have any idea this would be history. Having a sense of black people being put in an American history book was unrealistic. That's the way it was. When my brother and his companions were missing and they were looking for the bodies, they found more than seven additional black people who had died over that period of time who were involved in the movement. They had disappeared. Nobody searched for them. Nobody was concerned about them. Nobody even talks about them now. So it was like another black person gone.

When I was a kid, a young black man was being transported to a mental institution. He was handcuffed by the sheriff and his deputies. En route to the facility, they let him out and shot him behind the head, and nothing was done. I knew then that we were in for a long, long struggle. I thought maybe this place, Neshoba County, might be the only place that was like this. Maybe one day it would change.

I used to look at television a lot. Out of the super heroes—Roy Rogers, the Lone Ranger, Superman, Batman—that stood for right and justice, I couldn't understand why they couldn't come here and do the same things. Straighten up Neshoba County.

The first time that I met Michael Schwerner and James Chaney was at our home [in Longdale, Mississippi]. I was ten years old. They was telling us about so much wrong, and our rights. Michael Schwerner was always talking about the constitution and what wasn't right. It was enlightening. Really educated me into knowing that there were rights on written documents, and from 1865 we were free.

Once after a rally Schwerner said, “We have come here to die if necessary.” And that puzzled me. I looked at him and said this man is talking about dying, and I'm just now getting to know him, and I like him, too. After the services I asked him, “Why you want to talk about dying?” He said, “One day, young Mr. Steele, you might find something worth dying for. Freedom is worth dying for, fighting for other people's freedom.”

I remember that night very vividly. We started off in the truck to go to an official board meeting of the church, my sister, my mama, me, and my daddy. Mr. Jim Cole had walked past going down the road, and we picked him up. When we got to the church, me and my sister stayed outside under the night light.

We were playing with this frog when a car came by and stopped right out in front of the church. We saw a white fella get out and look up at the church. I was curious why he was looking up there. We went in, and I ran over to my father and I said, “Hey, there's somebody out there looking at us.” They carried on with some more church business. Finally we sang the dismissal song, and they said a prayer.

It was my job to cut off the lights in the church. I was standing on top of the bench over the light switch, waiting for them to turn on the headlights of the cars. I looked over in the corner, and I saw the back door of the church was open. It was on the same side as the cemetery. I flicked the lights off in a big hurry, and I saw something white, and I know that door opened. I took me a good look, and CLAP, I ran out and jumped up on the truck and said, “Daddy, somebody's in the church!” It seemed right then that it was a nightmare.

There was a car sitting in the driveway with three or four white males inside. Mr. Jim Cole got on the back of the truck. My sister was closest to my mother, and I was beside my dad. My mother pushed my sister down as we were going into the road. I popped up to look. As we got to the road, the cars came up and blocked us in. I was peeping, and the guy told my father to cut off the lights. I looked out the back windshield and I could see the other people leaving. Then they asked my father, “Where are those boys?” Mr. Jim Cole said he'd do the talking because my father had a temper.