SNCC VETERANS, REMEMBERING THE BATTLE

CIVIL RIGHTS ACTIVISTS, WHEN THE FUTURE WAS FORGED

Freddie Greene's family was in bed that spring night in 1963 when a shotgun blast riddled the front door of their house. A second blast sprayed pellets into a front bedroom. The attack was not unexpected -- her father was a leading member of the NAACP -- but the events of that evening changed forever the life of the tall reserved teenager considered by many of her neighbors to be "the nicest girl in Greenwood," Miss.

On that night, Freddie Greene Biddle recalled recently, "it became clear to me that anything could happen." After that, her interest in the civil rights movement changed from youthful curiosity to a full-time commitment as a field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, pronounced "snick"). The next summer she was one of only three women assigned to voter registration efforts in southwest Mississippi, generally considered the most dangerous part of the state.

The March 26 shooting at the Greene house, which caused no injuries, was just one of hundreds of such incidents that fueled the fight to end segregation in the American South.

Twenty-five years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act and a few months before the 25th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act, Biddle and other former SNCC activists look back on the battles as formative experiences that profoundly affected their futures.

They recall the struggle to survive on the $10 a week paid SNCC field secretaries, walking the dusty roads of the rural South to recruit supporters, sharing the homes of sharecroppers, and singing freedom songs in country churches, on picket lines and in damp jail cells.

Most important, perhaps, is the memory of the close friendships forged while struggling together to change an entrenched economic and political system defended by violence. Many of those SNCC workers now make their homes in Washington, where they have found new ways to continue to work for change in the lives of dispossessed blacks.

But first, there was work to be done in the South. Reginald Robinson, who had worked for SNCC in McComb, Miss., during the summer of 1961, recruited many of the students who converged on the state in '62, '63 and '64. Lawrence Guyot was one of the first SNCC workers sent to Leflore County, Miss., to do the tedious and dangerous work of trying to persuade blacks to take the daring step of "going down to the courthouse to register" to vote. At the time, less than 2 percent of the black population was registered. One night, Guyot had to escape through a second-story window when the SNCC office was attacked by a mob of white men. A few months later, he was arrested, then handed over to a group of white men outside the jail in nearby Winona after he inquired about a group of jailed civil rights workers. The men beat him bloody. Yale law student Eleanor Holmes, who had just arrived in Mississippi, went to Winona to bail him out. She recalled that he was so badly injured she had to wait until he could be made presentable.

When Leflore County authorities cut off surplus food allotments that many farm workers depended on to survive the winter, Ivanhoe Donaldson, a student at Michigan State University, ferried carloads of food and medicine through a hostile South.

After the SNCC office was burned down and the Greene house attacked a few days later, SNCC's executive secretary, Jim Forman, urged a group of angry blacks to march to Greenwood's City Hall to protest the violence and insist on their right to vote. The group was met by policemen and a snarling dog. Forman, Guyot, Frank Smith, Courtland Cox and four others were arrested for disorderly conduct. SNCC field secretary Dorie Ladner and Yale law student Marian Wright participated in the march but were not arrested.

After the arrests, Charles Cobb, a former Howard University student, rushed to Greenwood from nearby Greenville to join other civil rights workers trying to reinforce the voter registration drive.

All of these people now live in Washington. Smith is a city councilman. Cox is vice president of the U.S. International Cultural and Trade Center Commission, the agency putting up what will be the largest federal building in the District on Pennsylvania Avenue.

Donaldson, who served a three-year prison term for stealing $190,000 from the D.C. government, is head of Datafax Resources, a management consulting firm that specializes in environmental issues and has done some work for Jesse Jackson. Guyot is coordinator of voluntary activities in the mayor's office and active in the advisory neighborhood commission of LeDroit Park. Robinson is a city employee who has become the father to seven foster sons. Ladner is a social worker at D.C. General Hospital's emergency room.

Freddie Greene Biddle is a loan officer for the Small Business Administration. Cobb is a writer for National Geographic. Forman, who heads a small organization called Unemployment and Poverty Action Committee, does sporadic political consulting for Democratic candidates and is a candidate for "shadow senator" in the stalled D.C. statehood initiative.

Eleanor Holmes Norton is former head of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and a professor at Georgetown University Law Center. Marian Wright Edelman is president of the Children's Defense Fund.

