In the mythology of the movement, Amite County is a synonym for the Ninth Circle of Hell.

It was to impoverished, remote Amite County, in southwest Mississippi, that SNCC's Bob Parris came in august of 1961 to attempt SNCC's pilot project in voter registration. Beaten twice and jailed thrice, Parris left for the state capital in Jackson after four melancholy months.

It was in Amite that Herbert Lee, a fifty-two-year-old father of nine children, was murdered by E.H. Hurst, a member of the Mississippi state legislature.

It was in Amite that farmer Louis Allen, a witness to lee's slaying, was shotgunned to death in his home, after he had spoken to the Justice Department about the Lee murder.

It was Amite that saw not a single white volunteer during the 1964 Summer Project because of its legacy of lawlessness.

It was Amite that until July of 1965 had only one registered Negro voter in the whole country, despite a Negro population majority of 55 percent.

It is Amite that twelve years after Brown v. Board of education does not have a single classroom desegregated, two years after the 1964 civil rights act does not have a single public facility desegregated, and a year after the 1965 act does not have a federal voting registrar.

It is Amite that has never experienced a civil-rights march, a sit-in, or even a picket line.

It is rural, red-clayed Amite that the movement has bled itself dry trying to break the century-old trap of terror, poverty, and fear.

*   *   *

Amite is about eighty miles south of Jackson on the Louisiana border. Its county seat is the hamlet of Liberty, population 652.

More than half of the total population of the county is Negro, but only 40 percent of the 13,000 eligible voters are Negro. Because of the hopeless cycle of poverty, many Negroes escape to Baton Rouge, New Orleans, and Chicago while still in their teens. Sociologists have estimated that Negro Emigration from Mississippi is 40 percent. Amite is becoming a place for the very old and the very young.

Although many Negroes in Amite own their own farms, most of them are marginal. Attendance at all-Negro Central High each autumn falls below 50 percent because so many children are required to chop cane and pick cotton on the farms. While this makes the farmer less vulnerable to economic reprisals, it does led to frequent acts of physical violence.

More than 90 percent of the Negro homes have no heating system or indoor toilet. Only a few have telephones. Almost all rely on hand-dug wells for water. Food must be purchased in Liberty, where Negroes are still beaten up on the street on whim, and where no white has ever stood trial for violence against a Negro.

The sheriff of Amite is six feet, five inch Daniel Jones. His father, Brian Jones, is the Klan leader in the county.

Amite does not have a white, business-oriented middle class that has made Greenville, in the delta, an oasis of decency, or a merchant class that finally, in 1965, helped halt the reign of terror in nearby McComb. It was Hodding Carter's Greenville Delta-Democrat Times, and later, Oliver Emmerich's McComb Enterprise-Journal, that spread the message of compliance and moderation. the only newspaper in Amite is a racist sheet called the Liberty Herald.

Amite seems outside the flow of history, a backward enclave insulated from the passage of time. it has not only missed the civil rights movement, but the Industrial Revolution as well. There are no factories, no shopping centers, no unions in the county. The longed-for educated, civilized white moderate isn't in hiding; he doesn't exist in Amite.

This chapter is an attempt to chronicle the descent of three young Dantes into this one particular hell. this trio of pioneers did not abandon hope, but brought hope to this Ninth Circle.

*   *   *

Liberty is one of the oldest towns in Mississippi, its founding dating back to 1805. Among the earliest settlers in Amite were the poor whites--the "peckerwoods"--who were pushed out of the area around Natchez by the cotton-plantation-owning class of aristocrats. As the South moved toward the Civil war, great tensions developed between the rural peckerwoods of Amite and the affluent, genteel planters of Natchez. When the war began, the residents of Natchez voted to remain in the Union, while the poor whites of Amite chose secession.

After the Civil war, Amite was over 60 percent Negro, there were Negro sheriffs and a powerful Republican Party organization. But after the historic Compromise of 1876 ended reconstruction, the pattern of Negro disenfranchisement came to Amite, as it did to all of the South. Negroes were lynched, driven off land they owned, beaten, and their right to vote taken away. most Negroes who own their own land in Amite today do so only because one of their ancestors fought for it with guns or fists. Most of the Amite Negroes, however, fled to the rich soil of the delta, where cheap labor was needed to clear the swamps for the future plantations.

The diminution of Negro power in the county has continued all through the twentieth century. the only Negro resistance to this trend came during the 1930s when several of Huey Long's Share the Wealth leagues sprang up in the area, but they were violently suppressed. the remote rurality and the backward poverty of Amite have been the laws of the vise that has bled the Amite Negro since Reconstruction.

