Camelot was coming. Voters would see to that on Nov. 8, 1960.
In September 1960, after the crops were gathered, white landowners in Fayette and Haywood counties forced black sharecroppers off their land because they were trying to vote. Here a family prepares to move from their sharecropper home to the Tent City erected for displaced farmers.
But many blacks in Fayette and Haywood counties would not be able to make a choice between eventual President John F. Kennedy or Richard Nixon.
Black sharecroppers in the two counties were being threatened, kicked out of their homes and blacklisted by merchants because they had registered or tried to register to vote.
They were forced to gather on donated land in Fayette County and live on dirt floors.
"Tent City," as the encampment was called, would become a home to poor black folks who had no homes, no money, no food.
Fayette County 's Tent City was built on land owned by Shephard Towles. A white merchant, whose name is kept secret to this day, donated the tents. Another camp was set up off Tenn. 57 near Moscow on land owned by Gertrude Beasley.
By the time it was over, Tent City would attract the attention of the Kennedy administration, draw national media coverage and result in the first federal lawsuit brought under the 1957 Civil Rights Act.
The end result of Tent City appears in many accounts of the civil rights movement in America. What has not been written is the effect racism in rural West Tennessee had on the black students working for civil rights a few miles away in Jackson.
"We felt the injustice," recalled Ernest Brooks, a stalwart of the Jackson movement. "An injustice there was an injustice here. And we intended to do something about it."
Taking up the cause
In Jackson, sit-ins and picketing occurred downtown every day in the week leading up to the presidential election.
After successfully desegregating buses operated by Jackson City Lines Inc., Lane College students were pressing forward to desegregate lunch counters at Woolworth's and McLellan's.
Blacks in Madison County had little trouble registering to vote. So on election day, their thoughts turned to their neighbors to the west, where some white people were preventing black people from voting by harassing them and forcing them to leave their homes.
Word of the harassment had floated eastward to the Lane campus and to the black community in East Jackson. By Nov. 8, more than 100 people agreed to take a stand for the voting rights of their brethren. Their destination was Madison County's court square. They started marching.
Some carried signs with messages such as "Madison County, Let's Help Fayette County Fight for Free Rights" and "Is the 15th Amendment a Reality in Haywood County?," referring to the portion of the Constitution that prohibits voting restrictions based upon race.
John and Viola McFerren lead protesters to Fayette County Courthouse in 1965. (Photo by Art Shay, Life Magazine)
The students added ranks from nearby Merry High School on their way to Main Street.
Jackson Police Lt. Carl Johnsey spotted the group marching down Royal Street and warned the demonstrators they would be arrested if they continued parading without a permit.
But this wasn't a parade, the students thought. They ignored Johnsey's warning.
Marchers at the front of procession were arrested at the intersection of Cumberland and Main streets, a few blocks from the courthouse. A second group made it to Liberty and Main. A third group reached the courthouse.
Police arrested 144 marchers, all black, including 66 women and several teen-agers. Police charged the marchers with misdemeanors: disorderly conduct, threatened breach of peace and parading without a permit.
"This is in the interest of public safety," Police Chief Raymond Gaba told The Jackson Sun.
The marchers crowded the city jail, forcing police to move some people to the county jail. The result was bureaucratic gridlock inside the police stations, a common tactic used by civil rights demonstrators to frustrate police.
Local black businessmen such as Joe Merry, and Lane administrators such as President C.A. Kirkendoll, would come to the rescue, paying $75 bonds to release each marcher by about midnight.
In the weeks that followed, groups of students - 20, 30, 40 at a time - would be shepherded into city court to face judge Robert Holt and hear their attorney, Emmett Ballard, ask for dismissals and postponements.
Jackson's black community knew their neighbors to the west faced much more grave circumstances. In the 1960 election, several hundred of the thousands of black people in Haywood County were able to cast ballots. It was the first time ever that black people had voted in Haywood, and the white community had not finished its efforts to stop them.
1940 becomes catalyst
Memories are as long-lasting in the South as hot weather on an August afternoon.
Black people in Fayette County had passed down the stories of what happened the night of May 23, 1940. But they never acted on the memory until John McFerren and Harpman Jameson tried to get blacks registered to vote in 1959.
They paid dearly for that attempt: White landowners threw 257 black people off their land - after the cotton had been picked, just as winter was coming on.
What had happened to Burton Dodson more than 19 years ago? How had it galvanized a poverty-stricken black community to revolt? John McFerren and Harpman Jameson, who still live in Fayette County, can tell the story.
Judicial railroading
Burton Dodson and a white man were interested in the same black woman. They had words and came to blows. In the early morning hours of May 23, Sheriff W.H. Cocke and his deputies, plus white men who had been deputized, came to Dodson's home to tell him to surrender. He refused. The officers and their comrades told the children to fall to the ground. Then they shot into his house from the woods, from the corn crib, from all directions.
Dodson's youngest boy was grazed by a bullet and bears the scar on his forehead to this day.
Dodson ran and returned fire. Deputy Olin Burow died. He was behind a tree, down a hill, on the east side of the house.