Most prominent of other SNCC activists in Washington is Mayor Marion Barry, a native of Itta Bena, a small town near Greenwood, and the first chairman of SNCC.

Public and personal service was SNCC's legacy for most of these young activists. Consider the lives of three of them.

Frank Smith Frank Smith was born in 1942 on a plantation in Newnan, Ga., where his father was a truck driver. There were no public schools for black children, so he walked 2 1/2 miles to a Baptist church school.

"There was a school bus that passed us all the time with white kids on it," he recalled recently. "They would drive 20 miles down the road to pick up a couple of white kids; there weren't more than half a dozen on the bus. It would pass us on the road and they would spit out the window."

Accustomed to segregation, Smith traveled in the back of the bus to Atlanta to attend Morehouse College. There he soon joined SNCC and began participating in demonstrations to desegregate lunch counters in Atlanta department stores.

Smith says SNCC eventually decided that demonstrating for access to public accommodations was not enough. "The political structure was being used against us, the sheriff, police, prosecutor. Laws made locally were being used against us. Sooner or later we had to get at the base of that."

So the emphasis shifted to voter registration, and Smith dropped out of college to become a SNCC field secretary in the small town of Holly Springs in northeast Mississippi. He worked alone and lived at Rust College, a small black school, until February 1963 when a SNCC worker in Greenville was shot in the neck and seriously injured by nightriders. SNCC decided to concentrate its efforts in Greenwood and Smith moved there.

Smith and other SNCC workers later traveled around the country organizing support for a voter registration and educational campaign and for formation of a parallel political organization for those who could not register to vote in Mississippi.

The organization, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, tried to unseat the regular Mississippi delegation at the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City in 1964, and its failure to do so left many SNCC workers disillusioned about working within the electoral system.

Smith returned to Morehouse to obtain his degree, married SNCC activist Jean Wheeler (now a psychiatrist practicing in the Washington area), and returned to Mississippi. He worked with a federally funded Head Start program, then with a group of sharecroppers who had been evicted from a plantation near Greenville after going on strike. In 1966, the Smiths led the striking farm workers to Washington, where they installed a tent city in Lafayette Park to demand federal poverty funds.

Today, 23 years after camping out in Lafayette Park, Smith is a member of Washington's establishment -- and generally considered one of its more moderate members. He has a doctorate in urban planning, was an activist in his Adams-Morgan neighborhood, then a member of the School Board. Smith is now serving his second term on the City Council.

Smith says the change in his approach is partly a "function of being half a hundred years old."

"I always believed in the electoral system; we were always registering people to vote," he recalled recently in his office in the District Building. Being in government, he said, provides the tools to improve the lives of the poor, although politics also requires "compromises that sometimes leave" the values of the civil rights movement "in ashes."

"Government has many more resources -- the force of law, the value of taxation, money to spend," he said. "With all of its faults, electoral office is the only game in town. I guess I wanted the challenge to see if I could make government work to ameliorate the difference between people who are poor and people who are super-rich. I have used this office on many occasions, hopefully every day, to try to speak out on these issues."

Dorie Ladner When Dorie Ladner, a native of Hattiesburg, Miss., was 13, Emmett Till was lynched. Till, a 14-year-old black youth visiting Mississippi from Chicago, had spoken familiarly to a white woman, "was taken out of the bed ... and thrown into the river with cotton gin around his neck," Ladner recalled. The men tried for his murder were acquitted.

"I kept wanting to know why they let these people go when they were guilty and everybody knew they were guilty. Why didn't they send them to jail," she said.

Her questions led Ladner to begin attending NAACP meetings and eventually to organize a chapter of the civil rights group in her high school. After just one year at Tougaloo College in Jackson, she dropped out to work as a field secretary for SNCC, first in Jackson, then in Clarksdale, another Delta town.

Her years in SNCC were filled with tension -- gunfire, bombings, threats. She recalls being arrested for demonstrating at Medgar Evers's funeral; being harassed by Klansmen at the two trials of the man accused of killing Evers; and the murder of Vernon Dahmer, a Hattiesburg farmer who had aided civil rights workers.

Dorie Ladner remained in SNCC until 1966 when she moved to St. Louis where her sister Joyce, also a former SNCC member who lives in Washington, was a graduate student. In St. Louis, Dorie Ladner worked for an anti-poverty program and continued her activism with the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE).

