In a few days, with advice and contacts from John, I went on to Nashville, Tennessee, then to the SNCC headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia, only to be told by the woman who opened the door that “everybody” was down in Albany. Rather than take a segregated seat on the Atlanta-Albany bus, with whites sitting in front, blacks in the rear, I stood. The only other person standing was a nattily dressed black man who suggested I not try to reach the colored half of town at night. That turned out to be Wyatt Tee Walker, one of Dr. King’s lieutenants. It was a hot and humid night, with bugs flying in the bright lights of the Albany Greyhound station. An overweight policeman stood in front of me as I stepped off the bus. [...]
Then I made one walk downtown too many. As I passed the small cinderblock Cleveland police station, an officer stepped out from the parking lot and pulled me inside. I sat across from the chief as he politely explained to me that “in order to engage in the practice of photography” in Cleveland I needed to post a $1,000 bond. He opened a book of ordinances and pointed to the line. Outside in the parking lot, the policeman who had pulled me in was waiting. Clearly agitated, he explained with deep emotion that “we don’t mix the races down here.” He was sweating and rocking back and forth. Bizarre as it sounds, Frank Smith had told me that if I got into trouble I should just say I was black. This was apparently a common SNCC ruse, but it escaped me that I was supposed to say that it was a black woman who numbered among my recent ancestors. “As a matter of fact,” I said, “my grandfather was colored.” The policeman went completely crazy, reached for the gun on his belt, and said he would kill me right there on the spot. I thought he meant it. [...]
When the summer project of 1964 started, bringing a thousand mostly white Northern college students into Mississippi, I didn’t particularly want to go. For one thing, there were now many other people photographing the movement. For another, I thought voter registration was a bore. I found direct action, sit-ins, and marches, all of which often led to arrests, more exciting to photograph. Then, on June 21, a week before the project started, two workers and a summer volunteer were spotted changing a flat tire outside of Philadelphia, Mississippi, and taken to jail while the sheriff gathered the Klan to plan their murder. James Chaney was a black Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) worker from Meridian. He died, along with his best friend, a professional organizer with CORE from New York City named Mickey Schwerner, and Andy Goodman, a Queens College student and summer volunteer who had been in the South two days. A black Southerner and two Jewish boys from New York were lynched for trying to register African Americans to vote in a state that had lost the Civil War—but won back the power over their former slaves twenty years later by denying the right to vote through terror.
