American Experience; 1964; Interview with Bob Moses, Civil Rights Activist, part 1 of 2

These cameras have these fans and them because they're basically computers with lenses attached to them now. You know, in some ways you could argue that 1964 for our purposes really begins on November 22nd, 23rd, 1963. Do you remember where you were when... I was in Jackson really on my way to the office. We had a little office there on Lynch Street. Yeah, and I spent the rest of the day in the office watching the whole thing unfold, right? You and 93% of the rest of America. Everybody, yeah. You remember how you felt? Well, I've made a short list, actually. I said, well, if they're taking out the president, who else is going to go? And I watched those people go over the next 64, 72, about eight years.

And most of them were on your list. All the ones on my list went. Really? Yeah. Wow. Up until 64, how long have you been in Mississippi? So I come to Mississippi first in the summer of 1960. So the sit-ins hit, you know, in February. And I'm teaching at Horace Man and I'm really struck and need to go down. So my uncle is at Hampton. And I go down to see Uncle Bill, it's my father's brother. And the Hampton students are marching into Newport News, right? And Wyatt Walker comes down to give the mass meeting.

He lives in Petersburg, Virginia. And announces that King is going to set up an office in Harlem. And so I get the information and I actually make the organizing meeting. Byrd Rustin is running the organizing meeting. And I volunteer. So I spend the rest of the spring every day going down to volunteer. And then I ask Byrd if I can go down and work with King. I'm thinking he's in Montgomery. And Byrd sends me to Alabama, who is in Atlanta. And is King's executive director at that point. And what I'm in the office with Ella and I meet Jane Stembridge, who was a young white person who was at Union Theological Seminary.

And I learn about SNCC. Because all the time I'm in Byrd's office, no one ever mentioned SNCC, right? So Jane is working as the first really secretary, executive secretary for SNCC. She's a one woman operation. And they have a coordinating committee. They come during the summer. And I see Marion Barry and Diane Nash and other people who are part of the coordinating committee. And they plan to have a full meeting, their first conference. And Jane is worried because she doesn't have any contacts in Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. So she gets together with Ella and asks Ella to give her names. And Ella knows everyone who's tried to do anything across the South.

So they put me on the Graham bus and I make a tour. I stopped at Talladega and Birmingham, Clark Stale, Cleveland, Jackson, Shreveport, New Orleans, Gulfport, Luxe, Mobile, and then back. And when I'm in Cleveland, Amzy Moore, who's the head of the NAACP in Cleveland, really opens a door. He says, what the students need to do is come and work on voter registration, not public accommodations. And he's been pouring over the data that the Civil Rights Division or the Justice Department has produced. So what I think people don't really understand what happened with Eisenhower in the 1957 Civil Rights Act

and Lyndon Johnson, right? He's Senate Majority Leader. Right. He's got this act through to try to get space for professors at Tuskegee, right, who qualify under anybody's standards the right to vote. They didn't anticipate the Senate movement and SNCC, right? So they are setting up this Civil Rights Division within the Justice Department collecting all this data. John Doa has signed on in 1960 and has begun working up there in around Haywood County. So Amzy's sitting on this, it blew my mind because I've been through all these schools, right? But I never knew that there was a whole congressional district with a majority of black eligible voters.

That never voted, right? And Amzy is right, sitting right square in the middle of this congressional district, right? And so he says, the students need to come in and do voter registration. And so- He seems obvious now, but looking back, it's like, wow, here is some real potential. Yeah, so yeah, the issue which I understand now better was that, you know, doing voter registration for say was not radical, but doing it in the Mississippi and the Mississippi Delta was in order for black people to vote institutions, national institutions had to change, right? We didn't understand that in the end it was the National Democratic Party that would have to change that really held the key to Mississippi. We had no clue about that at all, right?

If you look at, I mean, I want you to be able to put in the context you need, but I'm wondering if you place yourself at the beginning of 1964. And you look back, where were you at that moment? I mean, I remember Ed King was saying that there was a level of exhaustion in the movement at that point. So where we were at the beginning of 1964 was at a choice point, because when mega was assassinated in June of 1963, right? A couple of people moved, right? One was all alone, all alone steam. So all was dean of freshmen at Yale, had been dean of freshmen at Stanford. And when mega, and he's a Democratic operative, right? With Hubert Humphrey and the whole Democratic sort of liberal wing, right?

