A very bright student, Stokely was admitted to the Bronx High School of Science, which was reserved for the top students in New York. “I was an avid reader, but had no discipline. All the other kids I went to school with, their fathers were professors, doctors, they were the smartest kids in the world. Their fathers had libraries.… We had Huckleberry Finn. That was our highest book.” In his later high school years, Stokely read Marx; pondered and debated radical ideas.
He was a senior in high school when the Greensboro sit-ins occurred. Soon after, he joined some of his classmates who went to Washington, D.C., to picket the House Un-American Activities Committee. “I was shocked to see Negroes at a H.U.A.C. demonstration. It turned out they had been involved in the sit-in demonstrations I was reading about in Virginia. I was very happy and decided, well, I can try it.”
At Howard University in Washington, Stokely joined an affiliate of the newly-formed SNCC. It was called NAG, the Nonviolent Action Group, and in it were Bill Mahoney (to whom the others looked for leadership), Courtland Cox (tall, handsome, bearded, dark), Joan Trumpauer (tiny, blonde, and soon a Freedom Rider), and Dion Diamond (who later, as a SNCC field secretary, would be locked up for a long time in a Baton Rouge jail). The NAG conducted sit-ins and demonstrations to desegregate public places all around the Washington area. Then came the Freedom Rides.
Bill Mahoney, writing later in Liberation, described their arrival at Parchman penitentiary in mid-June, shortly after Ruby Doris had gotten there. As they got off the trucks, they were surrounded by men who brandished guns and spat at them and cursed. Two white men, Terry Sullivan and Felix Singer, refusing to cooperate, kept going limp as guards tried to move them along. They were thrown from the truck onto the wet sand-and-gravel drive, dragged through wet grass and mud puddles across a rough cement walk, into a building. Then a guard in a Stetson hat approached them carrying a long black rubber-handled tube. It was a cow-prodder, battery operated, which sears the flesh with an electric charge. When the two men refused to undress, the prodder was applied to their bodies. They squirmed in pain but would not give in. Their clothes were ripped from them and they were thrown into a cell.
Stokely talks of their time in Parchman:
I’ll never forget this Sheriff Tyson—he used to wear those big boots. He’d say, “You goddam smart nigger, why you always trying to be so uppity for? I’m going to see to it that you don’t ever get out of this place.” They decided to take our mattresses because we were singing…. So they dragged Hank Thomas out and he hung on to his mattress and they took him and it and dropped him with a loud klunk on his back…. And then they put the wristbreakers on Freddy Leonard, which makes you twist around and around in a snake-like motion, and Tyson said, “Oh you want to hit me, don’t you,” and Freddy just looked up at him meekly and said, “No, I just want you to break my arm.” And Sheriff Tyson was shaken visibly, and he told the trusty, “Put him back.” I hung on to the mattress and said, “I think we have a right to them and I think you’re unjust,” and he said, “I don’t want to hear all that shit nigger,” and started to put on the wristbreakers. I wouldn’t move and I started to sing “I’m Gonna Tell God How You Treat Me,” and everybody started to sing it and by this time Tyson was really to pieces. He called to the trusties, “Get him in there!” and he went out the door and slammed it, and left everybody else with their mattresses….
James Farmer said later: “Jails are not a new experience for the Riders, but the Freedom Riders were definitely a new experience for Mississippi jails.”
The students from Nashville, Atlanta, Washington, and other places who came out of jail as Freedom Riders in July and August of 1961 sought one another out, wondering what they would do next. There was the SNCC office in Atlanta which had linked them all loosely, uncertainly. A volunteer SNCC worker named Bob Moses, just down from the North, was setting up voter registration schools around McComb, Mississippi. Two other SNCC people, Reggie Robinson from Baltimore and John Hardy from Nashville, had joined him.
Through the summer of 1961, fifteen or twenty people on the Coordinating Committee were meeting every month: at Louisville in June, at Baltimore in July, at the Highlander Folk School, Tennessee, in August. Tim Jenkins, a slim, energetic, bright young Negro who was vice-president of the National Student Association, came to the June meeting with a proposal that SNCC make the registration of Negro voters in the South its main activity. That started a controversy which simmered, unsettled, throughout the summer. It came to a boil at the Highlander meeting in August, where the issue was posed sharply: would SNCC concentrate on a methodical, grinding campaign to register Negro voters in the Black Belt? Or would it conduct more sensational direct-action campaigns—sit-ins, kneel-ins, wade-ins, picket lines, boycotts, etc.—to desegregate public facilities?
Even before the Freedom Rides began, Jenkins had been attending a series of meetings in which representatives of several foundations, including the Taconic and the Field Foundations, discussed the raising of substantial funds to support a large-scale voter registration effort in the South. Present at these meetings were Burke Marshall, Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Civil Rights Division, and Harris Wofford, special assistant to President Kennedy on civil rights. Jenkins was asked by the Foundation people to broach the idea to his friends in SNCC.
The Negro students who had gone through the sit-ins and Freedom Rides were somewhat distrustful of white liberals with money and of the national government. The fact that both these elements were behind the idea of concentrating on voter registration, on top of Robert Kennedy’s call for a “cooling-off” period during the Freedom Rides, reinforced the suspicion that an attempt was being made to cool the militancy of the student movement and divert the youngsters to slower, safer activity. Led by Diane Nash and Marion Barry, many of the SNCC people at the Highlander meeting held to the idea that “direct action” should continue to be the primary policy.
Tim Jenkins was also aware of the interest of the Justice Department in moderating the temper of the student movement. He knew that the Department’s conservative interpretation of civil rights law led it to argue that only in connection with voter registration activities could it go into federal court for injunctive relief against local and state governments in the South which tried to suppress the civil rights movement. But he felt that voter registration was the crucial lever which could set progress in motion in the South, and if white liberals and the government were willing to help, why not take advantage of this? Over the summer, he convinced a number of people in SNCC that he was right.
At the Highlander meeting, it seemed for a while that an impasse had been reached between the “direct action” people and the “voter registration” people, and that SNCC might even split into two groups. Ella Baker, advisor to SNCC since it was founded at Raleigh in 1960, helped reconcile the opposing viewpoints. The result was a compromise. Two arms of SNCC were created: Diane Nash was put in charge of direct action projects. Charles Jones (from Charlotte, North Carolina, and the Rock Hill jail-in), fair-skinned, blue-eyed, and self-assured, was put in charge of voter registration work.
In McComb, Mississippi, Bob Moses was already beginning voter registration schools when this decision was made, and about the middle of August, 1961, SNCC people began to converge on McComb. Moses recalls: “I became a member of the staff during a hectic hiring session in McComb in August, when staff hired staff or some such nonsense.”
Money raised by Harry Belafonte began to come through now, and a number of people decided not to return to school in the fall but to go to work full-time for SNCC: Diane Nash, Charles Jones, James Bevel, Charles Sherrod, and others. With Ed King leaving the Atlanta office to go to law school (Jane Stembridge had returned to school earlier), the organization desperately needed an Executive Secretary. Diane Nash telephoned James Forman in Chicago and asked him to come to work for SNCC.
Forman, a thirty-three-year-old teacher, was born in Chicago but spent part of his childhood