 Canton City Park -June 1965 |
We Had a Movement —page twoby Tom Manoff |
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We Had a Movement - page two
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Civil rights workers from New York that summer had a card to play. Robert Kennedy had just become our senator. Behind the scenes we’d been told that if arrested we could call his office and they’d call the jail. I was going to call my sister in New York. I knew the number. But suddenly I wasn’t sure. I rehearsed it several times and dialed. My sister still has the same number today. I still know it today though it’s harder to remember without the old prefix of letters. Phone numbers had character then.
My sister answered. I’m in the Canton city jail I said. Call Senator Kennedy’s office and tell him where I am and that the officer in charge is (…). The energy in the room turned. I’m sure that (…) was relieved. He didn’t want something big to happen on his watch. He was also a decent fellow, even pleasant. That’s how it went.
I’d been in the Canton jail several times, but not alone. The jail had three cells in a line. They put me in the middle cell that night. Other times I’d been in last cell. One of the walls was concrete. We’d stand up against it to get cool. Something firm, reliable, almost comforting. But this middle cell had only bars on both sides. More open. Less safe, it seemed.
I searched the cell and found a bent fork under the toilet. I wanted a weapon, not to use against the cops, but against a possible white inmate later that night. Thinking back now, it’s not clear why the fork was there. Another set-up. I also had a pen. How did that happen? I wrote a letter on toilet paper to Abby in Paris and put in my pocket. How utterly ridiculous to write this now. But that’s what I did.
Cops came in and stood at the cell. Sometimes they just stared at you. There had a special fury for “outsider agitators,” who worked and lived among “their colored.” Some kind of revulsion beyond anger. One cop spoke quietly. You’re going to county jail he said. We’ll tell the “boys” in that jail there about your guitar. As a white in a segregated jail I would serve the time with good old boys. Rednecks. The hands again. They’d know to fuck with my hands.
The charge was “pointing and aiming a dangerous weapon.” I was bailed out the next day. Five hundred dollars cash. Put up in by a man named George Washington, the black storeowner across the street who rented the Freedom House to CORE. You know we had a movement then. Come on now.
Although mostly ignored by the press, by summer 1965 the movement had important legal support from volunteers. My lawyer for the trial was Dale Tooley, the city attorney for Philadelphia. Smart lawyer. No experience in Mississippi, something that would almost get Charney killed the next week, but his mere presence in the courtroom brought some sense of outside authority.
At the trial, Officer Sonny Mott told how I’d pointed the shotgun at him. He said he’d heard a “trigger click.” A shotgun shell was produced. He pointed to a mark on the shell casing. The click and the mark suggested that I’d pulled the trigger and it misfired. They must have come up with this ruse right before the trial. They’d taken the shell casing and scored it. Had I really pulled the trigger, Sonny Mott might have been dead, and I’d be on trial for murder. With this testimony, I could be charged with attempted murder.
The great triumph at that trial was testimony by a local black teenager against the cop. He said that I’d put down the shotgun right away. No trigger sound. Jesus! We had a movement. Come on now.
The comical moment of the trial was the look on Dale Tooley’s face at the verdict. He’d put on a good case. There was no jury. Mayor Stanley Matthews was the judge. He would also pass sentence. Matthews was another moderate fellow in Canton. My father had called him the year before during another arrest to calm things down, to “keep order despite differences.” We white kids from New York had that kind of advantage. My father was dead by this second summer. But the courtroom was full of movement people.
“I’ve listened to all that went on,” the mayor said. “I can understand how things sometimes get out of hand.” I remember him looking at me somewhat apologetically. “But you can’t take the law in your own hands. Three months in county jail.”
Dale Tooley moved for appeal. Mathews granted it and let the five hundred dollars already posted stand. We celebrated that night. Joked about the cop looking stupid but not that I’d been convicted. That’s how it went. We had a movement. As a white kid from New York, I would have to come back to face trial. Not coming back would break faith. Bill didn’t say much about it. Once he’d told me to go home. Now, without saying it, he was saying that I had to come back. You don’t run out on your pals. We had a movement.
A few weeks later I was back at school in New York. Practicing Brahms and conducting Hindemith. Waiting for the legal papers. Waiting to go back. Oddly, I never worried about being killed in Mississippi. But I always worried about my hands.
Almost forty-five years later, in the first week Hilary started locating records online, I asked her to look for an official transcript of the trial. I didn’t think there was one. Mississippi courts could be somewhat informal with civil rights workers. But Dale Tooley had written an account of the testimony for the appeal. The last page of it had survived in my papers. A few paragraphs, the rest, lost. There was nothing more Hilary could find.
But the places of remembering have markers. Stone, bone and paper.
A few months later a complete copy of Tooley’s account was found [Click on red to see]. Not in Mississippi, but in the scablands of Eastern Washington on the ranch where Marjorie McGregor was born. She’d sent a copy of Tooley’s account of the trial to her brother, Sherman McGregor in 1965. It was in a box among old pictures, letters and documents in the old McGregor store, where my mother knew Sam Fisher. Alex McGregor, my cousin, is now head of the family ranch. He’s also an historian and author for whom documents mean something. Alex handed me the account of my Mississippi trial hidden in a box till the summer of 2008 when Hilary and I climbed the butte.
I’m not completely in the present when I visit Hooper. Looking for the place my mother knew, I am her ghost. Almost a century has past since Marjorie Jean McGregor was born next to the Palouse River and in the years that followed knew one of the last Palouse Indians named Sam Fisher. Nearly half of that century separates me now from the night I held a gun on a policeman in Canton, Miss. My mother has been dead almost that many years too. But there is life after life on the buttes, and in the freedom songs we once sang.
Through the dream of memory now. Mississippi and the lands of the Palouse. So many graves. Come on now. All of you come on.this is PAGE TWO
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