We Might ‘Overcome Someday': West Tennessee’s Rural Freedom Movement

Abstract

After white landowners evicted black sharecroppers in late 1960 for registering to vote, activists in Fayette and Haywood Counties organized ‘Tent Cities' in a bid to focus national media attention on their plight. Over the decade, it developed into a wide-reaching campaign for desegregation in public accommodations and education, welfare reform, voting rights, and sustained community improvement measures. This little-known episode significantly advances scholarly understanding of rural civil rights activism. Notably this story reveals complex dualities including: a local grassroots movement bolstered by a national framework of organizations and social networks; leadership on national, state and local levels; collaboration despite tensions along race, age, class and gender lines; coexistence of nonviolent strategies and armed self-defense; and varied initiatives demonstrating activists’ focus on local needs.

In rural West Tennessee during the winter of 1960–61, black families huddled in tents against the bitter cold. After being evicted from their homes, a few thousand men, women and children set up makeshift homes in the tents with small stoves for warmth against the wind that blew unrelentingly through the tent flaps. ‘Tent City was a miserable life,' one man recalled. ‘The tent was 16 by 14… My wife and four kids livin[’] there. We had to cook in there, we had to sleep in there, we had to eat in there. And mud – when it rained in Tent City it got so bad on Tent City ground you had mud almost up to your knees.' Many of those evicted were unsure whether to remain in the area, in the hope of returning to the land, or to leave for opportunities elsewhere. The same sharecropper ‘was never sorry [he] registered' to vote, as he hoped that he and his family might ‘overcome someday’, but prospects did not seem promising. Ella Baker, a nationally-renowned civil rights activist, highlighted the contrast between American prosperity and the squalid living conditions many rural black Americans endured. ‘The real tragedy,' she claimed, ‘is that in the wealthiest country in the world, in the jet-propelled atomic age of 1961, human beings could honestly say that their mud-floored tents were more comfortable than the shacks they formerly called ‘home’ for five, 10 or 30 years.' ¹

When African Americans sought to register to vote in large numbers from spring 1960 in rural Tennessee, the white economic squeeze was swift. By the end of 1960 alone, 257 black sharecroppers had been evicted from Fayette County with more than 700 sharecroppers evicted in neighboring Haywood County. Absolute numbers are difficult to ascertain, but perhaps 700 families were eventually evicted in these counties. In what briefly became a nationally-engaging civil rights story, many black families set up ‘Tent Cities’ in these two counties. ²

As media descended on Fayette and Haywood Counties in late 1960 and early 1961, it seemed that there was a chance for significant political and economic change for poor local African Americans. National civil rights organizations and labor unions across the country turned their attention onto these two rural counties in West Tennessee, documenting the mounting humanitarian crisis. International, national and regional attention focused on this small rural area as a potential turning point in the civil rights movement, a moment where the optics of black disfranchisement, and white supremacist economic coercion and violence, matched with vivid images of families huddled together in tents to force federal intervention and political change in the Cold War-era Mississippi Delta. Several Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) activists believed that the black freedom struggle in Fayette and Haywood Counties was a ‘watershed' moment, one that depicted vividly ‘the connection between poverty and civil rights’. Specifically, the grassroots activism indicated ‘a new dawn of freedom [was] breaking through the age-old social, economic, and political discrimination that blighted the lives of both whites and Negroes in the South’. But change was slow to come. ³

This rural West Tennessee activism, greatly understudied in civil rights literature, provides an excellent case study for considering civil rights activism away from the period's most famous ‘classic' confrontations. In particular, this activism informs recent scholarship concerning the goals civil rights activists pursued, the roles of violence and non-violence in the black freedom struggle, the periodization of civil rights activism, and the tensions along race, gender, class and generational lines among civil rights activists. Moreover, existing studies, though insightful, have relied upon a limited primary source base, be it newspaper articles, oral histories, or available court case summaries. In contrast, this article draws upon oral history evidence, archival materials from a presidential collection, the activists' papers and the recently-opened Tent City materials at the University of Memphis special collections to reconstruct the freedom struggle in this locale, with a close focus on the interplay between local and outside activists in the early 1960s. ⁴ Power was spread across grassroots activists, local leadership and partnerships between different local and national organizations. While activists affirmed a commitment to nonviolent direct action, armed self-defense had been a necessity for African Americans in this rural locale for decades. Generational differences concerning strategy featured prominently, particularly as focus shifted from voter registration and welfare relief to include the desegregation of public accommodations. Buffeted by differences in leadership, vision and direction for the movement in 1963 and 1964, relationships between local activists and outside student groups became increasingly fraught. This fracture was not complete, however, as local African American activists, and sympathetic whites continued to pursue economic, political and educational advances. ⁵