So he is really upset when mega is assassinated and comes down and tours Mississippi, right? And so when in the fall we do the freedom vote, Al brings the students down from Stanford in Yale. And so that now opens up a whole different perspective. In some sense, the issue of, well, can we, is the country going to get into this story, right? Because the students bring the country with them. Now, the other person who moved was Robert Spike. So, yeah, Robert Spike, who was also, he was one on my short list, right? So, but Robert Spike was the national director of the outreach of the National Council of Churches. And he decided that the National Council of Churches had to get involved in the civil rights movement after mega assassination.

So he came up to me at the march on Washington and said that he had decided that they were going to focus on Mississippi. And it was the only place where he could say to his constituents all over the country that he was working with all the civil rights organizations because we had this umbrella group, Kofo, right? So an ACP, SCLC core and SNCC were all in there. What about Kofo Stanford? The Council of Federated Organizations, right? So Bob then begins to bring his resources in. And actually, as 1964 starts, we're in Hattiesburg for Freedom Day, right? And Spike has an idea about how to get the civil rights bill passed, right?

He's getting ministers from the Midwest by the busloads. They're coming down. We're doing this voter registration. He's exposing them to Mississippi, right? So we're doing this Freedom Day in Hattiesburg. Spike is having his ministers come in. They go back, they organize their churches, they go to Washington to lobby, right? So he has a whole plan about how the civil rights bill needs to get the votes that it needs, right? But in the meantime, Lewis Allen is murdered, right? So that's what's happening for us at the beginning now. Lewis Allen's murder for me is closes a chapter in Mississippi. So it's a chapter that opens with the murder of Herbert Lee.

So Herbert Lee is murdered in 1961, and all we can do at that point is commit ourselves, right? But when Lewis is murdered, we have this option of bringing the country into this picture through Al and the students, right? What was it about Allen's murder that flipped a switch, I guess, for a lack of a better term for you? Well, I know that was a very personal thing. Right, well, the issue was that there was no way to actually get any news about the murder. I mean, when this bombing just happened up there in Boston, and I'm thinking the difference between those kind of events, and the events that we participated in back in the 60s, it was just utter silence, right?

Utter silence. There's nobody knows, and the media doesn't care, right? So they are murdered in silence, right? But it was clear that people cared about what happened to the white college students who came down. They were part of America, right, in a way in which Herbert Lee and Lewis Allen and the people we were working with were not. The mega wasn't some sense part of America, right? So it wasn't just the black and white, but the black people that we were working with were not part of America in that sense. What happened to them didn't count. The mega was because of a certain level of prominence. Yes, right, right. Just, yeah, knock enough mega couldn't be done in silence, right? The president, Kennedy said something about it.

He got on the national TV and talked about it, right? So, but the people we were working with were invisible, right? And what eventually made them visible or helped to make them visible was the country's youth, in other words, youth that the country acknowledged as part of its youth, right? Coming in because when they came they brought the rest of the country with them, right? And so that was our choice point at the beginning of 1964, but we all didn't agree that this should happen. So Ed came to say he was going to felt like an all or nothing, double down kind of moment. What were the stakes and what were the tensions or the arguments about whether to go forward? Well, the basic, there were two, I think of it now that there was a big division within the SNCC field secretaries themselves, some of whom did not want what they thought of as an external force coming in that would disrupt their internal collision.

And it, of course, that's what happened, right? But on the other hand, I didn't catch from any of the actual sharecroppers, domestic workers, day laborers that we were working with, the farmers, they all wanted help, right? They wanted resources, people to work, to stand up from wherever source. They didn't have the institutional protective protectionism that the SNCC workers did.

Yeah, and you have to appreciate for the SNCC workers what they had done, right? And you're dealing mostly with maybe, you know, it's a tiny amount, right? The 30 or so field secretaries, young kids, right? I mean, I'm the oldest, you know, I'm 64, I'm approaching 30. But these students that are late teens early 20s, right, who've been really working, again, invisible, right? To the country at large, no one knows about them, no one knows about the work that they've been doing, right? And the work is not easy by any stretch of the imagination what those field secretaries have been living through, right? Yeah, I know, what they're doing is kind of, it's guerrilla warfare within the country, right?

So your safe haven is your black community, right? The place where danger happens is the courthouse, right? The roads are not safe, right? So, so that small group really forged together by this war zone that you're working in. How did they see these white college kids, or mostly white, you know, I know the balance. Yes, I mean, everything is really important to have them be. There was some, I mean, the most significant mix of black college students came from Howard, right? The group that Stokeley Carmichael in, Portland Cox, and then brought down, but, so, I think they, they saw them individually in different ways,

and they all had different ways of relating to them once they came, you know? But at that point, at the beginning of 64, they were a diamond that they didn't want them to come. Not all of them, right? They split on the issue. And I was trying to hold off and not weigh in on the decision, and then Lewis Allen was murdered, and I thought that we have to do this now, right? Another way to think about it is that, you know, John Doer, after the civil rights workers were murdered in June in 64, John had me come to the Justice Department to meet with author's lesson to Junior and Burke Marshall.

