A Reason to Vote - Calvin Bess’ Footstep

[Excerpted from Beyond Roses—An Obligation to Speak (Finding Voice for Conversations)]

…At the intersection of the streets were footprints of foot soldiers on the ground. One stood out. His full name had been George Calvin Bess, Jr., but everyone who knew him had called him Calvin.

 Here it was, the name memorialized in concrete on a sidewalk that stretched for a block and ripped into every passing heart that bothered to stop and remember or learn the story for the first time.

              Calvin Bess had been a Baby Rattler too.  He was not in our class but was one of the “big boys” we looked up to in the 1960s in our segregated demonstration school that had some four hundred students in grades 1 through 12. Those of us who had been together since first grade, remembered Calvin, about four years ahead of us, for his freckles and his reddish complexion. My mother had been his homeroom teacher and had called him “a quiet boy” from a modest family. Yet Calvin had always refused to be silent when he saw something wrong. In fact, a later account of his life recalled the time when Calvin, while still a student in training to be an activist, accompanied another SNCC member to a rural Black church service.  When the pastor refused to allow the SNCC member to speak to the congregation, Calvin—unsolicited—yelled out without permission, insisting to the congregation that they must register to vote. 

            The right to vote was his passion. He had seen people in Northern Florida denied this basic right and forced to live with the consequences of poor representation. He had seen outrageous literacy tests and $2 poll taxes as part of a system that gave voting privileges to whites and denied them to Blacks. For the men and women of the South who deserved better, in 1967, Calvin headed off to Mississippi in a shiny blue convertible his Daddy had given him. At 22 and about to graduate college, he joined a host of other courageous students from across the country who travelled on a mission. Among them were many whites who were allies in the fight. Working all along the way, Calvin drove from Tallahassee through neighboring Gadsden County where there were more than twelve thousand Blacks eligible to vote and just a few years before had only seven Blacks who were actually registered. 

We don’t know for certain what happened when he reached Mississippi, but likely he began to knock on doors, confronting individual fears of people who never thought they would have a chance. There had been no poplar trees “with Black bodies swinging in the breeze” as in Billie Holiday’s Strange Fruit, but there had been danger and he had found it. Citizens wanted to vote. Calvin believed they had the right to do it, but forces in the universe converged to try to quiet his voice. It is likely that he faced the KKK, the police and state officials (sometimes who were one in the same). Mysteriously, he disappeared and days later, his blue convertible—charred and no longer shiny—was found at the bottom of a swamp. He was in it with a hole in his head.

The family took it the hardest, never knowing what actually happened.  Calvin’s baby sister who was 6 years old when he died kept looking for the fellow she called “Brother” to come home. Calvin’s mother never got over the tragedy and eventually passed away, perhaps of a broken heart. Calvin’s dad, in the aftermath of his son’s death, insisted that the burned-out blue convertible be brought back to Tallahassee for all to see. Neighbors say that car sat in the Bess’ front yard for nearly six months as a reminder of the high price the son had paid. Three years before, three other Civil Rights workers—Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman and James Chaney— had been viciously murdered for doing the same work. They had become a part of the national conversation. Calvin Bess never did, but he left something to follow anyhow.

Those of us Baby Rattlers looking at the footprint on the Civil Rights memorial sidewalk were the survivors. We were the ones, who by the Grace of God, were still here. Others like Calvin, because of somebody else’s bigotry and hatred and fear, never made it. At that moment, I was convinced the imprint in the sidewalk meant more than just the concrete used to create it, more than the historical record used to resurrect it, more than the sprinkles of dirt that now blew from the Tallahassee street intersection of contractions. In that footprint lay hope and a real expectation that the inanimate footprint could become a living footstep. We could be better Americans. If we told someone this story and let it lead us, it could be an example of justice and tolerance to follow. We could give up our complacency and indifference and excuses. We could make sure there never came an election we would “sit out” or “miss.” We could be certain we raised our voices and pushed our resolve so that every eligible person we knew voted—if not for our own sake and the sake of our progeny, for the sake of Calvin Bess. I realized he would expect it and we could do it.

Excerpted from Beyond Roses—An Obligation to Speak (Finding Voice for Conversations)

by Judi Moore Latta. [Chapter: “Calvin Bess’ Footstep”]