Civil Rights Events

Mississippi -- Freedom Summer

White Volunteers

 

Don't call me the brave one for going
No, don't pin a medal to my name
For even if there was any choice to make
I'd be going down just the same
—Phil Ochs, “Going Down to Mississippi” (Allen 1)

 

For nearly a century, segregation had prevented most African-Americans in Mississippi from voting or holding public office. Segregated housing, schools, workplaces, and public accommodations denied black Mississippians access to political or economic power. Most lived in dire poverty, indebted to white banks or plantation owners and kept in check by police and white supremacy groups such as the Ku Klux Klan. African-Americans who dared to challenge these conditions were often killed, tortured, raped, beaten, arrested, fired from their jobs, or evicted from their homes.

 

SNCC and CORE leaders believed that bringing well-connected white volunteers from northern colleges to Mississippi would expose these conditions. They hoped that media attention would make the federal government enforce civil rights laws that local officials ignored. They also planned to help black Mississippians organize a new political party that would be ready to compete against the mainstream Democratic Party after voting rights had been won.

 

More than 60,000 black Mississippi residents risked their lives to attend local meetings, choose candidates, and vote in a "Freedom Election" that ran parallel to the regular 1964 national elections. Several hundred African-American families also hosted northern volunteers in their homes.

 

Nearly 1,500 volunteers worked in project offices scattered across Mississippi. They were directed by 122 SNCC and CORE paid staff working alongside them or at headquarters in Jackson and Greenwood. Most volunteers were white students from northern colleges, but 254 were clergy sponsored by the National Council of Churches, 169 were attorneys recruited by the National Lawyers Guild and the Lawyers Constitutional Defense Committee, and 50 were medical professionals from the Medical Committee for Human Rights.

 

Administratively, the project was run by the Council of Federate Organizations (COFO), an umbrella group formed in 1962 that included not just SNCC and CORE but also the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and others. SNCC provided roughly 80 percent of the staff and funding for the project and CORE contributed nearly all of the remaining 20 percent. The Mississippi Summer Project director was Bob Moses of SNCC and the assistant director was Dave Dennis of CORE (What 1-3).

 

Veteran activist Tom Hayden says a key to Moses's success as an organizer was his hunger to learn from local people. "Bob listened," Hayden wrote in The Nation. "When people asked him what to do, he asked them what they thought. At mass meetings, he usually sat in the back. In group discussions, he mostly spoke last. He slept on floors, wore sharecroppers' overalls, shared the risks, took the blows, went to jail, dug in deeply" (Speech 1).

 

For Moses, the idealism of Freedom Summer was inseparable from the practical task of making it work. In 1962 SNCC and a group of civil rights organizations—the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC)—had joined together to form The Council of Federated Organizations (COFO).

 

A year later in the fall 1963 Mississippi state elections, COFO aided by Yale and Stanford students staged a symbolic “freedom vote” to show that if blacks could go to the polls without fear of reprisals, they would do so in record numbers. At unofficial polling booths set up in black communities across Mississippi, more than 80,000 blacks cast their protest votes for COFO’s candidates for governor and lieutenant governor candidates, Aaron Henry, the president of the Mississippi NAACP, and Ed King, a white chaplain at historically black Tougaloo College in Jackson.

 

Intrigued by out-of-state college students working as volunteers in a Mississippi election, the media gave the freedom vote campaign the kind of publicity SNCC had not received in its earlier voter registration efforts.

 

In the summer of 1964 Moses sought to build on the fall freedom-vote campaign. This time a presidential election, not simply statewide elections, would be at issue, but the publicity the freedom vote had won earlier was not all that led Moses to favor the Mississippi Summer Project, despite the doubts many in COFO had about the values of bringing large numbers of white college students to Mississippi.

 

The response of the white South to the 1963 March on Washington was a new wave of racial violence. The bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, in September 1963 was the event that got the most public attention in this period because it resulted in the deaths of four black girls who had been attending Sunday school.

 

Like everyone in the civil rights movement, Moses was horrified by the killings in Birmingham, but he was equally shaken by the death months later of Lewis Allen in January 1964. Allen was an eyewitness to the fatal 1961 shooting of Herbert Lee, a black farmer from Amite County who had been helping Moses with voter registration. The shooter was E. H. Hurst, a white state representative who was never indicted by a coroner’s jury after he claimed he was defending himself against Lee.

 

Allen offered to testify against Hurst, but when Moses asked the Justice Department to give Allen protection, Justice Department officials refused to do so, paving the way for Allen’s death. Moses believed such civil rights-inspired murders would continue to go unpunished in Mississippi if the victims were black, and he saw Freedom Summer as one antidote to that problem.