This episode of West Tennessee civil rights activism highlights how grassroots organizing developed in the Deep South, and the place of indigenous local leadership within that struggle. This episode has more in common with Mississippi Delta activism than Memphis activism, which was geographically close, but relatively insignificant to Fayette and Haywood County activists. In the late 1950s, Fayette and Haywood, 78 per cent black and 62 per cent black respectively, were Tennessee’s only majority black counties; in the United States, only two other counties were poorer than Fayette County. Refocusing analysis of the civil rights movement on poor rural areas like Fayette and Haywood where black leaders campaigned for political, economic and social gains highlights the interplay between local and outside groups. Complementing the work of scholars on other rural freedom struggles, despite the extensive involvement of national organizations in civil rights activism, local activists were the prime movers. ⁶

Rural African Americans’ efforts to register to vote marked a new phase in the black freedom struggle in West Tennessee. A mere 17 Fayette County blacks had voted between 1952 and 1959, out of a county population of nearly 17,000 African Americans. The location of the voter registration office was moved regularly by whites to dissuade potential black voters. Rev. June Dowdy recalled that when he asked where the office had moved to, he was told by white men ‘we’ll register you in Hatchie Bottom’, a heavily wooded area south of Brownsville, the county seat of Haywood that was known as a nearby location where blacks were lynched. Most notably, after the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) chapter of Haywood County (in Brownsville) was established in 1939, the body of Elbert Williams, one of the members, was discovered in Hatchie River a year later. Beginning in May 1959, the Memphis NAACP chapter was heavily involved in creating a local initiative to encourage blacks to register to vote in Fayette County, and even earlier in Haywood County, in May 1940. From June 1959, Fayette County witnessed more than 2,000 African Americans registering to vote, and in the general election of 1960, more than 1,200 blacks voted in Fayette alone. For the first time since Reconstruction, Fayette County voted Republican. Viola McFerren, Fayette County resident and activist, stated that this was ‘when hell kicked off in Fayette County’. While welfare leagues formed in subsequent years in both counties, their power (and subsequent success) was limited by the tenacity of white resistance to racial change in heavily black areas. In such a context, any meaningful grassroots activism in Fayette and Haywood Counties demonstrated the black community’s strong socio-political network. ⁷

The issue of federal involvement in southern segregated communities during the civil rights era was thorny. The Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation had valid grounds for involving themselves in the protection of voting rights, were it not for the stranglehold local white leaders had on many regions including West Tennessee. Prior to the eviction of black sharecroppers from Fayette and Haywood Counties, the federal government had been aware of local white resistance to black voter registration. The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights visited Brownsville, in Haywood County, then Somerville, in Fayette County, in May 1959 to investigate claims of voter intimidation. Following this investigation, using authority granted by the 1957 Civil Rights Act, the Department of Justice filed United States v. Fayette County Democratic Executive Committee on 16 November 1959, which accused the county’s Democratic Executive Committee of denying blacks the opportunity to vote in the Democratic primary. ⁸

Faced with continued disfranchisement, black residents of Fayette and Haywood Counties took matters into their own hands. The local black activists created community organizations, one in each county, in order to continue registering blacks to vote as early as the spring of 1959 and to form a local political machine. The Fayette County Civic and Welfare League and the Haywood County Civic Welfare League were created to address these issues on the local level. There were local leaders in both counties, John McFerren and Harpman Jameson of Fayette County, and Currie Boyd of Haywood County, who attended the Volunteer Civil Rights Commission hearings on 31 January 1960 in Washington, D.C. Their presence at the hearings, organized by Ella Baker (then of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference [SCLC]) and Carl Braden of the Southern Conference Educational Fund (SCEF) as well as 15 local civil rights and civic organizations, demonstrated that the local freedom struggle had reached a national audience. In February 1960, following his earlier legal work in Fayette County, Memphis African American lawyer and NAACP member James F. Estes and four league members drove to Washington to demand federal enforcement of the Civil Rights Act of 1957 against the evictions of the local black sharecroppers. The group met with Assistant Attorney General John Doar in Washington. They were ultimately successful in this endeavor when, on 14 December 1960, the Justice Department filed a case alleging some seventy persons (landowners, a bank, and local merchants) had violated the sharecroppers’ civil rights. ⁹

Furthermore, the leagues in Fayette and Haywood Counties tackled the situation of economic hardship for local blacks with an approach that would mirror later 1960s welfare relief efforts. In addition to providing immediate housing, legal advice, and economic relief for displaced sharecroppers, the leagues simultaneously distributed food (twice a week in Fayette), oversaw crop loans, funded scholarships for young people, paid medical bills and worked on programs for adult education. These broader social relief efforts fell under a Fayette program called ‘Operation Bootstrap’, which mainly focused on healthcare, small businesses, and adult education; the idea was that without a long-range program to support local blacks in their efforts towards self-sufficiency, efforts to register voters would not solve the larger problem of inequality. However, as the Fayette league articulated, ‘our primary objective is to register Negroes in this county’. ¹⁰

