Sheila Michaels

Originally, I sought out Sheila Michaels because she was also involved in an organization called The Feminists, and had been credited with coming up with the title ‘Ms’. I recognized these as elements of a more complex narrative of coming to feminism than the well known Mary King and Casey Haden position papers on sexism within SNCC. But the more we spoke, I realized that Sheila had many other stories that I had never come across while studying SNCC. In fact, she was not asked to contribute to The Freedom Plow, which was an anthology comprised of women’s stories from SNCC (a work that was created because a cohort of women were frustrated that their experiences had been ignored).

*This project is not meant to treat women in The Civil Rights Movement as an immutable category, but to recognize that there has been an underrepresentation of women’s voices in this particular historical period.

What is the process of unearthing women’s narratives of the Civil Rights movement?

It was right before a very big demonstration, a voting rights demonstration. And [Sandy] was at some hangout, some bootlegger because Mississippi was a dry state so everything you got, you got from bootleggers or you went out of state to get them. That was one of his weaknesses, and he was hanging out at a bootlegger and he came home down the street and he was being followed by a bunch of cars. They lined up in front of the building, and all of them had their lights on into the window. Our office was in a store, which she had on either side of the downstairs. They were calling him over a bull horn to come out. And he said, “Here comes Mama Woods down the steps” ‘clomp clomp clomp’ in her Minnie Mouse shoes. And she has a sawed off shot-gun or a shot-gun anyway and she throws open the door and she says, “Who’s out there? Cal is that you? You know I know everything about you. Now you get to gettin’.” [laughter] She’s waving her shot gun around. And she calls out everybody, you know, fire chief, everybody, and “You get to gettin’ you hear me?” [laughter] And they all turned off their lights and drove away.

People used to hang out in the front with, you know, a riffle. Across the street, watching us all the time. There was always somebody who had a riffle. And they never used to come behind the building because Mrs. Woods used to feed all the stray cats, and it stank [laughter] you know. And this was Mississippi in the Summer, and it was humid and it was hot and you did not go out the back [laughter] except she did to feed them. So I always thought that those cats really protected us. They kept the Klu Klux Klan from siting out the back and taking a shot at people because they couldn’t stand it.

What is revealed by taking a ‘life history’ approach for the women active during the Civil Rights Movement? How does this feminist practice provide us with a more complex history?

Pat and Frank were married in my apartment, which was another story. They were supposed to be married a little bit later. A few days later, I mean. Then there was a CORE meeting, I think it may have been in Syracuse. People were coming in to go to this national CORE meeting. It was not in New York City, but they were in for the day, and Pat, since these were all her old friends from New Orleans CORE, she decided to move it up I think a day or two. And then the minister who was going to do the wedding called I think the day, that day, or the day before, and said, “I’m really sorry but I’m in Cincinnati and I can’t come in.” It had been the plan all along for him to marry them because the women he was later to marry had been in New Orleans CORE too, and had actually risked her life the day that Pat got arrested in Poplarville. She had been... we always had somebody at a telephone booth to call in case something terrible happened, to keep track of what was going on. [...] She was in the telephone booth and the bus pulled off without Pat and Frank and Shirley. No Alice. Alice was small and serious, Shirley was a little more joyful [laughter]. Yeah they’d surrounded Pat and somebody pushed her and Frank pulled back the sheriff. And Frank’s father was (and mother too) were in the mafia. Mother was Jewish and Polish, Jewish and German... German, Jewish and Polish. And she had been a gangster’s mom. [...] So he’d grown up in that atmosphere. Actually they’d decided to change their name and move to the Bronx, so he had a pretty normal childhood. But you know, these habits. So when the sheriff or whoever he was pushed Pat. Frank pulled back his arm and said, “Don’t do that,” in a tone of voice that carried a kind of threat. They arrested him too, and they put him in Willy McGee’s cell, which was easy to get to for lynching if they wanted to lynch him, and it looked like they wanted to. [...]

Anyway, she was trapped in the telephone booth when all of this went on and they were looking for her because they knew there was one other person. Or they thought they knew there was one other person. That was her husband to be who was supposed to be the minister and we had actually gone to hear him preach his first sermon when we were in Washington D.C. So, he bowed out the day before and there were all these CORE people who came in for the wedding and there wasn’t going to be a wedding. Then Jerome Smith who had a stutter, and could hardly... actually he had been almost killed in, was it Poplarville? It was on a freedom ride. They broke in his jaw, and they were kicking him. [...] And Jerome had this terrible, terrible stutter. And he went down to get some beer at a corner grocery store, and he came back with a minister [laughter] who had been defrocked for his drinking. Presbyterian minster who’d been defrocked because he had become so bad an alcoholic that, you know, he couldn’t do his job anymore. I was cooking this dish that had shrimp... it was expense. It was shrimp and sherry and cream, and it was going to curdle. And I said sit down and have a drink and everyone said, “Noooo!” So the dish was ruined, and we had this wedding in our apartment, in the dressing room in our apartment. There was a closet next to- Marry had the front room, and I had the living room, a pullout couch on the living room. So it was between our rooms, and everybody crowded in around this closet and I then couldn’t get my shoes because they were in the closet. And everybody said it’s okay just have the wedding [laughter] you know, have the wedding. So everybody who was anybody was there for the wedding. And it happened. What were the chances that Jerome who could hardly get a sentence out was going to find a minister when he went down to get beer for the whole group? I’m not telling it well, but everybody who was there remembers it very, very well.