And so, you know, the question was, well, wasn't what you folks were doing part of the reason why this led to this murder, right? And wasn't what you did, the cause of Mississippi, right? But I don't think it was, and what I reminded them was that it was the March on Washington, and the announcement that we were going to have a National Civil Rights Bill, right, that started this. So it started with the bombing of the church in Birmingham, right? And then it spread across the fold in Mississippi. They started burning churches everywhere, right? So Mississippi was kind of sitting there, you know, with no protection at all, right? In response to an anticipated national shift, right?

And so what the summer project and freedom summer actually did was provide Mississippi with an entree into the National Consciousness, that is, because those bombings were happening, and again, they were invisible, right? And I remember right by telling me, he said, you know, these were synagogues that were being bombed, right? There would be a national uproar, right? The Jewish community would be rising up. There would be a national uproar about this, right? So anyway, you have to decide whether to go for this program, right? And you must have understood what it meant to bring all of these people black and white, but had flood in Mississippi, that's all. Right, I understood it in a certain way. I mean, I have a different understanding of it now,

terms of a different understanding of my story about the country and the history of the country. But I think we were, I was, and I'm not sure about all of us, but a historical, right? I had no real understanding of the history of Mississippi, of the history of the country, right? So my understanding of it was in terms of what I knew on the ground, right? I didn't yet really understand that the key to Mississippi lay in the national Democratic Party structure, right? You thought it was solvable from within?

Yes, or the Justice Department, or even the Congress, or something, right? But it was neither those, right? It was the actual national Democratic Party structure itself, right? But that was not visible from within Mississippi in terms of understanding how the country worked. And it was a Democratic Party structure because they were responsible for in effect, propagating or supporting the apartheid in a way? Well, so in that moment there, what people like Senator Eastland, right? The power lay in the fact that they were part of the Democratic Party structure. And once that Party structure said, no, right? You are not going to be able to do what you've been doing, right? They switched. I mean, just like that, it was in some sense, you know, magic, you know? Eastland, two years later, he's on the stump with Aaron Henry, you know?

So that's south, right? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that's which I think happened under the radar screen of the country, that is the switch of a whole class of people from Democrats to Republicans, right? And the idea that there's a privilege class of people who operate really independent of but associated with the national party structure, right? And have their own agenda which shape the agendas of the national party structure is something that operates underneath radar screen. So you went to Oxford. Right. Tell me what. That's right.

So Oxford was sort of, well, the goal, I guess, the goal for me was to help the students understand that their job was really simple. Very difficult job, but really simple, which was that their job was just to be in Mississippi and survive. Right. That was the job, right? And the job was to embed themselves in a black community that was their safe haven, right? And forget about the idea that they were Americans who could walk the streets of America whenever they pleased, right? So this is really difficult, right? Because the idea that you are an American and but you can't go walk to the downtown, right? Drive with someone, how you please, right? Right. Doing the day didn't matter, right?

So this is a hard and simple job, right? Especially hard for people, kids from many of them relative privilege. Exactly, yeah. So it turns the idea of America on its head, right? Because they had no conception that this was also part of America, right? What do you think was the most difficult thing about those two groups coming together, meaning the veteran activists and the new volunteer? Well, let me, the new volunteers, I think, almost would be interesting to really learn. But my senses that almost all of them really were welcomed and felt welcomed in the black community, right? And for the most part, this is a slice of rural America, right?

And it's a slice of rural America that is welcoming, right? And so I think the volunteers and the people that they live with really hit it off, right? And so for... I was more specifically meaning the volunteers and the organizers. Exactly, and that's the point, right? Because the ability of the volunteers to hit it off with the local community has to have an impact on the SNCC and the field secretaries, right? So part of the impact is maybe resentment that the volunteers can run things, right? But part of the impact also has to be a recalibration of their idea about what the volunteers could accomplish, right? Because they accomplished a lot in terms of how local people reacted to their presence.

So, you know, some of the people who integrated schools decided that they were going to send their children to the white schools did so after Freedom Summer, right? And did so in response to their experience of having these students come and live with them and their family, right? So I think you got different responses from the different field secretaries. Right, right. Before we go on, just sum up from me how you and others were feeling though. I mean, I know Alan's murder and that pushed you to make the decision.

