I was in some sense a participant in 1946 to 1956, where I lived with my parents on the Providence Cooperative Farm in Holmes County. But it was not what I did, but rather the experiences I had there in my formative years between the ages of 4 and 14. I was there except for a school year (1954-1955) which I spent at a boarding school in Arizona for my asthma (and probably, I think in retrospect, to get me out of Mississippi at a time of rising tension due to the Brown vs. Board of Education decision on May 1, 1954).
The White Citizens Councils were organizing to preserve segregation, and Holmes County was the second county where they set up chapters. The first was Sunflower County, close-by to the Northwest, but separated from Holmes by a short extension of Leflore County, This period is covered in the interview my wife Cathy Sunshine did with me on her blog, which also includes references to several of the books that have been written about Providence Farm and its predecessor in Bolivar County where my parents met before World War II.
My own time working with SNCC was in Albany, Georgia, as a summer volunteer in the summer of 1965 along with a group of other students from Union Theological Seminary in New York City. My first wife and I, Ruth Brandon, also a student at Union, were recruited by Charles Sherrod, one of the first SNCC staff, who was taking a year's leave from the frontlines to study at Union. He used the opportunity to recruit a group of six of us (if I remember correctly) to go to Southwest Georgia to work for SNCC the summer of 1965.
We did voter registration in Albany for most of the summer. But we were asked by SNCC to go to Newton, Georgia, county seat of Baker County, to join SNCC workers, local people, and others recruited from northern colleges and universities to support a demonstration in Newton. Baker County, the home of Shirley Miller, who would later marry Charles Sherrod, was known as 'Bad Baker County,' and with 'Terrible Terrell County,' was known to SNCC as one of the most dangerous counties in the state.
So SNCC asked for outside white people to join the demonstration, to provide the limited protection of the potential for national attention. In the event many of us at the demonstration were arrested. But as I remember it, the Baker County jail only had two cells, so the jailers had to decide whether to segregate by sex (we didn't call it gender at that time) or by race. They decided to segregate by gender.
Both cells were crowded and we were sleeping on the floor, which was almost full of people lying down. But we were not beaten or otherwise abused physically (unless you can count a diet of soft white bread and baloney at every meal abuse) I don't remember whether we spent one night or two. But movement attorney C.B. King succeeded in getting us bailed out and my parents wired the money for the two of us from Tucson. Local people had to put up their land as surety for their bail. The cases never came to trial as far as I know.
Another memory from that time is that we visited the home of Shirley Miller, before she was married to Charles Sherrod but after the murder of her father she described in a video for the SNCC Digital Project. And the transcript is here at Clip 3.
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