Civil Rights Movement History

Mississippi Freedom Summer Events

Photos

[ Terminology — Various authors use either "Freedom Summer" or "Summer Project" or both interchangeably. This book uses "Summer Project" to refer specifically to the project organized and led by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO). We use "Freedom Summer" to refer to the totality of all Movement efforts in Mississippi over the summer of 1964, including the efforts of medical, religious, and legal organizations (see Organizational Structure of Freedom Summer for details). In this discussion, we use the term "volunteer" to refer to those from out of state who came to Mississippi for Freedom Summer, though of course, the many thousands of Black Mississippians who participated were also unpaid volunteers. ]

See also:

Mississippi Summer Project

Photos

See Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party Founded for preceding events.

Contents:

The Situation

The Dilemma

Pulling it Together

Mississippi Girds for Armageddon

Washington Does Nothing

Recruitment & Training

10 Weeks That Shake Mississippi

Direct-Action and the Civil Rights Act

Internal Tensions

[Sidebar: Organizational Stucture of Freedom Summer]



The Situation

According to the Census, 45% of Mississippi's population is Black, but in 1964 less than 5% of Blacks are registered to vote state-wide. In the rural counties where Blacks are a majority — or even a significant minority — of the population, Black registration is virtually nil. For example, in some of the counties where there are Freedom Summer projects (main project town shown in parenthesis):





Whites Blacks County (Town) Number Eligible Number Voters Percentage Number Eligible Number Voters Percentage Coahoma (Clarksdale) 5338 4030 73% 14004 1061 8% Holmes (Tchula) 4773 3530 74% 8757 8 - Le Flore (Greenwood) 10274 7168 70% 13567 268 2% Marshall (Holly Spgs) 4342 4162 96% 7168 57 1% Panola (Batesville) 7369 5309 69% 7250 2 - Tallahatchie (Charleston) 5099 4330 85% 6438 5 - Pike (McComb) 12163 7864 65% 6936 150 - Source: 1964 MFDP report derived from court cases and federal reports.

To maintain segregation and deny Afro-Americans their citizenship rights — and to continue reaping the economic benefits of racial exploitation — the white power-structure has turned Mississippi into a "closed society" ruled by fear from the top down. Rather than mechanize as other Southern states have done, much of Mississippi agriculture — particularly the Delta cotton plantations — continues to rely on large-scale use of cheap Black hand-labor. But with the rise of the Freedom Movement, the White Citizens Council is now urging plantation owners to replace Black sharecroppers and farm hands with machines. This is a deliberate strategy to force Blacks out of the state before they can achieve any share of political power. The Freedom Movement is in a race against time, if Blacks don't get the vote soon, it will be too late.

In Washington DC, Mississippi's Congressional delegation of five Representatives plus Senators Eastland and Stennis are among the most racist and reactionary the entire nation. With Blacks disenfranchised, the undemocratic, "good 'ole boy," crony politics of the South return the same corrupt "Dixiecrat" incumbents to Congress year after year, allowing them to build seniority and amass enormous power. All legislation has to pass through the committees they control. They use that power to block civil rights legislation, prevent the federal government from defending racial minorities, and halt any national program or reform that might benefit the poor and working class regardless of race.

As the new year of 1964 begins, everyone in the South, Black and white, understand that when Afro-Americans demand the vote they are defying a century of oppression — and that a cry for the vote is actually a demand for social and political equality with whites.

For three hard years the Mississippi Freedom Movement has been trying to register Black voters against the adamant opposition of the white power- structure, the vicious terrorism of the Ku Klux Klan, and the economic warfare of the White Citizens Council. Blacks who try to register still face intimidation, violence, and arrest at the Courthouse, a phony literacy test, tricks, and abuses from the Registrar. After leaving the courthouse, they face arrest on trumped up charges, Klan violence, and economic retaliation — evictions, firings, foreclosures, business boycotts, license revocations, credit denials, and insurance cancellations. And lest there be any doubt as to whom should be targeted for this retaliation, the names of those attempting to register are published in the local newspaper.