But the general sense of the movement was one of exhaustion, almost desperation. At the end of 63, the beginning of 64, were you guys feeling like you've been in on the front lines for about three years already? How did it feel just as the decision was being made? Did you have a sense that this was a kind of an all or nothing moment? So I think, no, I don't think that's right. There were two things that were operating. And they both, again, came about because of mega assassination, right? Two kinds of resources that were becoming available. One was this idea of student resources.

And the other was the actual material and spiritual resources that were coming through the National Council of Churches. In other words, Bob Spike was really intent on setting up a base for operations. He had long range plans, right? They didn't actually materialize in the way that he thought they would. So I think those were things that were the idea, well, all this work is actually attracting some attention that's helpful. The other source was the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department. Now the turn had to do in part with the failure of the Justice Department in the Greenwood case

to actually move to supporting the idea of the feds intervening to make sure that the sharecroppers, the farmers, would have federal protection going to the courthouse. So that case, in one sense, you can say it was disheartening, but in another sense, it turned our attention away from the strategy we had been using, which was working with the courts and the Justice Department, to a strategy which shifted towards the politics. So we had been getting money from the voter registration, VEP, the voter education program.

This was money coming down through Stephen Currier, who was on my short list. Now Stephen Currier was the head of the Teconic Foundation, and Kennedy had decided to put money into the South through Stephen Currier and the Teconic. They set that foundation up. I'm not sure we can take that much of a detour, but I know where you're going with that. When we decided that we were going to focus on the politics, then that money was not available. So that was a big shift for us. But it was the idea of, here's a different route. So there's the running of candidates, and the beginning to explore the political dimensions, which eventually led to the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, and which led to actually the key that unlocked the state. So I don't think, at that point, there is this idea, and part of the idea was propagated by people who came in, and what they saw, and what they interpreted.

As well, this is a heart-scrabble group of kids. It's not going any place. So I didn't agree with that. What did someone like Fannie Lou Hamer or Stokeley think about the idea of bringing? Well, Fannie Lou Hamer was forward and so was Stokeley. So I'm from very different points of view, of course. So this is the point, because Fannie Lou Hamer and Amzi and Steptoe and those people are not factored into the discussion when the discussion is well, who was arguing about whether we should have this or not have it. Fannie Lou Hamer was actually in the meetings.

Yes, he has a great line. I read it in some book. He's kind of what exactly she says, do you remember? Something like, I don't see how we can be fighting segregation if we're going to segregate ourselves, or if something simple like that, which seems to get right at the central question. But I've forgotten your question now. I was just curious about this internal debate that went on about the Freedom Summer Project and how it played out. So I think that's basically the people we were working with and for wanted it. And then there was the split within the actual staff, the field secretary. What was your biggest worry when you were in Oxford? Well, the biggest worry came when we got the news about Mickey and that they had been arrested and then released and no word.

And it quickly became clear that they were dead. And so then the biggest worry is how to make sure that the students understand that they were dead. Because there's no evidence. The bodies are not found. They're searching for them. So that they understand what they are going into. So that was the biggest worry. How one to understand that Mickey and them were dead and then to make sure that the students understood that. And that they had to think again about whether they were up for this. Did you break the news?

What happened? Well, they sat there. They were silent. It was dead silence. And we asked that they really think through whether or not they were up for this. Just a couple left. Do you remember what you said? As if the kids were dead. And I told them that we had waited to read a left, right? And Mickey's wife. She was organizing them for support, you know, telegram called that Congress people put pressure on the White House. So we waited until she left. She left to go to Washington and then told them.

How did it all end at that meeting? It ended in the song. Freedom is a constant struggle. I walked off the stage and I think it was Jean, one of the snake field circuiters from Howard. She just lifted up a voice. And they all sang. What were Mickey and Andrew and James trying to do? And why was there presence? Where they were in the Shelby County South, so provocative.

Right. So it was a big, big, big discussion within snake about the presence of White field circuiters. And we had begun to have two or three really mature people come and work in the Jackson office. But we wouldn't let them out in the field. But Kofo had an arrangement under which core in order to participate the National Office of Core asked that they have a separate geographical domain. And so the core domain was under Dave and the National Office of Core, Dave Dennis. And in the fall winter of 63, they sent down Mickey and Rita. And they established an office in Meridian.

So they were really targets in the sense that they were the first and only White field secretaries actually operating in the open in an office. And so, so they were targeted and just targeted. And so the nation responded to the fact that they were missing. And was it what you expected to happen? Or was it even more of a phenomenon? I mean, the national response? Well, the nation responded variously because Senator Eastland denied that they were missing. You know, there was one response which was, oh, this is just another hoax.

