Fred Bright Winn was a teenager in San Francisco, California, when he was first introduced to his bi-racial 4-year-old half-sister.
That introduction would change Winn and his family forever.
“My mother had been traumatized by the events and was very upset,” Winn told The Enterprise-Tocsin in a Zoom interview. “This, in those days, was forbidden, even here in San Francisco.”
Winn was one of over a thousand volunteers who would come to Mississippi in 1964 for the Freedom Summer project. He said that it was his half-sister who inspired him to become active in the Civil Rights movement in California and eventually in Sunflower County.
Enrolled in community college during that year, Winn had heard a number of leaders from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee speak about Mississippi’s Civil Rights struggle.
Winn decided that he wanted to join the Freedom Summer project.
His mother did not hide her disapproval, and Winn said that his decision “Changed the dynamics of mine and her relationship for the rest of our lives.”
When he told his father that he was planning to come to Mississippi, he gave his son two things. First, he gave his blessing, and second, he gave him his New Testament Bible, which he had carried himself throughout his service during World War II.
Winn would end up spending a year in Sunflower County.
He was arrested five times, and the home in Indianola where he would eventually live was firebombed in the summer of 1965.
When Winn arrived in Ruleville in the summer of 1964, he knew that the danger was real.
He had been in training with SNCC leaders in Oxford, Ohio, during the week when Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner and James Chaney were reported missing in Neshoba County.
“We were in a meeting, and Mrs. (Rita) Schwerner came in, and she said, ‘My husband and two others, Goodman and Chaney, are missing,’” Winn said.
She asked that everyone in the room contact their congressman and local newspaper to try and stir up national attention.
“You could just tell she was so, so upset,” Winn said. “And she left the meeting, and Bob Moses stood up, and once she was out of earshot, he said, ‘I want you people to know, those men are dead. I know Mississippi. I have been in Mississippi. Those three men are dead. I didn’t want to say that in front of Mrs. Schwerner to not upset her, but I want all of you to seriously look within yourselves and decide whether you want to go home or into Mississippi, and I will hold nothing against you if you go home.”
Winn, along with most of the others in the room that day, made the decision to press forward.
Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney would be found dead later that summer in August.
In the heat of June, Winn and other volunteers stepped off the bus in Ruleville for the first time.
“As we’re getting off of the bus and getting our suitcases out, a white family drove up, and the woman had hair curlers as big as my hands,” Winn said. “Her hair was completely in curls and covered with a bandanna, and she just looked me right in the eye.”
The woman delivered a full extension of her middle finger in their direction, Winn said.
“That was my first impression of my country cousins in Mississippi,” he said.
Winn, who was training to become a plumber, quickly became a handyman at the local Freedom School.
He would serve as an educator there. He kept in contact with Civil Rights organizations, and he was the liaison to local police departments and the sheriff’s department, which then was under the late Sheriff Bill Hollowell.
During his time in Ruleville, he got to become friends with Fannie Lou Hamer.
“I have told my children that they are to tell their children and their grandchildren that their grandfather ate at the table of Fannie Lou Hamer,” Winn said. “I met with Mrs. Hamer many times. She called me by my first name. I saw her with regularity, and sometimes I would drive with her to meetings in Jackson.”
Winn described Hamer as a humble and generous woman, who always had a meal for anyone who came to her door.
“She was common folk, mild-mannered, except when she sang,” Winn said. “When we talked, she was not overbearing in her conversation. She spoke equal with us but spoke with authority.”
Winn said that at one point during the summer, Hamer was forced to confront the volunteers when many of them were engaged in interracial relationships.
“We did what comes naturally, and one night at a meeting, she said, ‘I’ve got to speak with you all,’” Winn said. “She said, ‘You are doing a dangerous thing, and somebody’s going to get killed, and they will bring hell down upon us the way you young people are behaving. I know what you’re doing, and you can’t do it.’ She put us in our place.”
Winn said they took Hamer’s words to heart, and many continued their relationships more discreetly.
“You were not going to stop Mother Nature,” Winn said.
During one of Winn’s five arrests that summer, he asked the jailer in Indianola to place him in a cell with the Black men there instead of white men.
His cell was directly above some female Civil Rights workers, who had been arrested at the same time.
Winn said that he could see through a hole in the floor down below, and he could tell that at least one of the women had been hit in the face.
When the arresting officer came upstairs, Winn said that he called him “Every foul word that I could, and it just bounced off of him.”
