Stone went to sleep that night - the smell of smoke from a Ku Klux Klan bombing still in the air - wondering if his commitment to equality was worth his life.
In the next room, Curtis Hayes nursed a cut face and a bandaged foot. He had been in the house a few days earlier when the bomb blew out a front wall. While Stone slept, Hayes listened to his buddies patrolling the dark streets, keeping watch on pickups crammed with angry men and rifles.
Hayes, who was a boy when they lynched his cousin, was black and had lived in Mississippi for all of his 21 years.
Stone, a Yale graduate and the son of a famous architect, was white and only there for the summer.
It was Freedom Summer.
1964.
This month, three decades later, those who joined in the effort to challenge white supremacy have been invited to return to Mississippi for a reunion. They will share recollections of those tumultuous days, stories like those told recently by Stone and two other civil rights workers: Ira Landess, a white New York City schoolteacher, and the Rev. Harry Bowie, a black Episcopal clergyman from New Jersey.
It was the summer when the Supremes crackled on the jukebox at the Desoto Hotel and 16 bombs ripped through churches and homes in McComb as blacks registered to vote - scores of them for the first time.
Freedom Summer was an effort of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and other black organizations. SNCC's leadership believed blacks could not do it alone. The movement needed white liberals, the sons and daughters of bankers and doctors who hailed from places like New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and Boston.
The presence of Stone - and hundreds of volunteers like him - would bring national attention to the oppression that blacks had been suffering quietly for years.