As the sharecroppers faced increasing hardships, the sight of African Americans forced into homelessness reflected poorly on the federal government, a key concern during the Cold War era. The Kennedy administration was particularly worried that ‘vivid photographs' of the black sharecroppers would be ‘used against the United States in the rest of the world’. Nationally, the African American magazine Ebony connected the Cold War and inequalities faced by West Tennessee blacks in its September 1960 story entitled, ‘Cold War in Fayette County’. One black minister from Detroit who visited the area described the situation in Tent City as ‘really good grist for the Communists’. ¹¹

The situation remained dire for those already displaced and living in tents. Their location left them exposed to harassment and violence from local whites, meaning that armed self-defense was sometimes a necessity. John McFerren, under a microscope due to his leadership role locally, recalled that in driving to Memphis every few days to stock his store, the local White Citizens’ Council ‘chased me just about every time’. The most frequently-related account of violence towards blacks living in Tent City is the shooting of Early B. Williams on 28 December 1960. Williams was asleep in a tent with his family when he was hit by bullets fired by whites driving by the site. Reportedly, shots were returned from the tents in response, and Williams was driven to the hospital by armed guard. The displaced sharecroppers also faced continued unemployment. The White Citizens’ Council in Fayette blacklisted evicted black sharecroppers. These blacks could neither buy necessary food products nor receive assistance or goods from whites. As an article in the Chicago Defender detailed, the embargo included an ‘illegal denial of federal crop loans, foreclosures, evictions, refusals to sell food and gasoline to blacklisted Negroes, and refusal to provide the Negroes health and medical services’. This embargo on necessary products began in April 1960, following the registration of hundreds of black voters in March 1960. Haywood County whites organized a similar blacklist during the summer of 1960. ¹²

At the Memphis NAACP chapter’s urging, the national organization took a stand against the embargo on 8 July 1960. Major oil companies including Gulf, Texaco, Amoco, and Esso Standard (now Exxon) participated in the embargo. Consequently, the NAACP had its state offices and its local and youth chapters encourage a counter boycott of these oil companies. Within a single week of the NAACP’s press release calling for a boycott, the organization was in communication with the companies to resolve the issue. ¹³

Beginning in December 1960, donations of food and other basic, necessary items like clothing and medicine, were donated to the local area to relieve unemployed and displaced blacks from the colder weather and the economic embargo. The Kennedy administration provided surplus food for the former residents through the Department of Agriculture when the donations from private organizations could not meet demand. One Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) activist estimated 3,500 people were ‘dependent on outside aid' (1,400 adults and 2,100 children) in January 1961. Black communities in both counties needed these materials but lacked a pre-existing system to feasibly receive the items and distribute them to locals, with the local welfare leagues filling this void. Made up of African American leaders, in particular businessowners John McFerren of Fayette and Odell Sanders of Haywood, these welfare leagues were central to resistance. Despite facing allegations from the area’s white leadership of misappropriating the donations, the community leagues continued to oversee the acceptance and distribution of the necessary items on behalf of the displaced sharecroppers. ¹⁴

What developed from the combination of local activism and national donations was a network between local activists and various socially- and politically-minded organizations, namely the NAACP, CORE, the National Sharecroppers Fund and the American Friends Service Committee. This combination bore similarities to the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO), composed of local and national groups operating in Mississippi during Freedom Summer in 1964. In 1960, CORE chapters formed ‘Emergency Relief Committees for Fayette and Haywood Counties' to raise money nationally for those living in Tent City. James Forman, soon to be SNCC’s first executive secretary, travelled from Chicago to assist the displaced blacks in Tent City as a CORE representative in December 1960. Forman declared to the Associated Press that ‘these undemocratic elements in our society will think twice before they start another economic boycott against Negroes in the South who want to register’. Labor unions including the United Automobile Workers, the Teamsters, the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), United Packinghouse, Food and Allied Workers Union, and the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, sent representatives and supplies to the area to aid those displaced. The AFL-CIO gave ‘run money' to sharecroppers who had land to work but were affected by the economic boycott, and therefore unable to obtain subsistence funds between planting and harvesting. ¹⁵

In addition to these organizations, SNCC had a substantial role in the civil rights movement in West Tennessee. The strength of the grassroots activism in the area, its proximity to civil rights protests in the Mississippi Delta and the publicity of evicted black sharecroppers and disfranchised locals organizing into welfare leagues all indicated that West Tennessee was a place to keep an eye on. Indeed, SCEF member and civil rights activist Anne Braden believed SNCC was interested in West Tennessee ‘because it is a good project' and that it tied ‘in well with Mississippi’. SNCC members were involved in the area’s activism from as early as winter 1960, when Casey Hayden and others arranged a food drive for the displaced sharecroppers; the organization’s newspaper The Student Voice dedicated a number of stories to the situation and urged its readers to donate their time, clothing, food or funds to the cause. SNCC members felt this was an important initiative at the time, but they would also recall this drive years later as an impetus for their activism in civil rights efforts across the South. Students who came from outside the area to work formed connections with SNCC, including Walter Tillow, who went on to work for the organization, and young activists from the area who formed local organizations also affiliated themselves with SNCC; one such group was the Fayette County Council for Christian Action, which allied with SNCC in the summer of 1963. Local groups like this council received funding, wider recognition and access to SNCC’s media engine when they affiliated with SNCC; the West Tennessee Voters Project in particular, a student organization, used the SNCC WATS [Wide Area Telephone Service] to spread news about their work in West Tennessee in the early to mid-1960s. This association, however, added to the concerns of some older Fayette activists that SNCC would, in the words of student activist Danny Beagle, ‘sort of bomb into the county and take things over’. ¹⁶