Finally, Winn called him something that touched a nerve.
“I called him a communist,” Winn said. “He spun around and started coming. His partner had to hold him back. I called him the worst word I possibly could, which was satisfaction to me.”
When Winn was released from jail, the officer confronted him on the street, and told him, “I’m going to beat the sh*t out of you.”
“I was scared,” Winn said.
He apologized to the officer.
“I said, ‘I know you’re not a communist. I will never do that again,’” Winn said.
The officer did forgive him and allowed him to leave.
The voter registration movement in Sunflower County that summer was mostly peaceful, Winn said, thanks in part to local officials like Sheriff Hollowell, whom Winn would later reunite with during a reunion almost 25 years ago.
“I was the one responsible for seeing him,” Winn said of Hollowell. “I was the liaison…Hollowell and I had rapport…He was not at all hostile and resentful of me for upsetting Southern ways. There were some good things about him.”
By the summer of 1965, Winn was living in Indianola at the home of Irene McGruder, one of four places that were bombed in one night in June.
Winn said that a group of college students had come to Indianola to help with canvassing and registration.
There was internal strife growing inside the local movement, he said, and tempers were starting to boil over with local whites in the community for various reasons.
That Saturday night, most of the college students had stayed out until about 11 p.m. This was after a day of voter registration work in Drew, Winn said.
The students came back to the house, and they were getting ready for bed.
Winn was manning the phone in the living room, like he did on many nights.
That is when someone ran out of a room and hollered, “Bomb!”
“I ran in and saw my bed on fire, grabbed the fire extinguisher…and it did nothing for the gasoline,” Winn said. “I yelled for everyone to get out, because I could see that it was going to continue.”
Winn said the group had to knock down a fence to get the elderly McGruder out of the home.
He said that he ran back into the home to get their money box and his father’s Bible.
“It’s only a New Testament Bible, but he had been given that when he joined the Army for World War II, and in it, he wrote to me when I was two years old, ‘Dear son, I carried this book with me throughout the war,’” Winn said. “I was going to a war, and I carried his Bible with me. He made it through the war, and so did I.”
“Then the fire department came, and I’ve never seen firemen move so slowly. I was infuriated,” Winn said.
At one point, he confronted a police officer, the same one he had called a communist the previous year. He arrested the irate Winn and placed him in the back of his patrol car.
After a while, Winn said, the students were getting just as angry as he was.
The officer allowed Winn to go free so that he could calm everyone down.
The next thing he heard was that the Freedom House and Giles Store were both on fire.
There was damage to both from the fires, but they were extinguished.
“Then I could see a glow,” Winn said.
A man Winn referred to as Mr. Wilder had been bombed as well.
“Poor Mr. Wilder had lost an arm in World War II,” Winn said. “He was picking up his garden hose, and he looked up at me and smiled and said, ‘Hello, Mr. Winn.’ That was a horrible night.”
Within a month, Winn had decided to leave Mississippi.
“By the time June came around, I was so damned frazzled, I had to leave, and I brought with me my girlfriend from Moorhead. We took the train and came back out to San Francisco,” he said. “It was falling apart, the project itself, and I was very frustrated with it, and I was very frazzled having had a bomb land in my bed.”
Winn left Sunflower County, but the memories of that year have never faded.
“We didn’t’ have the term in those days, PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder),” Winn said. “We didn’t know that term. Later I learned, and I suffered, as did many of my peers, from PTSD for quite a while. I could not be in the car at nighttime and open the door and have the light come on. I took the light out of all of the vehicles, because SNCC told us to do it. I could not in a restaurant sit with my back to the door. I could not be in a room with a shade up at nighttime. I would always pull the shade down. I would jump at loud noises.”
Winn, who became a plumbing contractor in San Francisco, said that his wife finally confronted him about his PTSD, and he was able to work out his issues over the course of time.
“It was a while before I would say that I was calm again,” Winn said.
With 60 years now passed, Winn is looking forward to being in Indianola this year for another reunion.
Like has happened at reunions in years past, he will see a changed Indianola, Sunflower County and Mississippi.
“Yes, there’s been progress, but you can’t tell a lot of young people that there’s been progress,” he said.
There are people locally who have the right to vote because of the work that Winn and others did during the 1960s here, but many of those citizens are not registered to vote or do not show up on election day.
“It pisses me off, damn it,” Winn said. “There’s great power to be had, but damn it, apathy breaks us.”