"I'm still waiting for someone to explain to me how that bullet went over the house, down a hill and came up behind the deputy and got him in the back," Harpman Jameson said. "There was no testing of the gun or the bullets."
Dodson escaped, but in 1958 he was found in St. Louis and brought back to Fayette County to stand trial for murder before an all-white jury. One black juror was called, but he said he was sick.
Although a deputy testified that Dodson's escape path was far from where the deputy was struck, Dodson was convicted of murder and sentenced to 20 years, later reduced to 10.
Still, the judicial railroading of a black man was nothing unusual in that day. In fact, West Tennessee blacks had been lynched without trials in West Tennessee. Why the connection 19 years later to voting rights?
During the trial, J.F. Estes, Dodson's black attorney from Memphis, tied a fair trial for Dodson to voting rights. Estes asked every juror: "Do you believe Negroes should have the right to register and vote?" If they said, "no," he got them dismissed as potential jurors.
When McFerren and Jameson were ready to challenge authority in 1959, they remembered Estes and called him for help.
Wanted something better
McFerren, a black man with sky blue eyes that disconcerted many white people, had come back from World War II wanting something better for black people in Fayette County.
Jameson, McFerren's best friend and a fellow WWII veteran, saw white and black men become friends fighting the war, and then become strangers when they returned.
McFerren had worked in an engineering brigade building bridges during the war. He was near a mine that blew up and nearly lost his legs. Jameson had driven a truck out of a landing barge under fire when the Navy and Marines took Guam and the Philippines, although he was supposed to be a cook. He said the officer in charge wanted country boys who knew how to drive a truck and Jameson was picked for the job.
Both men wanted something better out of life when they returned to Fayette County.
"We had fought for our country," said Jameson, who was 18 when he entered the Navy in 1943.
When Dodson was convicted in 1958, the two decided they would register to vote.
McFerren, then Jameson, went up to the voter registration office. "They said they had no objection to us registering to vote so we could serve on a jury," Jameson said.
Minnie Jameson, Harpman's wife, chuckles as she remembers the moment. "John and Harpman thought they really meant it."
So the two men began trying to get people registered to vote. And Minnie, who wanted more than anything to teach full-time, was never called as a substitute teacher again.
"There are people in this county who still won't speak to us," said Viola McFerren, now divorced from John McFerren, in an interview this year. Viola said she was so scared of what John was doing that she begged him to stop.
The two men wanted to vote for T.L. Redfearn, a liberal white sheriff's candidate. They were allowed to register. But when they went to vote in the August 1960 Democratic primary, "they told us, 'This is an all-white primary and no blacks are permitted to vote,' " Jameson said.
"They didn't let them step in the door," Minnie said. "They were so disappointed."
The white Fayette County Democratic Executive Committee was about to discover that two men who had experienced the horrors of war weren't about to slink back to their small farms and give up.
Time to unite
The men sought Estes for guidance and formed the Fayette County Civic and Welfare League Inc. At the same time, Estes helped people in Haywood County form a league.
The goal was voter registration. One of the first mass meetings was held at Mount Olive Church and the Rev. June Dowdy led off the speaking, followed by McFerren.
Participants in the Fayette County movement were determined to vote.
In January 1960, John had 1,000 black voters lined up to register.
"That's when hell kicked off in Fayette County," Viola McFerren said.
Dowdy asked a white official where he was supposed to register to vote. "He was told Hatchie Bottom. That's where blacks were lynched," McFerren said.
John McFerren, Estes and Jameson drove 22 hours to Washington, D.C., to meet with John Doar, the No. 2 man in the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division. Doar promised a lawsuit.
On Nov. 16, 1959, the federal government filed a lawsuit against the Fayette County Democratic Executive Committee, charging its members with failing to let blacks vote in the Aug. 1 Democratic primary. This was the first lawsuit of its kind to be filed under the Civil Rights Act of 1957.
Members of the Fayette County Election Commission resigned in hopes of shutting down voter registration, but the federal government named new election commissioners in June 1960.
Hundreds of blacks stood in long lines with only one registrar. They were not allowed to sit or stand on the courthouse lawn. Some passed out from the heat.
"People on the roof of the courthouse threw red pepper and spat on them and threw hot coffee on them ... and paint," Jameson said.
In April 1960, the White Citizens' Council drew up a list banning blacks and some whites from shopping in Fayettte County stores. Blacks couldn't get loans at the bank, and their insurance was canceled. Gulf, Esso, Texaco and Amoco oil outlets refused to sell oil and gas.
The oil embargo was broken in August 1960, when the NAACP national office encouraged 350,000 members to boycott the oil companies. But whites tightened the screws in worse ways.
"Black farmers couldn't get crop loans," Jameson said.
In September 1960, eight families were forced off land.
White landowners stepped up their efforts to throw black sharecroppers off the land after blacks voted in November. Fayette County turned Republican for the first time since Reconstruction with 1,200 new black votes. Although Kennedy, a Democrat, was later credited with civil rights advancements, blacks in 1960 were still voting for the party of Abraham Lincoln and against the Southern Democrats who were defending segregation.