*   *   *

Robert Parris Moses grew up in a housing project on the edge of Harlem. But somehow he was not swallowed up by the squalor and violence of the ghetto like so many of his contemporaries. Instead, gifted with a philosophical and poetic mind, he went downtown at age thirteen, as a result of high grades on a competitive examination, to virtually all-white, academically superior, Stuyvesant High School. There Parris not only compiled outstanding grades, but was captain of Stuyvesant's championship basketball quintet, and vice-president of his graduating class.

Parris then went, on a scholarship, to predominantly white Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, where again he excelled in both scholarship and sports. It was at Hamilton that a French instructor introduced him to the writings of Albert Camus, whose melancholy morality was to make a lasting impact on his thinking. Almost a decade later, addressing volunteers at Oxford, Ohio, for the Mississippi Summer Project, Parris compared racism to Camus' plague, and the volunteers to the sanitary squads.

From Hamilton, Parris went on to graduate school at Harvard, and received a master's degree in philosophy in 1957. Afterward Parris began to teach math at one of New York City's elite private schools--Horace Mann, in the Riverdale section of the Bronx. Nothing in his first twenty-four years--spent increasingly in the white world--seemed to indicate that Parris was destined to become a myth-shrouded legend to thousands of young radicals, and to have his picture hang in sharecropper shack in the delta next to Abraham Lincoln's and John F. Kennedy's.

Folk singer Bob Cohen, who lived with Parris in Manhattan from September of 1960 until he left for Amite in July of 1961, remembers him as "extraordinarily quiet, abstract . . . really involved with his students and reading a lot--Bertrand Russell and Camus in French. . . . Yet I always had the sense he was very busy in his head all the time."

Cohen met Parris at the Maine Folk Dance Camp in June of 1960, and recalls, "One of the few times I can remember Bob's face really lit up was when he was folk dancing. He loved it. I remember sometimes we would be coming home late from a party or something, and if Bob had had a good time, he would start dancing down Amsterdam Avenue. he could be very free and gay then."

Cohen, who named his first child after his roommate, says, "Bob hardly ever talked about going back South after his trip in June of 1960. . . . The only hint I got of the deep feeling he had about going back South was that he would sit for hours and listen to a record of Odetta singing, 'I'm Going Back to the Red Clay Country'."

Nineteen hundred and sixty-one, when Parris went back to the red clay of Amite and Pike counties, marked the first time a SNCC worker tried to live in and become part of a community. It was the first time SNCC engaged in voter registration. It was probably the most creative and heroic single act anyone in the New Left has attempted. Certainly much of the subsequent history of the New left has flowed from the existential act of Parris disappearing alone into the most violent and desolate section of Mississippi.

As a consequence of that deed and his own selfless personality, Parris occupies a legendary niche in the New left. He has been compared to Danilo Dolci, Hesse's Siddhartha, and Prince Kropotkin. Perhaps the reverential feeling about this shy, often sad prophet was best expressed by Dick Gregory when he introduced Parris to the mammoth Berkeley teach-in in may of 1965 with these words:

The series of events that propelled Parris into the Ninth Circle of Amite began during the simmer of 1960. It was then that Parris, while traveling through Mississippi trying to recruit Negro students to attend SNCC's October founding conference, met Amzie Moore, the indomitable leader of the NACCP chapter in Cleveland, Mississippi. In the course of several conversations Moore convinced the twenty-five-year-old SNCC field secretary he should quit his teaching job and return tot he delta the following summer to begin a voter-registration campaign. Parris agreed, and in November the popular Negro magazine, Jet, printed a short item describing the projected venture.

Amite County's NAACP founder and leader, E.W. Steptoe, saw the Jet item, and along with Pike County leader C.C. Bryant, wrote a letter to Parris in New York, suggesting he change his plans and try to organize a project in southwest Mississippi. At that point only 38 of 9,000 Pike county Negroes were registered to vote, and one of 5,500 in Amite was eligible to vote, according to Civil Rights Commission figures.

Parris, who was encountering unexpected difficulty in finding a church willing to house a voter-registration school in the delta, agreed to come to the Amite-Pike region.

Civil-rights workers had not even tried to enter Mississippi until 1952. According to Elizabeth Sutherland, in her Letters from Mississippi, the "first 'agitator' was shot and killed, the second was shot and run out of the state." Next came Bob Parris in July, of 1961, without a grand scheme, lacking any concrete experience in voter registration.

On August 7th the SNCC Pike County voter-registration school opened up in a hamlet called Burglundtown in a two-story structure, which included a grocery store below and a Masonic meeting hall above. The only teacher was Parris, and the student body consisted of about 20 Negroes, half of them too young to vote.