Conditions for blacks in Fayette and Haywood Counties worsened as the majority of evicted sharecroppers and their families lived in tents from 1959 to 1962. Although sharecropper evictions continued quietly, civil rights initiatives increasingly focused on segregated public facilities as well as the longer-standing stresses on voter registration and economic advancement. Local activists and newly-arrived outsiders drove this shift. ¹⁷

This next period of local activism was marked by youth participation in conjunction with the established, ongoing adult-led movement. The phase encompassed two stages: first, the influx of white northern college students into the area to work on voter registration and community improvement projects, and second, the organization of local black youths (with some white college student participation) to target segregated public accommodations in the two counties. ¹⁸

Initial publicity about Tent City drew several college students to Tennessee before program organizing was fully underway. A student from New Mexico State University, Bob Plese, was likely the first white student from outside the South to come to the area, early in 1961. Plese worked, as students after him would, on voter registration. Students from the University of Michigan travelled to bring food and clothing to Haywood County in early February 1961 but were arrested on traffic charges. Police released them from jail on the condition that they leave the county, but not before a deputy sheriff ‘slugged' a photographer for the University of Michigan newspaper for snapping the deputy’s photograph without his consent. In spring 1961, two college students from Cleveland, Ohio, Charles Butts, who was white, and Gilbert Moses, who was black, travelled to West Tennessee to witness the registration drive’s progress. Also that spring, white Fisk University professor Nelson Fuson and two young black activists, Leo Lillard and J. Metz Rollins, drove from Nashville, Tennessee to deliver items they had collected from friends, including food and household goods. In November 1961, Kennedy’s administration received reports of a student and minister arrested in Brownsville for trying to give clothing to displaced black Haywood County sharecroppers. In the words of a fellow minister, the minister and student were arrested ‘on concocted charges and in a secret hearing' and fasted while in jail. ¹⁹

The national publicity of the West Tennessee voter registration drives and the increased interest in broader civil rights organizing contributed to the establishment of three organizations that facilitated assistance to West Tennessee from outside the state. The first, Operation Freedom, was made up of social and religious organizations from around the country including CORE and the SCEF, and sent thousands of dollars in donations to the West Tennessee efforts. Formed in October 1961, Operation Freedom’s first project was to send financial assistance to Fayette County. The program’s membership included well-known civil rights activists such as Ella Baker, Carl and Ann Braden, C. T. Vivian of Nashville and Myles Horton of Highlander Folk School, a training school for radical southern labor and civil rights organizing in Tennessee. The funding from Operation Freedom dramatically declined after the organization decided to broaden its focus to the Mississippi Delta in 1962, but it continued to give local blacks loans for purchasing crops and related farm equipment, as well as for home financing. ²⁰

The organization’s decision to widen its activism inspired Virgie Hortenstine, vice-chairman of Operation Freedom and a white, Quaker, Cincinnati housewife, to found Fayette Haywood Work Camps Inc. in late November 1962. The workcampers, as they were called, travelled to the West Tennessee counties and assisted local black residents with specific community tasks, like pouring concrete or construction. According to Minnie Jameson, a Fayette County Civic and Welfare League member, Hortenstine’s efforts to bring students to the area began with building a community center; the students’ travel was funded between the money they raised before going to Tennessee as well as local donations. Hortenstine coordinated funding from various religious and social groups from the Midwest and Northeast, including the Baptist Ministers Conference of Cincinnati, Race Relations Committee of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of Friends (a Quaker organization), Cincinnati Chapter of Operation Freedom, International Voluntary Service, Miami Quarterly Meeting of Friends from Ohio and Philadelphia Friends Social Order Committee. ²¹

The third organization involved in on-the-ground activism was the West Tennessee Voters Project, based out of Cornell University. In many ways, the establishment of Cornell as a hub for civil rights training developed organically. As Lisa Anderson Todd, a Cornell student and participant in Mississippi’s Freedom Summer who caught a ride south with fellow students headed to Fayette County would later say: ‘My stand for civil rights was not difficult or controversial for me in the supportive environment at Cornell, where other progressive students were also becoming activists for civil rights.' Campus talks with Cornell students who had worked in civil rights efforts and returned to campus as well as widely-recognized leaders such as James Forman of SNCC fostered an environment for students to be introduced to, and moved by, opportunities to work in the South. Launched by Charles Haynie, a former Cornell student, other northern white students and a Cornell professor named Douglas Dowd, the West Tennessee Voters Project functioned to assist the ongoing voter registration drives in Fayette County. Haynie had attended a SNCC conference in spring 1963 where he met longtime white activist Anne Braden, who encouraged him to join in West Tennessee activism. He visited the area with his wife during the summer in 1963, and returned north that autumn. Haynie had connections with other non-southern white activists including University of Wisconsin students Robert ‘Bob’ and Vicki Gabriner and Danny Beagle, a Cornell graduate and Wisconsin graduate student in 1965. The group’s work in West Tennessee began in the summer of 1964 and continued through 1966. It founded a Freedom School to promote literacy education and provide political training, an approach that mirrored SNCC’s local organizing efforts in Deep South states. Indeed, the project participants were a combination of white northern college students, many of whom had SNCC connections, and local black activists; figures in the summer of 1965 hovered around 40 project members, 10 of whom were locals. When the majority of students left to attend school in August 1964, Debby Rib, a University of Wisconsin graduate, remained as the Fayette County on-site coordinator to plan for the upcoming year. ²²