Some sharecroppers were told to move immediately, leaving behind all their possessions. Others were given a little time.
"My daddy, Shepard Towles, owned land and he gave them a place to stay on his land," said Levearn Towles, his son. The land, on Tenn. 195, still belongs to the Towles family.
A white merchant gave tents to the displaced blacks. Even today, 40 years after that gesture, the McFerrens and the Jamesons will not name the merchant because of fear that he will be ostracized.
About a dozen tents sheltered families. Wood stoves provided heat, but there were no floors for a long time - not until help came from the American Friends Committee, a national Quaker group. There were 20 adults and 56 children at first.
"Bad as it was, many people said they felt warmer in the tents than they had in the houses they had lived in," Jameson said. None of them had homes with bathrooms.
"We felt responsible for helping these people find some place," Viola McFerren said. "We met several times a week. Most of the members were church leaders. They were strong men. We stood together."
Not long after moving into the tents, Earlie B. Williams was asleep in bed with his wife, Mary, and their baby, Sandra. There was a loud noise.
"I jumped up," Mary Williams said. "Earlie didn't realize he was shot at first. When he moved across the bed, there was a stream of blood on the sheet. He was resting his head on his arm and it went through his arm. Another inch and it could have been his head, or the baby, or me."
"We were there about two years," Earlie Williams said. "It was hard."
Blacks remember law enforcement's response as less than overwhelming, but C.E. Pattat Jr., who was sheriff from 1960-66, said he took some action.
"I talked to them and told them we would have no more of that," Pattat said.
"I talked with both races and told them there would be no violence. There were little things going on all the time. You'd hear about it. Whatever information I had, I gave to the FBI and TBI."
The men in Tent City armed themselves. Not too much later, a group of teen-agers drove by firing in the direction of Tent City. Police did little, so when tents were set up in Moscow on Gertrude Beasley's land, the location was kept a secret.
Reprisals continue
Etta Mason had her baby, Cleo, in February 1961 in a tent when it was about 22 degrees outside and the family's dog froze to death that night.
"There were four tents and about four families when I moved in," said Mason, 67. "We were there over a year on my mother's land. I already had five children and the baby."
Mason said she didn't talk to the children much about the right to vote. "All I was thinking about was getting out of there and doing better."
The reprisals continued. Robert McFerren sold his grocery store to his brother, John, because of the difficulties put on him by the voter registration drive. No food was being sold to him and no fuel.
John rented the store for $50, but to get food, he had to drive in his '55 Ford to Memphis and bring back supplies in the car, outrunning members of the White Citizens Council and the Ku Klux Klan who would lie in wait for him.
Viola was frightened. "White men would drive by so slowly," she said. "The phone rang constantly with the caller using obscene language and threatening to kill us. This happened all the time. One night John came driving into the yard so fast. He was trying to get away from a car that had been chasing him. The car went on by."
"I was threatened every day all day long by people who would drive through and call me names," Levearn Towles said. "We went to the governor (Buford Ellington) several times but they did not respond."
Viola McFerren took it another notch higher.
She met with Robert Kennedy shortly after he became U.S. Attorney General. "He said, 'I've only been here six months. We know what's going on in Fayette County. If you don't believe we're going to do something about it, you come back and see me in six months.' "
Meanwhile, back home, the Williams family received a kind offer of land and a house from white landowner Talmo Johnson of Chester County.
"I saw on TV about these people in Tent City," Johnson said. " All I know is what I understood from TV about them registering to vote. Well, it's a job to get people to pick cotton. I went over and talked to them. They came to work. I built them a house, bought them a refrigerator and cookstove, a washing machine and a deep freezer. I didn't ask no questions. I just wanted somebody to help me work."
Johnson added, "I have no regrets. They are good people."
Mary Williams described the day their benefactor showed up. "We were scared at first when he came to talk with us. He said he was looking for someone to sharecrop. I said we can't just sit here because God didn't intend for us to just sit here. And we've had such a good life. People were so friendly. God opened up a door and we've been here in Chester County ever since."
On June 14, 1961, President Kennedy authorized shipments of surplus food to Fayette and Haywood counties. In March 1961, the National Baptist Convention bought 400 acres in Fayette County and wanted to relocate families there. Leaders of the Fayette Civic and Welfare League squabbled and McFerren's faction formed a group called the "Original Fayette County Civic and Welfare League." The two groups went to court and the money, food, clothing and supplies were divided.
Despite their disagreement over administering aid, blacks in both counties sealed their victories on June 26, 1962, when a consent decree in federal district court in Memphis ended all pending lawsuits against the 74 defendants, landowners and merchants. The agreement permanently enjoined the defendants from engaging in any acts for the purpose of interfering with the right of any person to vote.
Viola McFerren continued her work, receiving accolades from U.S. presidents and appointment to a federal commission. She and others built a community center that is still a vital part of the community and is used by whites and blacks alike.
Like Viola McFerren, several civil rights leaders in Jackson remained in their community and have worked ever since to build it up. One of them - Ernest Brooks - was arrested in the march for Haywood and Fayette voting rights. We tell their story Friday.