I mean, it really speaks to the enormous Gulf in the nation between one kind of consciousness about what's really going on and another. So, I mean, I'm not sure what Hoover's response was. I'm not sure. I don't know what kind of pressure Johnson put on Hoover. I do know the battle that we had with the various outreaches of the FBI right across that period. Right. But so that was one kind of response, right, typified by Senator Eastland. And I can imagine they are not just the conscious of Mississippi. It's the whole White South, right.

The denial, right. So that's one kind of response. And then the other kind of response really is the response of a nation that's concerned about its children. Because all of these young people now are coming into Mississippi and all of their parents are now frantic. Right. And are mobilizing not just their families, but their communities to put pressure on the White House. What are you going to do? And these are families with cloud.

Many of them. Many of them are families with cloud. Right. But I think the more important issue is that the young students in some sense for whether their families have cloud or not, they are families that are and students that are part of America's fabric. Right. And so they count. Right. In a way in which, you know, the black sharecroppers that we were working with didn't and don't. Right. Right. Right. That's probably, you know, that's just the ultimate essential point. One is visible and one is not. Right. Yeah. Yeah. I've talked to, I'm supposed to talk to Rita. I think tomorrow, I think we're going to hear her. She's a force. Yeah. Yeah.

You've talked about the broadest possible kind of goal of what the MFDP was about. What was the more practical goal in Atlantic City? And what did you all need to do first in order to make the freedom Democrats work of come alive as a force? So I think that work actually was done by the contingent from Howard that Stokely led. And they worked the Delta. Right. And they really took over the organizing of the meetings that led to the election of the delegates. Right. And what they ensured was that there were delegates who really were able to stand on their own two feet and stick to their convictions. Right. Right.

And so that that was sort of the nitty-gritty hard work that had to be done. And it was done, I think, really through the Howard group. And Stokely and them, you know, at Howard were really operating under a theory that Biod Rustin had about the way to really get constructive change was to shift the Dixie grads out of the Democratic Party. Right. So it was not just practical work for them. It was also part of a theory about what the country needed to do, right, to change. Right.

Alongside the surprising idea that Lyndon Johnson might actually be pushing an agenda that would spark that in a way. Say that again, I'm not sure that probably when that theory was originally kicked around, if it was during the Kennedy administration. Right. Who would have known that by January of 64, LVJ would be the one driving a civil rights bill and actually having the chance of actually getting it through Congress? Getting a civil rights bill through Congress, yes, but not changing the nature of the Democratic Party structure. Right. So I think Biod's theory had to do with how do you restructure the actual party? I see. Right. The idea that you could get a different constituency in the South. Right. And of course, in some sense, Kennedy with the idea of focusing on the vote was also interested in trying to get a different constituency in the South. Right. For the Democratic Party. But I don't know that Kennedy or anyone, I didn't catch that anybody in the Democratic Party thought the way to get that constituency was to push the current stakeholders out and bring in new stakeholders. Right.

I don't think anybody had that idea. So that was our idea. Right. Get these guys out of here. Let's get some different people in. And you're using the laboratory of Mississippi as the place to, I mean, the obvious place to do it, you know. I mean, and I didn't know it then, but the whole history, 1875, you know. Alexander Percy goes into the Mississippi legislature to oversee the articles of impeachment for Adelbert Ames. Right. And so part of what he wants to ensure is that the money set aside for the education of the freed slaves by the Republican administration. Right. Right. Get's used to build the whole infrastructure for sharecropping. Right. For cotton farming. Right. And so the Democratic Party, right, has is involved with this, you know, forever. Right. Right.

And so the goal was to create a parallel party. Help me understand. Well, we were, yeah. So we were operating outside of, we had no entry point into any of the civil establishments. Right. So we're operating outside. And the question for us is, well, how do we build within our people some sense of what the work is? Right. That goes into being part of civil society. Right. So the actual process of running candidates for office. Right. We had the, you know, in the meetings leading up to this people were looking at small things in their local areas that they wanted to make happen. Right.

So cotton allotments, anything, right, that was, they could impact. Right. So part of the process was, well, what do people do who involved in a guerrilla warfare? Right. Where they can't access, you know, the real politics or anything. How do they structure themselves to get ready to take over? Right. And to get ready to participate. Right. And I'm sure it's part of guerrilla warfare all over. Right. Yeah. Right. So that's what we were doing. Right. With varying degrees of success. Yeah.