After the first class four persons went tot he registrar's office in nearby magnolia, the county seat, and three of them registered without incident. Three Negroes went down on August 9th, and two registered successfully. The next night one of the Pike County Negroes who had attempted to register was shot at by a white farmer. The next day only two people showed up at the voter-registration school.

Parris then went into Amite, living on Steptoe's farm. On August 15th, he accompanied an old farmer named Ernest Isaac and two middle-aged women, Bertha Lee Hughes and Matilda Schoby, tot he courthouse in Liberty. The trio managed to fill out a form, but not to take the test. As they were driving out of Liberty, toward McComb, their car was flagged down by a highway patrolman, who told Isaac, the driver, to get out and come into the police car. 

Isaac quickly complied, but Parris also got out of the car and asked the officer why. He was pushed and ordered back into the car. At that point the patrolman arrested Parris for "impeding an officer in the discharge of his duties." Taken to McComb, Parris was fined fifty dollars, and for the first of man times saw the inside of a Mississippi jail, as he spent two days in prison, fasting, rather than pay the fine.

On the Monday, August 28th, Parris started a voter-registration class at Mt. Pilgrim Church, the first in the history of Amite County. The next day he went with Reverend Alfred Knox and Curtis Dawson to the courthouse in Liberty to try to register. A block from the courthouse they were met by Billy Jack Caston, a cousin of the sheriff and the son-in-law of state representative E.H. Hurst.

Without saying a word, Caston walked up to Parris and knocked him down with a punch to the temple. He then proceeded to pummel Parris for several minutes with punches to the head and ribs. Parris just sat in the street trying to protect himself as best he could in the traditional nonviolent position, his head between his knees and his arms shielding his face. Reverend Knox tried to pull Caston off his victim, but white bystanders ordered him not to intervene.

Knox and Dawson never made it to the courthouse. Instead they picked up the semiconscious Parris and drove him to Steptoe's farm. Steptoe later recalled, "I didn't recognize Bob at first he was so bloody. I just took off his tee-shirt and wrong out the blood like it had just been washed." Then Steptoe drove Parris to a Negro doctor in McComb, who took eight stitches in his scalp.

The next day Amite experienced another first: Parris filed assault and battery charges against Caston, the first time in that area a Negro had challenged the right of a white man to beat him up at will. The warrant was made out by the county district attorney after the county judge refused.

The trial was held in the Liberty courthouse on August 31st. More than 100 whites, many of them openly armed, jammed the courtroom for the spectacle. While on the stand, Parris was asked by Caston's attorney whether he had participated in riots the year before in Japan or San Francisco. After his testimony Parris--the plaintiff--was told by the sheriff he had better leave the courthouse because he could not guarantee his safety. So before the trial ended in Caston's acquittal, Parris was given a police escort to the Pike County line.

*   *   *

Meanwhile, two other crucial events were happening during the month of August. One was a SNCC staff meeting at the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee. At that meeting the fledgling organization was divided into two camps, one favoring direct action on the order of the sit-ins and the freedom rides, and the other suggesting the innovation of voter registration. Hints from the Kennedy Administration that it would look favorably on voter-registration activities, plus financial support from the New World and other foundations, strengthened the voter-registration group in SNCC. After prolonged debate, SNCC decided to adopt "an all-out revolutionary program encompassing both mass direct action and voter registration drives."

The second thing to happen during August was the gradual emergence from jail in Jackson of the first group of freedom riders. Four of these freedom riders, Reggie Robinson of Baltimore, John hardy of Nashville, Travis Britt of New York, and MacArthur Cotton of Jackson, were to join Parris before the month was over. Also, direct-action partisans like Marion Barry came to McComb during August and sparked a series of sit-ins and protest marches. 

 fifteen-year-old McComb high-school, Brenda Travis, and five friends sat-in and were arrested. her companions were sentenced to eight months for "breach of the peace," and Brenda was turned over to juvenile authorities and sentenced to one year in the state school for delinquents. Later, more than 100 of Brenda's classmates at Burgland High School marched through McComb to protest her severe sentence and expulsion from school. They were all arrested as they knelt praying at the steps of the city hall.

More violence in Liberty.

On September 5th, Parris and Travis Britt accompanied four Negroes to the courthouse. In this pamphlet, Revolution in Mississippi, Tom Hayden recorded Britt's terse description of the events that followed:

This incident, in the heart of the hell Bob Parris says isn't real unless you're there, went unreported in the national press. this was still three years before the Summer Project, and such beatings administered to blacks were so commonplace as not to fit the definition of news. Such beatings, however, turned out to have considerable news content in 1964, when the bloodied recipients were white students from "good families" in the North. In 1961 the blood of Parris and Britt was invisible.