 

Moses was candid in 1964 about his motives for bringing white students to Mississippi at a time when so much of the country was indifferent to the killing of blacks in Mississippi. “When you come south, you bring with you the concern of the country—because the people of the country don’t identify with Negroes,” Moses told the predominantly white summer volunteers during their June training sessions at Oxford, Ohio (Mills 4-6).

 

For many whites in Mississippi, like Jackson Mayor Allen Thompson, the prospect of hundreds of mainly white volunteers coming to the state signaled a second “War of Northern Aggression.” And as Mayor Thompson put it, “They won’t have a chance.” So before the summer began, the number of state troopers doubled. The state legislature passed dawn-to-dusk curfews, and Ku Klux Klan numbers expanded. The legislature tried to outlaw planned Freedom Schools. Crosses were burned in 64 of the state’s 82 counties on a single night (Freedom 1).

 

Moses was right about the impact of so many white college students going to Mississippi. On June 21, three Mississippi Freedom Summer workers—James Chaney, a black Mississippian, and Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, both white New Yorkers—disappeared shortly after arriving in Meridian, Mississippi, from Oxford, Ohio. Their disappearance became national news (Mills 6).

 

Heather Tobis Booth … was among those at the University of Chicago who answered the call for volunteers.

 

“I had been brought up to believe we were in a society that should treat people equally,” she says. Her parents had taught that “we shouldn’t just say the words—we should work to make it happen.”

 

…

 

Looking back, alumni [of the University of Chicago] involved in Freedom Summer say it deepened their commitment to social justice and shaped their lives in lasting, if not always straightforward ways. They formed bonds with black civil rights activists and gained additional respect for the bravery of everyday people trying to claim their rights. Leaving Mississippi, “I felt we had accomplished a great deal,” says Peter Rabinowitz …

 

…

 

Once in Mississippi, volunteers like Booth and Rabinowitz were tasked with registering new voters, staffing community centers, and educating high school students in “Freedom Schools.”

 

These peaceful activities made volunteers targets of local law enforcement and violent attacks by the Ku Klux Klan. Arrests and fire bombings were a regular part of life for civil rights workers in Mississippi. SNCC organizers carefully screened applicants to the summer project to find those with the maturity to handle the heavy responsibility of the work.

 

Rabinowitz, whose father was a prominent civil rights lawyer, had been involved with the movement since junior high. He was tasked with teaching in a Freedom School, but had no idea what he would be asked to teach.

 

What he found was a group of high school students hungry to learn material that was not available in their segregated schools. Somewhat to his surprise, Rabinowitz’s students asked to study French.

 

It was a point of pride for students who had been told they would never need the language. “French was something that was taught in white schools but not in the black schools,” he explains. “This was something that had been kept from them.”

 

Rabinowitz taught his students elementary French and exposed them to the works of Jean-Paul Sartre. In so doing, he hoped to “convince them they were just as smart as anybody else.”

 

Booth spent the summer traveling through the cotton fields of rural Mississippi to register new voters. Many of the people she met lived under extreme poverty. Still, “they opened their homes and their hearts to us,” she says.

 

…

 

Throughout the summer, Northern volunteers were sheltered by the Mississippi black community. They stayed with black families, worked with black leaders of SNCC and other local organizations, and, for safety reasons, rarely ventured into white parts of town.

 

The culture shock could be intense. Goldsmith [another University of Chicago student] remembers a seasoned SNCC organizer taking him aside after he ate a sandwich in front of other workers and volunteers. He was told that in some impoverished parts of Mississippi, “you never eat in front of somebody else, because you don’t know if they’ve eaten today.”

 

From the student volunteers to the experienced SNCC organizers to the local families supporting the cause, everyone involved in Freedom Summer was united by the shared danger they faced.

 

The murder of three Freedom Summer volunteers—James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner—reminded everyone of the high stakes of their work.

 

Rabinowitz knew both Goodman and Schwerner personally. He had chosen a project in Meridian, Miss. specifically to work with them. Learning of their disappearance “didn’t give me pause, but it sure terrified me,” Rabinowitz said.  …

 

Traveling in integrated cars posed a constant risk. Booth remembers hiding on the floor of a car to avoid being seen with black volunteers. She was briefly arrested early in her stay in Mississippi and spent several hours in jail before being released.

 

Yet Booth argues the dangers faced by Freedom Summer volunteers were far less severe than those faced by the new voters they registered.

 

“It was an act of courage and bravery and commitment to vote when they knew their lives might be threatened, their jobs might be threatened, they might be beaten,” she says.

 

“They weren’t going back to a safe place at the end of the summer” (Allen 2-7).

 

Chude Allen was 20 years old when she made the trek to Mississippi.

