blacks to vote, defying the segregationists who had killed or beaten anyone suspected of being a civil rights activist and burned down their homes and churches. All over the South activists were looking to Mississippi to give them inspiration and courage and calling us for legal advice and other kinds of support. Wedged into our already crowded offices at Freedom House, I dived into an endless stream of questions and requests for help that came in through the association’s more than eighteen hundred branches. One was trying to start a boycott somewhere, another was planning a march. If a judge ordered the NAACP not to demonstrate or conduct a boycott, we were asked for advice about how to respond. Often the branch would decide what to do without talking to us. At other times we would be asked to get demonstrators out of jail or oppose lawsuits seeking damages. In the South, LDF generally handled school segregation cases, so we rarely had that burden. In the North, however, branches would call to find out how much support we could provide if a school board refused to desegregate.
* * *
The national office at Freedom House had a small staff that could not respond to all the inquiries that poured down on them on a daily basis. The higher-ups at the association were swamped by the unending crises that threatened it, so it was all hands on deck, whether that meant Gloster Current or the NAACP’s education director, June Shagaloff, or the labor director, Herb Hill, or even a new assistant counsel like me. Whoever was around and willing to spare a few minutes did what they could in the daily life at Freedom House.
Often I tried to get Barbara to take the phone calls that came my way because I had a hard time understanding the accents of callers from the Deep South.
“You handle it, hon,” she would push back, singing out to me.
I’d take the calls and do the best I could. When I did understand the accent on the other end of the line, I scribbled furiously to take down what was said and promised to get back with an answer, sighing with relief when I managed to escape the caller. Sometimes I had no idea what I’d been told. That’s just the way it was.
When Barbara was inclined to educate me, she explained that most of the time the people who were calling were asking about the legality of actions they had no intention of undertaking.
“It’s mostly just talk,” she told me. “And anyway, if we tried to give real advice to everyone who called us, we’d never have time to get anything done. Most of the time those people aren’t looking for any particular answer; they just want to know they’re connected to a place where they could get help if they needed it. And you’re the lucky one to give them that assurance.”
I got what she was saying, but the person on the other end of the line had my name. It was fine for Barbara to be so cool about it. She was attuned to her own people. I wasn’t.
What am I doing here? I’d ask myself at odd moments, when my anxiety had me in its grip. It was hard for most people to understand that the NAACP’s national office—the headquarters of that august organization—had virtually no control over the chaos that was the civil rights movement during the 1960s. We were caught up in the same maelstrom as everyone else. At least on the surface the world I came from appeared more orderly. Right or wrong, leaders had answers to questions about how to proceed. At the NAACP, however, even those staffers who could pick up the nuances of what was being said “out there” were often powerless to do anything about it. Just too many people involved, all in their own worlds, too far away. The local branches of the NAACP had to make things happen as best they could. Or they could back off and wait, and things would stay the same. Barbara’s cavalier attitude was a coping mechanism. It was her way of dealing with a stressful reality. As for me, the very fact that I didn’t know what to do or how best to help was a magnification of what propelled me toward the NAACP in the first place.
* * *
A few weeks after joining the legal staff, I attended a retreat sponsored by the Eleanor Roosevelt Foundation as