The beating had its desired effect. Attendance at meetings and voter-registration classes dwindled to almost nothing. The small group of SNCC workers walked the back roads from dawn to dusk in a vain search for Negroes willing to try to register in Liberty. "But the farmers were no longer willing to go down," Parris later recalled, "and for the rest of the month of September we just had a rough time."

Amite's unchecked, legally sanctioned violence became murder on September 25th, when Hubert Lee was shot to death in front of the Liberty cotton gin by E.H. Hurst.

The day before, Parris had met with Steptoe and John Doar of the Justice Department at Steptoe's farm. Steptoe had told Doar that Hurst, whose land is adjacent to his, had publicly threatened to kill him and Herbert Lee. Lee had attended voter-registration classes and had volunteered a few days before to attempt to register in Liberty, the first individual to do so since the beating of Britt.

Lee was shot once in the brain by Hurst's .38 caliber revolver. It happened about noon in front of a dozen witnesses, including several Negroes. Lee, wearing his farmer's overalls and field boots, was sitting in the cab of his pick-up truck, and fell out into the gutter when he was shot. For two hours his body lay in a pool of blond, uncovered and swarmed over by insects. Finally, a coroner from McComb came and picked it up. That same afternoon a coroner's jury in Liberty met, and ruled that lee was killed in self-defense.

Parris felt responsible for Lee's death, just as three years later he was to feel himself responsible for the deaths of Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner. For the next three nights, from sundown till almost sunup, he walked and rode through the mist-shrouded rolling hills of Amite, knocking on strange doors, seeking the three Negro witnesses. Fighting off exhaustion, waking up families that had to get up at 5 a.m., Parris finally found the Negro farmers who had witnessed the slaying.

But none was willing to tell a grand jury the truth. instead they told Parris that the sheriff and deputy sheriff had warned them to tell everyone that Lee, who was about five feet four, had tried to hit Hurst, who is six feet three, with a tire iron.

One of the three witnesses was a farmer named Louis Allen. Late in October a federal grand jury convened to consider an indictment of Hurst. it was then that Allen drove to McComb to inform Parris he had changed his mind, and would tell the truth about Lee's death if he was guaranteed federal protection.

Parris called the Justice Department in Washington but was told it was "impossible" to provide Allen with protection. So Allen testified tot he federal jury that Hurst had killed Lee in self-protection. Six months later a deputy sheriff told Allen he knew he had contacted the Justice Department, and he broke Allen's jaw with a flashlight. On January 31, 1964, Allen was found dead on his front porch as a result of three shotgun blasts.

Tormented by the shadows of guilt, Parris has tried to make Herbert Lee a symbol for all the hundreds of Mississippi Negroes who have been lawlessly murdered by whites. Whenever he spoke in the North in 1962 or 1963 he would talk about Herbert Lee, and soon thousands of young people knew of this one murder out of many. Lee was also memorialized in a song, "Never Turn Back," written in 1963 by Bertha Gober, a wide-eyed teenager from Albany, Georgia. For a while the song, a dirge sung at a workers in Mississippi. Its final verse goes:

The murder of Lee broke the back of whatever had been stirring in Amite. few Negroes were willing to be seen talking to Parris or to the other "freedom riders," as they were called by both Negroes and whites. The tiny flicker of hope from Parris' candle went out, and Amite's Negroes were left to curse the darkness.

A month later Parris went to jail for two months in Pike County for leading a march of 118 high-school students to the McComb city hall. From the magnolia jail he smuggled out a note tot he SNCC office in Atlanta. The last few paragraphs illuminate Parris' speculative and poetic turn of mind.

In January Parris left southwest Mississippi, melancholy and depressed, to begin a pilgrimage that was to lead to the Mississippi Summer project, the Freedom Democratic Party, and a 100 percent rise in Negro registration in the state by the end of 1965 (25,000 to 50,000).

But for three years Amite was to remain that base of the iceberg most submerged beneath the ocean of terror. Nobody tried to register in Liberty after the murder of Herbert Lee. No SNCC project was attempted in the county. No summer volunteer was sent into the hills and woods of Amite. For three years a pattern of life incomprehensible to an outsider endured without assault. Negroes were beaten and killed. Whites, a minority of the county, continued to make every political and economic decision. No word was written about the iceberg, and the tiny crack Parris had made froze over. . . .

Source: Jack Newfield. A Prophetic Minority. New York: The New American Library, 1966

*   *   *   *   *

BLACK CLASSIC BOOKS   BCP Digital Printing

*   *   *   *   *

updated 9 October 2007