Students from outside Tennessee who participated in the workcamps during this direct-action focused phase defined themselves as civil rights workers. They brought an understanding of the potential life-threatening consequences of their actions as well as a missionary (and sometimes culturally-insensitive) approach to their work. Many of them had previous experience in other southern efforts, such as Michael Tobin, a student at Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, who wrote to Bob Gabriner to ask to participate in the Fayette County Project in April 1965 and highlighted his participation in the Selma to Montgomery, Alabama march the previous month. Gabriner subsequently questioned Tobin’s commitment to the project, to which Tobin replied: ‘I’d be a fool to say that I wouldn’t be scared. However, I’d be more of a fool to think that Fayette County is going to be a picnic.' Tobin continued: ‘I have not minimized the possibility of danger and I am prepared to commit myself under these conditions … I would be willing to do whatever you or Danny [Beagle] feel I should do.' Tobin mirrored the reasons many students, northern and southern, gave during this period for participating in civil rights activism. Deborah Cohen, a University of Chicago sophomore, also wrote Gabriner in April 1965 to ask to participate in the project that summer. Cohen cited her previous work with SNCC, CORE, American Friends and the Harlem Education Project in Chicago, Indianapolis, Indiana and New York as her experience in similar initiatives, work that prepared her well, she believed, for West Tennessee. ²³

Students who participated in the project were selected for their political involvement and past activism, where relevant. Most young activists were from middle class white backgrounds and were students at northeastern and midwestern colleges and universities, similar to the makeup of Freedom Summer participants. Students from across the country came as workcampers, often for a summer or spring break, from a broad swath of colleges and universities including public universities in the Midwest and smaller liberal arts colleges in the Midwest and Northeast. They stayed with local black families during their time in the area, and brought their own food to prevent being a financial burden on their hosts. The majority of them were drawn South by the publicity surrounding the sit-in demonstrations in the early 1960s. A political report describing proposed activism described the ideal candidates as ‘Workers experienced in political organization and/or the civil rights movement as necessary’. Furthermore, ‘Both white and Negro organizers are needed preferably with stable and mature personalities. Local paid workers will be Negro with a good background in political organization and at least some experience in working on elections in Fayette County.' Project organizers sought politically-inclined and experienced young people, with whites as the outsiders and blacks of equal position within the project but from the local area. ²⁴

In the summer of 1963, an established network of white student workcampers and SNCC activists in Fayette and Haywood Counties began to push for desegregating public accommodations, in addition to continuing the voter registration drive. In Fayette, 38 Somerville black high school students marched towards the courthouse in mid-June, singing as they walked, and were stopped by Sheriff Clarence Pattat before reaching their intended destination. One of the visiting white college students recorded their altercation with Pattat, which featured the black youths’ strong defense of their actions. When Pattat demanded to know what they thought they were doing, especially as they were marching without a permit, one female student said, ‘we are marching for our freedom’, and ‘we’re our own leaders’. Many of these black students were the children of newly-registered residents of Fayette County, which suggests that their arguments may have come from conversations at home. One of these young black demonstrators, Minnie Jameson’s nephew James, attributed his interest in the activity to Minnie and her husband Harpman’s influence, both of whom were heavily involved in the Fayette County Civic and Welfare League. ²⁵

As the protest strategy became more confrontational, some local whites became more violent in response. Somerville, for example, deputized a number of white men after the high school students’ march in mid-June 1963, and by August the police were using fire hoses and tear gas to disperse protestors. The municipal government passed a curfew ordinance in an unsuccessful effort to stop the number of demonstrators from growing. Consequently, more than 50 protestors were arrested. In Brownsville (Haywood County) on 3 August, recently deputized men confronted a civil rights protest at the courthouse. In addition to releasing a dog on one young woman, they poured a chemical directly onto another protestor. Edna Mae Jones’ wounds from the dog attack and Eric Weinberger’s chemical burns led CORE to contact Assistant Attorney General Burke Marshall to request a federal investigation. The escalation of demonstrations and the violent reaction to them threatened to open the area up to unwelcome national media coverage on a level not seen since the mass eviction of sharecroppers a few years earlier. ²⁶