"It was basically doing the same things but not with the same type of threats," she recalled, although even in St. Louis she sometimes found policemen parked outside her house and the two Ladners were named as subversives during hearings of the House Un-American Activities Committee.

Dorie Ladner moved to Washington in 1974 to enroll in Howard University's School of Social Work, where she earned a master's degree. Today she works in the emergency room at D.C. General Hospital, "counseling the other America -- the homeless, the unemployed, the mentally ill, sexually assaulted, neglected and abused children, neglected elderly."

The SNCC experience left her with "an ability to see injustices, and to want to deal with them in the workplace, politically, in your apartment building, on your street, wherever you are."

The hardest part of her job at D.C. General, Ladner said, is dealing with the aftermath of a murder -- being present when the victim is pronounced dead, informing the victim's relatives and finding someone to identify the body. But here, too, her SNCC training and experience stand her in good stead.

After a murder victim is brought to the emergency room, she says, "the police come in, the family comes in screaming," and she is forced to tune out all distractions and concentrate on the job at hand, just as she did at dangerous moments in Mississippi.

And when she talks to the families, she is able to draw on a reservoir of compassion and understanding because she remembers. "I've had many comrades fall to murder, people I knew and loved dearly."

Reginald Robinson Reginald Robinson was one of many SNCC activists raised in the cities of the North who decided as college students to join the battle in the South. "When I was growing up in Baltimore you had your boundaries and you didn't go beyond them. In terms of how the system places people in different areas, it was no different than Mississippi. There were still quite a few folks disenfranchised."

Robinson began working in a voter registration campaign run by a city councilman while attending Cortez Peters Business School. He also worked for a SNCC affiliate in Baltimore, and in 1961 went to Mississippi for SNCC.

"That was a totally different situation," he said. In Baltimore, he could take bus loads of black people to register to vote with no obstacles. In Mississippi, they had to be prepared for a complex literacy test that involved interpreting sections of the state's constitution. And, he added: "The ultimate was that you could lose your life. ... A man by the name of Herbert Lee who was working with us was killed in broad daylight by a state representative. ... It was witnessed by a Mr. {Louis} Allen. He was killed too."

After leaving SNCC, Robinson used many of the skills he had learned in the civil rights movement. He did community organizing for federally funded anti-poverty programs based in Boston and Washington. When the federal government stopped supporting such programs, he went to work for A.L. Nellums, a public relations firm that did fund-raising for the Congressional Black Caucus.

Today, Robinson works with the victims of violent crimes. He helps them obtain compensation through the Department of Employment Services' crime victims compensation program.

He also continues the work he did in SNCC in a more personal way. He has helped raise seven foster sons and is in the process of adopting one of them, Brian Williams.

Robinson began thinking about taking in homeless boys when he turned 40, he said. He had no children, and had been divorced for several years.

"I had thought about what it is I wanted to do. I had been places, done things. There is nobody in my life right now I want to marry. I was just generally thinking I had time and space and what is it I was going to do with it," he said.

Many of the boys placed with Robinson for foster care had serious problems. He struggled to provide stability and discipline in their lives. He worked to find the right schools for those with learning disabilities and emotional problems. One ran away repeatedly and is now serving a 45-year jail term for killing a foster mother. The others, he said, have returned to their families or other foster homes and are attending high school.

Because the placements were temporary, Robinson became discouraged and said he would not continue. "Then I decided that the situation was a lot more than just my feelings of rejection," he said. "I decided this time I would go for adoption."

Robinson found his son, Brian, now 13, through an emergency placement two years ago. A social worker called him a few weeks before he was to go on a vacation and asked him to take Brian temporarily. He agreed. The arrangement worked so well that when it was time for Robinson to go to Martha's Vineyard on vacation, he took Brian with him.

"He told me he could swim and jumped in the pool and almost drowned," Robinson recalled recently. "I had to jump in with my clothes on. ... We began to form a bond."

Today Brian attends Watoto School, a private school in Washington "based on pan-Africanism and African culture. It gives him a sense of pride," Robinson said. "He's surrounded now by good support."

Articles appear as they were originally printed in The Washington Post and may not include subsequent corrections.