Bruce Watson's Freedom Summer
In the summer of 1967, I went to Holly Springs, Mississippi with a group of students from Michigan State to conduct a summer workshop for incoming freshman at Rust College, an historic black college, which had lost its accreditation because of low academic standards. Products of segregated schools, Rust students had few academic skills when they entered, giving their teachers little to build on. A remedial program intended to give freshman a leg up in reading and math, the 6-week summer workshop was intended to help the college raise standards and regain accreditation. (Such remedial programs, ubiquitous on college campuses today, were more or less unheard of in 1967, when college classrooms overflowed with more baby boomers than they could handle.)
Before leaving for Mississippi, veterans of the program schooled us in how to behave, both off and on campus, to avoid either stirring up trouble with white Mississippians or breaking the rigid rules of our host college. Rust strictly forbade any form of PDA—public display of affection—no matter what color or combination of colors the couple. Frankly, this worried us more than the threat of violence, but we heard stories of “varmint guns” carried in the backs of pickup trucks and knew, in a general way, of violence throughout the South, targeting civil rights workers. Although heinous race-based crimes had continued to occur in Mississippi through 1966, the state had, by 1967, settled down considerably since the infamous summer of 1964, when three young men were abducted and murdered, and the state was gripped by a veritable guerilla war. In Freedom Summer, fellow Franklin County resident Bruce Watson documents that war and, to a lesser extent, its aftermath, the relatively peaceful Mississippi that I encountered.
Mississippi in 1964 was considered so violently racist that even Martin Luther King avoided it, preferring to stage his actions in his home state of Alabama. Taming Mississippi was left to SNCC (the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee). “Freedom Summer,” which, working out of Freedom Houses throughout the state, spearheaded voter registration drives and established consciousness-raising Freedom Schools, was the brainchild of Robert Parris Moses, SNCC’s field secretary. Volunteers were recruited from college campuses across the country. In the end about 300 young people, most under 25, participated in Freedom Summer, half of them Northern, relatively privileged, and mainly white; the others members of Misissippi’s chapter of SNCC, veterans of shootings, beatings and Southern apartheid.
On the first day of the project, three of the workers, Andrew Goodman, James Chaney and Michael Schwerner, were murdered by Klan members, the county sheriff among them. It would take the rest of the summer for the FBI to locate their bodies and issue indictments. Watson’s narrative jumps skillfully between the FBI search and the events and achievements of Freedom Summer, using the stories of four volunteers from the North, one black, three white, two men and two women, to give a face to the narrative and tie it together. Most poignant is the story of shy Fran O’Brien, who spent the summer teaching young children in a Freedom School, only to be abducted and beaten by Klansmen at the end of the summer. At one point, Fran asks her young pupils to name the countries from which Americans had come. The children begin with European countries and move on to China and India when Fran finally asks them “What about Africa?” “Does that count?” they ask her dubiously.
Threats and violence came non-stop. Highly organized, Freedom Summer volunteers kept in touch via a WATS line (precursor to 800 numbers) and wrote up logs, which recorded each incident. Page 7 in one log leads off with a familiar name: “Holly Springs: … Threats of dynamiting Freedom House tonight. Guys driving around with guns….”
Celebrities came to Mississippi, some to entertain, some to volunteer, among them actress and activist Shirley MacLaine, as well as Richard Beymer, star of the film version of West Side Story, who worked alongside [my congressman] Barney Frank, a Harvard student at the time. “I am prouder of being there than of anything else in my life,” Frank has said. Harry Belafonte, along with a terrified Sidney Poitier, delivered $60,000 in cash to bankroll Freedom Summer’s final project, sending an all-black delegation to the Democratic National Convention. Fannie Lou Hamer, activist from Ruleville, Mississippi, would become a celebrity (although never a wealthy one) because of that convention.
In the years after Freedom Summer, Mississippians came to be embarrassed by their singular status as the most racist state in America and, according to Watson, worked hard to modify that image. Already in 1967, I found Rust students quick to tell me that Mississippi was bad, but Alabama was worse!
So many years after and with later generations of young people famous for their apathy and/or incubation of cynical right-wing extremists like Jack Abramoff, Karl Rove, and Grover Norquist, one wonders why so many were willing to risk their lives in Freedom Rides, Freedom Summer, and other aspects of the Movement. One answer is that the children of the 40’s and 50’s grew up acutely conscious that their parents had fought and sacrificed to win a momentous victory over fascism abroad. They could do no less than fight it at home. And then there was the martyred president, who had admonished them to “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship … to assure the survival and success of liberty.” Kennedy himself was taken aback when young people applied his words almost immediately to the Civil Rights struggle, but once spoken, they inspired a generation to fight the battles their elders would not fight.