The war at home: forgotten events in the civil rights movement.

It was forty years ago--July 3, 1965, to be more precise--when I sat with three other ministers in a care owned and operated by blacks in Jackson, Mississippi, as we lifted our beers to celebrate having helped break the back of Jim Crow. The successful march held that day around the state and city buildings in downtown Jackson did for Mississippi what the Selma Bridge incident accomplished for Alabama.

We were hilariously giddy as well as physically and emotionally exhausted. I was there as leader of a team of fourteen ministers from the North who had been sent by the National Council of Churches (back when the NCCC stood for something).

I had been selected as team leader on the dubious strength of my experience the previous summer in Greenwood, Mississippi, where I'd been arrested along with other ministers for refusing to move, around to the back of the courthouse, our picket line supporting blacks seeking to register to vote. We were determined there would be no more back of the bus or back steps of restaurants or back of the courthouse for the brave black folks who were marching with us that day. When we were arrested, we were singing, "This little light of mine, we're going to let it shine.... All the way to the courthouse ... all the way to the jail ... we're goin' to let it shine...."

Our team of fourteen had been in Jackson for almost a week. Every day a group of fifty to one hundred black and white supporters tried to march to the center of town, only to be arrested and hauled away in buses. After four days all the ministers except me were at the fairgrounds being held in the only building big enough for several hundred demonstrators. I had to stay out in order to handle any problems that arose--like the incidence of family illness that necessitated arranging bail for one member of my team.

Jackson Mayor Allen Thompson and Mississippi Governor Paul Burney Johnson Jr. had sworn that none of these "pinko outside agitators" were going to march around the city and state buildings. No way.

Things had obviously heated up in Washington, D.C., too. Word had been sent from President Lyndon B. Johnson's oval office that this crisis was to be resolved. On July 2, 1965, an injunction came down from the federal district court prohibiting Jackson and Mississippi officials from preventing our exercise of free speech--our marching.

The fairgrounds were emptied out, including my team of fourteen, and we prepared to march the next day, together with other northerners and several hundred local black people.

The Background: 1963-1964

To understand the fury of the whites protesting along the street the day of the march, it is necessary to know that for years the White Citizens Councils--composed of educated professional men--had been conducting a systematic disinformation campaign. Many of the whites along the march sincerely believed the propaganda they had digested: that we older marchers were communists and that the young, northern white participants were there to engage in wanton sex with local black boys and girls.

I don't think many people remember the high price paid by civil rights activists prior to Selma and our march. Black women who tried to register to vote were routinely fired from their jobs as domestics in white homes, even though they were often the only financial support for their families. There were over three hundred incidents of violence in Mississippi during the summer of 1964, including beatings and murders. Civil rights workers were jailed routinely, and racist white prisoners managed to savagely beat them. Black men who tried to register to vote sometimes had their hands and feet bound with barbed wire, after which they were dumped in the river. One local white Unitarian minister in Greenwood, who was a supporter of black voter registration, was killed by a shotgun blast in his back the day after we left Greenwood in 1964.

Some of this history you've probably seen in such films as Mississippi Burning, which supposedly describes the FBI's efforts to find the murderers of three civil rights workers in 1964. I scoffed at the movie. The only role the FBI actually played, on Director J. Edgar Hoover's explicit order, was to observe and report. The local agents were southerners, hardly sympathetic to start with, and many civil rights workers have stories of how FBI agents stood by taking notes as activists were beaten or arrested for no reason. Police cars routinely followed vehicles with out-of-state license plates and arrested on trumped up charges, like crossing the center line or running a stop sign, those they merely thought were civil rights workers. I remember one minister saying as we drove across the state line from Nashville, Tennessee, that he felt like he was entering Nazi Germany.

In August 1964 my wife Dee and my four small children were with me in Greenwood. We stayed with a black Baptist minister who kept a shotgun on the wall and calmly declared that he wouldn't go peacefully with any mob that came after him. Toward the end of our stay we went on a picnic with a black family to a nearby creek. Later we heard about a similar picnic, a mile further down, which had been invaded that same day by several carloads of young whites. They beat a folk singer so severely with chains that he was bedridden for weeks.

By the time I was arrested in Greenwood in 1964 the blacks who marched with us in picket lines were all women or children. It had become too deadly for black men to try and register to vote. And white Mississippians, for all their prejudice, would rarely engage in violence against women or children.

But white sympathy for the black cause wasn't tolerated. One local lawyer who undertook to defend a civil rights worker was visited at home by a couple of whites who showed him an affidavit signed by an eleven-year-old white boy claiming the lawyer had raped him. The lawyer was told to leave the state within twenty-four hours and never return or be prepared to face the charges. The lawyer was innocent, of course, but he chose to flee. In another incident, a white man who had entertained a black family in his home received a call from his mother the next day. She said she'd been told that, if he didn't straighten up, she would be fired from her job as a school teacher and would lose her entire accrued pension. The White Citizens Council used such tactics on freethinking whites while encouraging poor whites, especially Klansmen, to do the violence.

The March

So tempers among whites on that day in 1965 were hotter than the July pavement. We marchers fully expected violence. As we were driven to the area, the streets were already lined four deep all along the two blocks of public buildings.

As we marched, three and four across, in a solid parade around the two downtown blocks, the whites, four deep at the curbs, crowded against the barriers, hissing, booing, and shouting obscenities. The local cops sat on their motorcycles and appeared to be alternately afraid of being overrun and hoping they would be.

I was marching with Jim, a young black worker from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. He had spent two summers being threatened and shot at in Rulesville, one of the most dangerous towns in Mississippi. We were walking behind a couple who had their arms around each others' waists (actually, the boy's hand was in the girl's back pocket). Both were about sixteen years of age and they were barefoot and dressed in dirty overalls. What was wrong with this picture for spectators was that the boy was white and the girl was black and they were deliberately and obviously displaying their affection for each other. This fueled the fury of the whites, whose deepest fears were over intermarriage and the "mongrelization" of the Caucasian race.

I turned to Jim and said, "How can they do that? Don't they realize this crowd is looking for some excuse to charge in and wipe us out?" Jim just grinned at me and said, "They might as well swallow the whole pill now."

We all could have been mobbed and killed that day. Fortunately, the local people were intimidated by the federal presence. There were no incidents. We marched around and around, finally quitting a little after noon.

Selma gets the credit for the Civil Rights Act of 1964, enacted by Congress that fall, but our less dramatic week in July 1965 deserves more than a footnote in history books.

While I led a group of ministers, there were Humanists, atheists, Jews, lawyers, teachers, and others beside us all the way, helping our cause of desegregation and rights for all.

Vern Rossman graduated from Yale Divinity School in 1951, became ordained as a Disciples of Christ minister, later left that church to join the Society of Friends (Quakers), and is today a Humanist. He established two innovative prison visitation programs that still continue in New Jersey and Indiana and spent almost two years in prison himself for his part in the Griffiss Plowshares action in 1983 when he and six others hammered and poured their blood on a B-52 bomber being converted to carry nuclear tipped cruise missiles.