 

“I volunteered because I understood that the struggle to end segregation and racism in the South was one that was as important for White people as it was for Black people. This was my fight as well as other people’s fight,” says Allen. “I believed that racism was wrong and that segregation and the discrimination against African Americans was unjust and that unjust laws were to be challenged.”

 

On the first day of Freedom Summer, the student volunteers learned that Chaney, 21, Goodman, 20 and Schwerner, 24, were missing. The three had traveled to Neshoba County, Miss., to investigate the bombing of a Black church. They never returned. Organizers feared the worst. This was Mississippi after all. Missing, says Allen, meant they were dead.

 

“When I volunteered, I knew I might die,” says Allen, who worked in Freedom Schools in Holly Springs, Miss. “White people in the U.S. didn’t care if Black people died, but they cared if White people did and that is what happened. They would never have looked for them if it had just been James Chaney and two of his friends. No one would have cared” (Joiner 2).

 

The postcard looks ordinary enough. It's a message written from a 20-year-old to his parents, informing them that he'd arrived safely in Meridian, Mississippi for a summer job.

 

"This is a wonderful town and the weather is fine. I wish you were here," Andrew Goodman wrote to his mom and dad back in New York City. "The people in this city are wonderful and our reception was very good. All my love, Andy."

 

The card was postmarked June 21, 1964. That was the day Andy Goodman was murdered (Smith 1).

 

The ten weeks that comprised the “long hot summer” centered around several goals: to establish Freedom Schools and community centers throughout the state, to increase black voter registration, and to ultimately challenge the all-white delegation that would represent the state at the Democratic National Convention in August.

 

…

 

Freedom Summer included more than 44 projects, grouped by congressional districts across the state. These projects ranged in size and scope. For example, Hattiesburg had more than 50 volunteers and staff while some projects had as few as two workers. Most projects built upon existing movement activity and relationships with local Black leaders.

 

Yet other aspects of the summer project, such as the establishment of Freedom Schools marked a new element in the Mississippi Movement. In a state where funding for white schools sometimes quadrupled the amount spent on Black schools, all but three summer projects had Freedom Schools. Work-shop style courses ranged from basic reading and math, civics, African-American history to modern Africa and French.

 

…

 

Midway through the summer, the project’s emphasis shifted from voter registration towards challenging the Mississippi Democrat’s all-white delegation. Local people began attempting–without success–to attend delegate selection meetings. A Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) had been formed in April and a delegation of MFDP members was selected to challenge the so-called “regular” delegates at the national Democratic Party convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey in August.

 

By the end of Freedom Summer, there had been 6 known murders, 35 known shootings, 4 people critically wounded, at least 80 volunteers beaten, and more than 1,000 people arrested (Freedom 1-4).

 

On June 13 the first group of Freedom Summer volunteers began arriving at Western College for Women in Oxford, Ohio, for their training session. “If we can crack Mississippi, we will likely be able to crack the system in the rest of the country,” said John Lewis, today a long-serving Democratic congressman from Georgia, in 1964 chairman of SNCC.

 

…

 

The lunch counter sit-ins and Freedom Rides of the early ’60s had already made ending desegregation a dramatic issue for the nation. The aim of Freedom Summer was to build on that momentum by giving an explicitly political focus, centered on the right to vote, to the civil rights movement (Mills 2).

 

  

 

 

Works cited:

 

Allen, Susie.  “”Remembering ‘Freedom Summer.’”  The University of Chicago.  Web.  https://www.uchicago.edu/features/remembering_freedom_summer/

 

“Freedom Summer.” SNCC Digital Gateway, SNCC Legacy Project and Duke University.  Web.  https://snccdigital.org/events/freedom-summer/

 

Joiner, Lottie L.  “Mississippi Closes The Case On Freedom Summer Murders.”  Daily Beast.  June 21, 2016.  Web.  https://www.thedailybeast.com/mississippi-closes-the-case-on-freedom-summer-murders

 

Mills, Nicolaus.  “The 1964 Miss. Freedom Summer Protests Won Progress At a Bloody Price.”  Daily Beast.  June 21, 2014.  Web.  https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-1964-miss-freedom-summer-protests-won-progress-at-a-bloody-price

 

Smith, Stephen.  “‘Mississippi Burning’ murders resonate 50 years later.”  CBSNews.  June 20, 2014.  Web.  https://www.cbsnews.com/news/mississippi-burning-murders-resonate-50-years-later/

 

“"Speech on Freedom Summer at Stanford University."  American RadioWorks.  Web.  http://americanradioworks.publicradio.org/features/blackspeech/bmoses.html

 

“What Was the 1964 Freedom Summer Project?”  Wisconsin Historical Society.  Web.  https://www.wisconsinhistory.org/Records/Article/CS3707