A twelve-car motorcade pulled away from the COFO office in Philadelphia Miss. on Monday and headed for the Neshoba County courthouse, carrying four COFO workers and 39 local Negro citizens who wanted to register.

When cars arrived and prospective registrants piled out, they were escorted up the court-house steps by Neshoba county sheriff Lawrence Rainey and deputy sheriff Cecil Price, both of whom were recently indicted for depriving Philadelphia Negroes of their civil rights.

Inside the courthouse, the registrants sat on the floor in the hall outside the registration room, waiting to fill out the 12-question test. Only three people were permitted into the registration room at once, so that it was 5 P.M. before all 39 were through.

Surprisingly Easy

Except for one COFO worker who was roughed up, the only incident of the day was the arrest of one registrant on charges of passing a bad check.

Philadelphia COFO workers had not thought on Sunday evening that the second "Freedom Day" would be so peaceful. Rainy and Price the day before, told COFO staff members that they would be out of town on Freedom Day. "You'll be on your own" the sheriff and deputy sheriff had said.

That spelled trouble. On the first Freedom Day on Sept. 14, a local white citizen had beaten a COFO photographer over the head with a blackjack and smashed his $250 camera.

But evidently Rainey and Price were apprehensive themselves, for late Sunday evening, they called COFO to say they would be around after all. "When we found out how many people were coming to register, we decided to postpone the trip a day," Price explained afterward.

Such cooperation between civil rights workers and local law officers is new in Neshoba County. Last June three COFO workers were-murdered after being held in jail for six hours on a speeding charge. Recently, five law enforcement officers (Rainey, Price, two policemen and a former sheriff) were arrested and indicted by a Federal grand jury for beating six Philadedphia Negroes, and thus violating their civil rights.

The charges carry a maximum penalty of a $1000 fine and a year's imprisonment--if the Federal government can win a conviction. But with most Negroes barred from juries in Mississippi the prospects for such conviction seem dim.

The five arrested men never saw the inside of a jail. After being seized, they were taken to Meridian, where they posted bonds of $1000 on each charge. Immediately afterwards they returned to Philadelphia to resume their law enforcement duties.

COFO workers in Philadelphia felt their return quickly. According to Ralph Featherstone, 25-year old Negro COFO worker from Washington, D.C., Rainey and Price circled the office four times that evening.

An uneasy truce has existed in Neshoba County ever since COFO set up its Philadelphia project in late August. Plans for establishing an office earlier in the summer were postponed after the three workers were murdered there.

COFO in Philadelphia

Seven COFO workers--all male, for the area is considered too dangerous for girls--are now operating in Neshoba, doing voter and Freedom registration and organizing a farmers' league for the local Negroes, most of whom support themselves by farming and sharecropping. In September, COFO workers drove a bookmobile around the county, reading books and telling stories to the children who gathered round. Now, however, the bookmobile has been replaced by freedom school classes, which began Wednesday in the bottom of the COFO office. The Freedom School shares the office, a former hotel, with a 600-book library, the voter registration headquarters and the workers' beds.