Freedom Village

The latest eyesore on the South's unhappy racial battlefield is a tent town outside Somerville, in Fayette County, Tenn.

There, on property donated by Negro Farmer Shepherd Towles, some 70 Negro tenant farmers and sharecroppers and their children last week were making their temporary homes in ten Army-surplus tents. They had been evicted by white landowners because, the whites insisted, there was no need for them after the recent cotton harvest, and besides, increased mechanization of the farms meant that fewer hands were necessary. But the Negroes felt that they had been evicted because they had registered and tried to vote in hard-boiled Fayette County.

Blacklist. Fayette County's Negroes won a court ruling outlawing the all-white primary last spring, and began to register by the hundreds. White registrars offered no opposition, but soon the registered Negro businessmen and workers found that they were blacklisted. As the cotton harvest ended, the blacklisting spread to rural areas, and some Negro tenant farmers who had spent their lives on one piece of ground were ordered to move on. Last month the Justice Department moved into Fayette County and neighboring Haywood County, asked a federal court to enjoin white landlords pending a hearing based on the 1957 Civil Rights Act. The court refused on the ground that the Civil Rights Act does not involve property and contract rights.

The evicted Negroes for miles around, hearing of Somerville's tent town, moved in their worldly possessions and set up family life in the 16-ft.-by-24-ft. tents.

They threw down old rugs or corrugated pasteboard to cover the dirt floors. For heat they had potbellied stoves, some made from old oil drums. Their light came mainly from kerosene lamps flickering dismally behind tent flaps. They carried water by the bucket from Owner Towles's house. A one-hole outhouse served the entire community.

Splinters of Hope. The whites' argument that machines were taking over the workers' jobs got only disdainful snorts.

John McFerren, who runs a service station and grocery store and who has not been allowed to buy gasoline or groceries locally since the trouble began, waved a hand at surrounding hills and gullies: "On a farm like this, what could you do with modern machinery? If it's only due to machinery taking over, why won't they sell me gasoline?" Still, McFerren, who runs the Fayette County Civic and Welfare League, grabbed at some splinters of hope. "First," said he, "we've got to get these folks housed and fed, and then we'll start trying to find work for them. There's no way of knowing when that will be. Nobody knows but God. A small group like ours, which was caught up in a nightmare, can't move but one direction at a time." By week's end, food and clothing, gathered by goodwill Northern agencies, was arriving by the truckload at what was now dubbed "Freedom Village." In Cincinnati, the U.S. Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals granted the Justice Department a temporary injunction against evictions in Haywood County, and in Memphis, a federal court issued a temporary restraining order prohibiting further evictions in Fayette County. But the lawless were also active: a 25-year-old Negro was shot and slightly wounded by a night rider as he lay sleeping in his tent.

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