In an act that could be described as nothing less than terrorism, someone scaled the massive hill off Hossley Street, presumably found an open window, lit a stick of dynamite and tossed it inside the Freedom House where 14 people were supposed to be sleeping.

Almost everyone inside was in bed late on Oct. 5, 1964, but Henry Hunter of Vicksburg was wide-awake taking a guitar lesson from fellow civil rights worker and Yale student Bryan Dunlap when the dynamite exploded.

Out of nowhere there was a rumble. Hunter was in a pile of rubble; the bed he had been sitting on was hanging between the first and second stories of the home.

“All of the sudden, man, a loud explosion went off,” Hunter said. It seemed to me like a blue light went all though the place, and the place just separated.”

The house at 1016 Hossley St., now the site of a vacant bank building at 1020 Mission 66, was blown to bits.

Pieces of debris rained down on the A&P Grocery just south of the Freedom House.

“I didn’t have any clothes on, but I found my way out,” Hunter said. “The police tried to get me to go back in and get my clothes, and I asked him was if he crazy. I went to the house across the street and they gave me an overcoat.”

The high hill the house sat upon was flattened when Mission 66 came though in the early 1970s. There is nothing to mark where the home was, and when Hunter visited the site this week, he had to guess the location of the bedroom where he was sitting that night.

No one was seriously injured in the blast, but Bessie Brown and her 2-month-old grandson, who were living in the home, suffered minor injuries.

“It was a miracle that nobody got hurt, really,” said John Ferguson, who had left the Freedom House minutes before the bombing. “I think it’s maybe because we had so many books and stuff in there that it absorbed the shock.”

After many seemingly empty threats of bombings and violence against the Freedom House, it was evident that whomever tossed in the dynamite that night had intended to kill every man, woman and child inside, regardless of race.

Member of the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist groups considered the bombing vigilante justice.

The supposed crime of the civil rights workers?

“We had been out canvasing all day trying to get people to sign their kids up for Head Start and trying to do a little voter registration,” Hunter said.

After an FBI investigation, no one was charged with the Freedom House bombing here, in what many considered to be one of the most racially moderate cities in the South.

“To have the Freedom House blown up in this most tolerant of Mississippi cities, therefore, is the worst possible setback to law and order and to the civil rights process,” Drew Pearson wrote in his nationally syndicated column.

Vicksburg lacked any significant presence by the KKK or the White Citizens’ Council, and it had been the only city in the state to allow the mostly black Freedom Democratic Party to hold a convention, Pearson and other commentators of the time pointed out.

The oppression in Warren County was real and had been psychologically driven, Ferguson said.

“They don’t know what the hell they’re talking about,” Ferguson said of people who in the 1960s cast Vicksburg as a moderate beacon of racial equality. “In fact, it was worse because they had black folks thinking they were OK.”

Hand-in-hand with the psychological oppression and intimidation was a constant threat of physical violence, Ferguson said.

The physical threats in Warren County became immanent during the summer of 1964 when members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Confederation of Federated Organizations sought to educate and empower a people just a few generations removed from the slavery of their ancestors.

“Killing was second nature then. You didn’t have to do much for a white person to pull a gun and shoot you,” Ferguson said.

Plenty of guns — and triggers for that matter — were pulled, but the violence never escalated here the way it did in Neshoba County where three civil rights workers were kidnapped and murdered by Klansmen in June 1964.

The fertile farmland around Eagle Lake was the stage for a large portion of the local violence.

Hunter vividly remembers a tip to Australia Island where he was encouraging black families to send their children to public school rather than the one-room shack their boss had set up.

“If they would send their kids out to the road, they could come over to Temple,” Hunter said.

The white landowner for whom all the black families worked found Hunter talking to his employees.

“He caught me up there and put that shotgun under my neck,” Hunter said. “He said to me, ‘I told you to leave my n*****s alone. They don’t need to go to school and they don’t need to vote. I vote for them.’’’

“All I could say was yes sir. I didn’t go back on his place.”

An older woman in the Eagle Lake area also found Hunter talking to families who worked for her and stuck a .38-caliber pistol in his face. Later in the summer, Hunter and others civil rights workers were conducting a voter registration drive at China Grove M.B. Church when someone unloaded a dozen rounds into the building.

All the violence fazed Hunter, but his quest to spread freedom in the black community was undaunted.

“You couldn’t show fear,” he said. “They would beat the hell out of you sure enough if you did.”

Ferguson was shot at while educating black farmers at Eagle Lake about soil conservation and government programs from which they had been systematically excluded.

“I think if they wanted to kill us, they could have,” Ferguson said of the shooting.

Vicksburg Police Chief Murray Sills and Sheriff Paul Barrett seemed to go out of their way to avoid conflict with Civil Rights workers, said Freedom House worker Fran O’Brien of Frazier Park, Calif.

“The local sheriff was always elaborately polite to us,” said O’Brien who was a student at Pacific University before traveling to Vicksburg for Freedom Summer.

The law, however, was far from on their side.

One Mississippi Highway Safety Patrol trooper especially had it out for Hunter.

On a trip up U.S. 61 North, the trooper stopped Hunter about five times.

“Every time he stopped me, he searched the car and found something to give me a ticket for,” Hunter said.

Finally, the trooper cited Hunter for having a slick tire on his station wagon and told him not to move the vehicle again that day. Hunter tried to change the tire, but his spare wouldn’t fit.

The trooper had gone, so Hunter headed back to Vicksburg. At the exit to Kings, the trooper was waiting and arrested him.

“Instead of taking me to jail, he took me up 61 back to the store at Redwood. There was a motorcycle gang. They all came around the car looking at me like I was a monkey in a cage,” Hunter said. “I was scared to death. I didn’t know what to do. The civil rights workers in Neshoba County had just wound up missing and I didn’t want to be another damn statistic.”

After the intimidation, Hunter was taken to jail.

“About four to six months after that COFO, SNCC or somebody carried his butt up to court,” Hunter said. “Next time I saw him, he was driving a potato chip truck. They got his job. So some good did come out of it.”