The West Tennessee Voters Project organized specifically to help register black voters in Fayette County, and during the summer of 1964, project members identified their major test: the 7 August 1964 county general election. By assigning project members to each of the 15 election districts, the project canvassed the area to register residents up to 1 July 1964, the final day for voter registration prior to the election. Each district was then split into smaller areas, called sections, each with its own leader, named a section leader. In this sense, project members hoped to create a political system that could continue after they left the county. Section leaders led two meetings during the summer with between 10 and 15 voters in attendance; the first of these meetings, which lasted about an hour, pertained to the candidates running for election and answering questions about voting procedures. The second meeting centered on broader subjects such as the upcoming presidential election and federal civil rights legislation. The project also sent students to nearby counties to organize similar grassroots registration programs. Later, the West Tennessee Voters Project continued to pursue the idea of SNCC funding a West Tennessee project that would stretch out from Fayette into the surrounding counties of Haywood, Shelby, Tipton and Hardeman to help blacks in those counties to organize their own freedom movements. By March 1965, they joined with what they identified as ‘local indigenous leadership’ and fostered ‘agitators’ from Fayette specifically to move into those other regional counties. ²⁷

By the county election in August 1964, white and black voter registration numbers were approximately even (3,500 each), and out of the 15 election districts, 11 of them were majority black. In the county general election, two men affiliated with Fayette activism ran for positions in Fayette government; L. T. Redfearn, a sympathetic white landowner, ran for sheriff, and Rev. June Dowdy, an African American, ran for the position of tax assessor. Dowdy’s election was the first time in living memory that a black candidate ran for a position in Fayette County. In the general election on 3 November 1964, African American Earl Maclin ran as an independent for Congress. These candidates were not elected, but the results from the elections, the county one in August in particular, indicated that efforts to organize and register new voters brought incremental gains. ²⁸

Around the November election in particular, there were additional concerns over political organizing for local black leaders, which white students did not always notice. Older black leaders in West Tennessee feared the potentially radical direction outside student-led activism promised to take, and this was clear in the discussions locals had about potential collaboration with the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP). After some white members of the West Tennessee Voters Project and local Fayette African Americans met with Fannie Lou Hamer, Bob Moses and Dave Dennis from the COFO at the Freedom Democratic Party convention in Chicago in August 1964, questions about the differences in direction emerged. The West Tennessee Voters Project thought the chance for the Fayette movement to be linked with the MFDP would be beneficial, specifically the opportunity to receive additional funding and trained staff and potentially establishing a West Tennessee Freedom Democratic Party. The Fayette movement activists who travelled with them to Chicago agreed. Questions remained in the wider West Tennessee movement, however, about how much the local organizing should associate itself with establishment politics. This ideological difference paralleled the tensions that emerged after MFDP failed to unseat the all-white Democratic state delegation for the party convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey. In West Tennessee, it would influence the direction of the movement. A Nashville lawyer who represented the West Tennessee Voters Project and Fayette league’s legal interests in the summer of 1964, Whitworth Stokes, Jr., described the change in perspective of local Fayette activists’ focus for the future as more of a ‘great disappointment based on unrealistic expectations’, attributing it more to a difference in perspective that influenced the local movement’s focus, rather than personal or generational tensions. After August 1964, when he was retained solely by the Fayette movement, Stokes noted that local black activists ‘were determined to continue their efforts' without the help of students ‘even though they knew it was not going to be an easy, or short, struggle’. ²⁹

The West Tennessee freedom struggle further highlights the coexistence of non-violent protest and armed self-defense before the mid-1960s. Attacks on white and black youth activists increased, but the reality for African Americans living in the area had already been one of armed self-defense as a necessity. In Fayette, John McFerren would stand guard overnight with a ‘sawed off shot gun' while his family slept inside. In Haywood, John Frank Bond reported that following a cross burning in his yard, he slept with a loaded shotgun at the head of his bed. One white SNCC activist declared that ‘Nonviolence is irrelevant here’, while a reporter from the North observed that ‘everyone – Negro and white – is armed’, ‘Negroes have nothing to lose’ and that black youths carried ‘some kind of weapon… at all times – a knife, a razor, a tire chain or a gun’. Militant white segregationists and police used baseball bats, pocket knives, hot coffee, sticks, dogs, cattle probes, tear gas and even acid as weapons. Most of the media accounts that workcampers released described both ‘hoodlum attacks' or unorganized mob violence alongside more coordinated assaults, and pinpointed local whites, the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) and local law enforcement as the assailants. White SNCC activist Casey Hayden recalled that on a trip to Fayette and Haywood Counties to deliver food donations in spring 1961, she and her later husband Tom Hayden were ‘chased' out of Fayette and Haywood Counties by ‘angry white men… at gunpoint’. This was after she had called the police, who then ‘joined the toughs' and chased them for 50 miles. ³⁰

