Peace and Freedom. Simon Hall
activists, drawn from a dozen Virginia colleges, made plans for a summer of civil rights work during 1965. Their activity would be focused on Virginia’s Southside, a bloc of agricultural counties stretching from Norfolk to Lynchburg, which made up the fourth and fifth congressional districts. The area’s African American residents lived in poverty under a strictly segregated system, and were denied political power by local whites.48
William Faulkner wrote that the whole land of the South is “indubitably, of and by itself, cursed,” and that “all of us who derive from it, whom it ever suckled, white and black both, lie under the curse.”49 Certainly the “bleak country of red clay and scrub pine” that was the Virginia Southside was plagued by the “race problem … as no other section” of the state. Indeed, for more than two centuries the “cursed” land of the black belt, soaked in the blood of slaves and Confederates alike, was inextricably bound up with what James Baldwin termed America’s racial nightmare. Slaves had outnumbered whites in the antebellum period, which made Nat Turner’s bloody insurrection in Southampton County during 1831 particularly terrifying. In 1865, the war to free the slaves had left the region desolate and the plantations plundered—facts which “the lowland [white] South has never forgotten.”50 During Reconstruction the area provided the heart of black political power in the state, electing John M. Langston to the House of Representatives in 1888. He was the only African American to represent the Old Dominion in the hallowed halls of Congress until the election of Bobby Scott in 1994. By the mid-twentieth century a rigid caste system, relying on custom and law rather than Klansmen and rope, kept the black population of the Southside firmly “in their place.” African Americans earned about three-fifths the income of whites, and averaged just five years of schooling.51
In the years following the Second World War, the region witnessed the rise of the modern black freedom struggle. A long and painful campaign to desegregate Prince Edward County’s public schools eventually made it all the way to Washington, DC, where, in 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court considered the case as part of Brown v. Board of Education.52 In 1960, in the wake of the Greensboro sit-ins, protests were held in Richmond, Norfolk, Newport News, Hampton and Suffolk.53 Three years later, the tobacco and textile city of Danville saw mass protests against Jim Crow segregation, which were met by a response violent enough to inspire a SNCC freedom song.54
The Southside counties targeted by the VSCRC proved that no activist needed to travel to Mississippi to find serious problems that needed addressing. Lucious “Duke” Edwards explained that many people believed that “Virginia Negroes are free just because nobody is shooting at them every few nights.” But Edwards, a black activist and student at Virginia State College, pointed out that the Old Dominion was actually a “controlled society” in which African Americans were denied basic civil, economic and political rights.55 The fourth congressional district was impoverished, and its black residents lacked political power. The median annual income of the district in the mid-1960s was $3,532, which gave it a ranking of 405 out of the nation’s 435 congressional districts. In most Southside counties, between a quarter and a third of African American families earned less than $1,000 a year, and 86 percent of the adult black population of the Southside had not completed high school.56 Most of those who managed to find employment worked as unskilled laborers, and many lived on tenant farms.57
Like countless communities across the South, economic deprivation went hand-in-hand with political impotence. While African Americans made up 47.9 percent of the fourth congressional district’s population, only 18.6 percent of eligible blacks were registered to vote.58 As W. Lester Banks, executive secretary of the Virginia State Conference of the NAACP noted, though Virginia did not use violence to the same extent as Mississippi or Alabama to prevent blacks from voting, “registrars in the Black Belt Counties of Virginia do effectively discourage registration by Negro citizens.” They did so by being uncooperative about opening hours and by requiring blacks to answer questions not required under the state constitution.59
The VSCRC, though an independent organization, was heavily influenced and aided by SNCC. Stanley Wise, a native of North Carolina who had been active in Howard University’s Nonviolent Action Group and the Cambridge civil rights movement, was pivotal in the group’s founding and attempted to pass on the lessons learned by SNCC activists.60 On the eve of the summer project, SNCC field secretaries Stokely Carmichael, Charles Cobb, and Chuck Neblett spent three days in Virginia “giving pointers” to the VSCRC activists.61 The young Virginians’ declaration that their “primary function” was to “meet the needs of the people as they see them,” owed much to SNCC’s belief in participatory democracy and group-centered leadership. Indeed, one activist recalled that “VSCRC workers were thoroughly imbued with what is known … as the ‘SNCC philosophy.’”62
“It’s very much like the 1964 Mississippi Summer Project in miniature—except that the accents of most of the workers are Southern,” began the Southern Patriot’s September 1965 article on the VSCRC.63 Anne Braden, a white southerner and civil rights stalwart, declared that “no civil rights project in the South has been more carefully prepared for than this one.”64 Twenty students, mostly Southerners, from seven Virginia colleges moved in to work in six Southside counties (Amelia, Brunswick, Dinwiddie, Lunenburg, Nottoway, and Powhatan).65 VSCRC headquarters were established in an old pool hall in Blackstone, Nottoway County, which had a population of 3,659.66
Believing, as Howard Romaine put it, that their job was “to find out what people want and need and help them organize themselves,” the VSCRC activists spent “a lot of time just listening.”67 Programs “varied sharply from county to county,” and depended largely on what local blacks requested or supported.68 Activities included voter registration, organizing black farmers, establishing selective buying campaigns, carrying out research, and publishing a newsletter. The VSCRC also worked at building up the local infrastructure by establishing community centers and forming sports teams.
At the end of the summer project, six students remained to continue working with the local black population. The activists’ decision to engage in full-time organizing reflected the fact that short-term commitment was of limited use. As Nolan explained, “with students in summer projects [there] is barely time to start a baseball team.”69 Instead the young activists would have to immerse themselves in the communities where they worked, and become what Bob Moses called “deep-sea divers.”70
Over the next six months or so, VSCRC continued much of the work that it had begun during the summer. In cooperation with the SCLC’s Summer Community Organization and Political Education (SCOPE) project, more than 1,200 people were registered to vote. The largest increase took place in Lunenburg County, where the number of registered African American voters doubled. The VSCRC also helped to organize marches and rallies, which resulted in the electoral boards in Lunenburg and Dinwiddie Counties granting additional registration days. Crop allotments were a major local issue, with African Americans often suffering from discrimination. The group attempted to educate black farmers about relevant federal farm programs, and organized mass meetings. VSCRC reported that “in each of the magisterial districts of three counties farmers nominated and had placed on the ballot candidates for the county Agricultural Stabilization and Conservation committees.” This was the “first time, in counties where Negroes comprise a majority or near-majority of farmers, that Negroes have been represented on the farm ballot.”71 VSCRC activists also organized local blacks to take advantage of the war on poverty programs, and worked to improve local schools.72
During late 1965 and early 1966 the war in Vietnam began to have an impact on the VSCRC. At a January 1966 staff meeting, the Georgia legislature’s refusal to seat Julian Bond because of his stand against the war was discussed. The following month, the VSCRC staff agreed that “discussion of peace” should form part of the program for a planned statewide student conference. At a staff meeting in March, David Nolan expressed his opposition to the war and the draft.73 Indeed, Nolan was particularly enthusiastic about opposing the war. In July, for example, he argued that Vietnam and the black freedom struggle were inextricably linked. Nolan believed that the war presented