Direct action protests escalated between May and August 1965, as tensions within local leadership simultaneously mounted. Disagreements highlighted tactical and generational differences. When James Gray, a 17-year-old vice-president of the Fayette County Student Union, was stabbed during a protest including 50 black students and four white students in Somerville on 3 May 1965, Rev. Fred L. Shuttlesworth, the president of SCEF, beseeched Tennessee Governor Frank G. Clement to ‘act immediately' to ensure the safety of the young civil rights workers. Here the ‘student union’ denoted a group of black youths in the local area, probably of high school age. Robert Horton, one of the Fayette league members and one of the adults who participated in the public demonstrations, remembered that in the same incident when Gray was stabbed, he, Debby Rib and Danny Beagle were at The Hut, a local restaurant. They were drinking at the counter when a white man named Julian Pulliam poured hot coffee over Horton’s head. That same week, local whites beat Danny Beagle and his brother Peter with baseball bats at a nearby drug store and accosted another white student, Tim Hall, in a restaurant as the protestors organized a week-long series of demonstrations. A league member in Fayette County and Robert Horton’s wife, Maggie Mae Horton, recalled that during the attack on the Beagles, ‘I went screamin[’] then for someone to come… [while the man who attacked the Beagles], a bad sonofagun, he was standin[’] there with his bat drawed back and I just moved the bat over and I went in the door.' Protestors targeted segregated restaurants in Somerville and soon broadened their focus to the nearby towns of Braden, Rossville and Moscow. ³¹

In June 1965, harassment of young civil rights workers continued to escalate as the West Tennessee Voters Project organized additional targeted attacks on public accommodations. Two West Tennessee Voters Project workers, Jerry Jenkins, a local black participant, and Neil Varian, a white volunteer, were ‘physically hauled' out of a restaurant in Hardeman County at the intersection of Route 100 and Road 64, near the town of Whiteville. Organizers planned a larger, integrated protest for the next day. A few days later, civil rights workers in Haywood County reported ‘a lot of harrassment [sic]' from local whites. ³²

The violence against civil rights demonstrators escalated into July, as a successful coalition of school-aged children, youth volunteers and adult activists organized a boycott of area schools and public accommodations protests. On 10 July, Tennessee National Guard members reportedly cursed and threw rocks at some 40 Haywood County Student Union and West Tennessee Voters Project members while they integrated the Brownsville municipal pool. A cross was burned on the Covington, Tennessee property of the movement leader in Tipton County on 11 July. ³³

In living with black community members, white students were somewhat integrated into the local grassroots activism, and at times benefited from armed protection, often at great personal risk to their African American hosts. Recalling events from July 1965, one Cornell University student noted that after the KKK burned a cross on the property where they were staying, 15 African American men who had heard about the incident on WDIA Memphis radio came to protect the students, ‘heavily armed – our own Deacons of Defense’. The student was referring to the Deacons for Defense and Justice, a Deep South group of African Americans who advocated for armed self-defense for community protection. In mid- to late July, a Cornell University student described attacks on project workers involving beatings, including one with a pot that was so forceful that it broke a protestor’s jaw. The local police later claimed they did not see the attack and suggested that the man’s jaw had already been broken before the altercation. This attack in Brownsville on 23 July was followed by a Covington protest the next day that drew an incredible 1,000 marchers despite 103-degree heat. ³⁴

At the beginning of August, a school boycott of the Fayette County Training School was called; this boycott demonstrated the breadth of activists’ demands. Out of 1,200 students registered, on the first day of the boycott, 2 August, only 300 students attended classes. By the third day, about 65 per cent of students remained at home. Fayette County protestors, in fact, were brought to court over their participation in the boycott, but citing the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the county judge sided with the demonstrators. Those who participated in the school boycotts also faced more informal coercion from the Somerville-based welfare department, such as restrictions to their access to welfare and food aid. On 7 August, a Brownsville demonstration including West Tennessee Voters Project members and Haywood County Student Union members brought a few hundred marchers despite heavy rain and the presence of Tennessee state troopers. This was the largest protest of its kind to date in the town. The demonstrators presented Julian K. Welch, Brownsville’s mayor, with four demands: increased job security for African American police and equal protection of protestors by Brownsville police; improved school conditions including ‘[more money for] books, hot lunches, more school buses, and better roads’; desegregation of Brownsville theaters, cafes and recreational accommodations, including the reopening of the county swimming pool as an integrated facility; and ‘fair employment in all factories and government jobs’. ³⁵

Mirroring the events of Freedom Summer a year before, the violent attacks against civil rights protestors in Fayette and Haywood Counties, particularly the white youth activists from outside the South, garnered national attention. After three white students sustained particularly serious injuries towards the end of July, a group of 12 concerned parents and Douglas Dowd, the Cornell professor and Fayette County Project chairman, travelled from the New York area to Washington, D.C. to call for federal protection of their work in West Tennessee. Following their meeting with John Doar, the head of the Civil Rights Division at the Justice Department and several congressmen, including Senator Jacob Javits (R-NY), the parents urged Tennessee governor Frank G. Clement and the mayor of Brownsville to provide further protection for their children. Bob Gabriner soon explicitly compared local law enforcement negligence in West Tennessee with Freedom Summer in a press release about the attempted restraining order and injunction. In the release, ‘Gabriner (former Cornell roommate of murdered Civil Rights Worker, Mickey Schwerner)’, announced: ‘We are doing everything in our power to get sufficient protection from federal, state, county and local public officials on Saturday [7 August protest]… to prevent any disaster occurring similar to the Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner murders in Mississippi last summer.' ³⁶

Like Mississippi’s 1964 Freedom Summer which faced accusations of interracial sexual relations between participants, activists in West Tennessee were equally concerned about the potential condemnation of such behavior. During the summer of 1964, after a night of ‘drinking and disgraceful behavior’, 11 students participating in the West Tennessee Voters Project were sent home. The peak of these concerns occurred during the next summer when, as Vicki Gabriner described, white female project members were ‘indiscreet' about interracial relationships and white male project participants were ‘really hung up on Negro girls’. These interactions were, in her words, ‘detrimental to their work’. Three more students with West Tennessee Voters Project were dismissed for what was described as ‘sexual immorality' at the time. Members of the Original Fayette County Civic and Welfare League and the West Tennessee Voters Project clashed in the summer, with the student activists reporting that league members ‘have been talking against the [project members], charging that they are Communist, that they are a bunch of white people trying to take over, that they are there only for sex’. Debby Rib alleged that ‘NAACP folks and others who could be helpful' financially to the West Tennessee Voters Project ‘will really avoid you like the plague if they believe there has been something to do with “SEX” happening’. In later years, Charles Haynie recalled the situation slightly differently in defending the project’s decision to dismiss participants amidst the accusations of sexual impropriety. ‘We agreed to be governed by the behavior patterns that were acceptable to the black leaders who invited us there,' he said. ‘This was their county, not ours.' These questions about the morality of younger activists exposed underlying tensions along generational, race and class lines. They also suggest that white outsiders might have underestimated the salience of interracial sexual allegations in the region. ³⁷

The ‘new dawn of freedom' predicted at the beginning of the Fayette and Haywood Counties movement never fully materialized, but the activism was still impactful, if incremental. In 1971, the Original Fayette County Civic and Welfare League recalled with pride that their accomplishments included higher voter registration in the area, financial and employment assistance for members of the community and federal assistance in the form of Head Start and Neighborhood Youth Corps programs and funding for job training and loans. Viola McFerren was instrumental in bringing Head Start to Fayette, having drafted the initial proposal for the program in 1964, and in 1966 she was appointed by President Lyndon B. Johnson to the National Advisory Committee of the U.S. Office of Economic Opportunity. The area’s activism also had an impact on future generations’ self-awareness and political aspirations. ³⁸

Local African Americans faced an arduous path towards racial advancement even after the West Tennessee activism, but the experience radicalized both the students who participated in the demonstrations as well as those from the area. For non-southern white students, involvement in civil rights activity in West Tennessee and other Deep South areas in 1964 galvanized the New Left as college students returned to their campuses invigorated by their experiences. Many of those who were involved in Fayette, Haywood and other surrounding counties organized fundraising drives and gave talks at their colleges and universities. Others, like Bob and Vicki Gabriner and Charles Haynie, returned to the area and remained active in organizing students in subsequent years. Two other college students demonstrate the personal connection some young participants felt to the area in making multiple return trips. Tim Hall, a native of Ohio, was a Cornell student when he first visited West Tennessee as part of the university’s project. Following the 1964 election, Hall stayed in Fayette County for a while to collect affidavits for U.S. Attorney John Doar alleging election fraud against the county’s black candidates. After time away, he returned to Fayette in May 1965 to participate in the Somerville sit-ins and assist Fayette County Student Union members to publish their local newspaper, West Tennessee Freedom Train. Hall made a final trip in the summer of 1966 to assist in Fayette County elections. Dean Hansell, a student at Denison University in Ohio, worked in Fayette County on some fifteen different occasions beginning in 1971, during which he taught in Fayette freedom schools on law in Tennessee, worked in freedom libraries in Fayette and Haywood, and helped with the construction of the Rossville Health Clinic. ³⁹

The West Tennessee movement embodied the challenges facing many rural southern activists; the tensions within the local movement mirrored those evident in the national civil rights coalition by the middle of the decade. Beyond the struggles of local people for civil rights in Fayette and Haywood Counties, a national network of pro-civil rights organizations and mostly white non-southern students provided economic relief and shelter to displaced sharecroppers who had sought the franchise. Peaceful protest methods coexisted with armed self-defense, while intergenerational and interracial disagreements were (mostly) held in check through 1964. And though access to the ballot box drove this phase of activism, voting was understood as only part of the broader African American struggle for political, social and economic advancement. As in Mississippi, civil rights activists in Fayette and Haywood Counties eventually prevailed on federal authorities to protect black voter registration efforts, at least to a limited extent. Their gains were incremental, bitterly-resisted and incomplete.