With steadfast courage, freedom fighters have suffered and endured beatings, jailings, shootings, bombings, and assassinations in places like McComb, Jackson, Greenwood, the Delta, and Hattiesburg. They have built a broad and determined mass-movement, yet no more than a few hundred new voters have been added to the rolls.

As 1963 ends, the number of Blacks registered by the Mississippi Movement is so small that at the end of 1963 the Voter Education Project (VEP) halts all further funding for COFO projects because they are simply not cost-effective, the money can be better spent elsewhere. Loss of the VEP grants is critically important, without them the Mississippi Movement faces financial starvation.

Violent repression of Blacks is a traditional component of Mississippi's "Southern Way of Life." Since 1880, the state has averaged more than six racially-motivated murders per year in the form of mob lynchings and "unsolved" assassinations. After three years of sit-ins, Freedom Rides, pickets, rallies, marches, and thousands of arrests, the fundamental rights of free speech and assembly are still denied to Blacks in Mississippi — any act of defiance, any protest, any cry for freedom, is still met with violent state repression and immediate arrest.

Despite their many public promises, neither Kennedy nor Johnson take any effective action to defend Black voters in the Deep South. Though laws are on the books making it a federal crime to interfere with voting rights, neither the FBI, nor the Department of Justice (DOJ), nor the federal courts enforce those laws. The FBI is able to track down and jail kidnappers and bank robbers, but when crimes against Blacks are committed right before their eyes they claim they are "only an investigative agency," with no power to make arrests. The DOJ files lawsuit after lawsuit, which they often win in court, but nothing changes and no Afro-American voters are added to the rolls because no action is taken against the politically well-connected officials who violate the law and flout the court rulings. Nor is there any relief in sight because LBJ has stripped out any meaningful voting rights protection from the draft Civil Rights bill being debated by Congress.

While most of the national media covers dramatic, photogenic events such as the Freedom Rides and the Birmingham marches they either ignore the issue of Black voting rights or relegate coverage to small articles on the back pages — leaving most Americans unaware of the brutal political realities of the Deep South.

The Dilemma

By November of 1963, Movement activists in Mississippi are exhausted, frustrated, and discouraged. Their efforts and strategies have built a movement — but not increased the number of Black voters. But movements move, if one strategy fails you try another. Something new is needed, something dramatic, something bold.

Structurally, the Mississippi Movement is led by COFO, the coalition of SNCC, CORE, NAACP, and SCLC. But CORE's attention and resources are primarily focused on the North, particularly at this time around protests at the New York World's Fair, and much of their small southern staff is concentrated in Louisiana. SCLC's participation in COFO is small, and its attention is on St. Augustine, Florida and the state of Alabama. The NAACP national leadership is mainly interested in legal cases and they are uneasy with the growing radicalization and militance of the young organizers of SNCC and CORE. SNCC provides most of the COFO staff, and with VEP funds cut off, SNCC is now shouldering most of the financial burden as well. So the decision of what to do falls largely on SNCC — as SNCC decides, so COFO will go.

SNCC activists note that in October, the presence of northern white supporters at Freedom Day in Selma Alabama encourages Black turnout, draws national media attention, and restrains the normally vicious Sheriff Clark from the kind of violence and arrests previously inflicted on Blacks lining up at the courthouse to register. Even the notorious State Troopers are held in check. Will the same strategy produce the same results at the upcoming Freedom Day in Hattiesburg? SNCC leaders decide to find out.

Similarly, they note the heightened FBI presence, extensive media coverage, and decrease in violence during the two weeks that white students from Yale and Stanford are in Mississippi to support the statewide Freedom Ballot. As SNCC/COFO leader Bob Moses later put it: "That was the first time that I realized that the violence could actually be controlled. Turned on and off. That it wasn't totally random. I realized that somewhere along the line there was someone who ... could at least send out word for it to stop. And it would. That was a revelation." [1]

If the presence of a handful of northern whites can restrain Jim Clark in Selma, and if 80 white students can reduce violence in Mississippi for two weeks, what would happen if a thousand northern students, most of them white, came to Mississippi for the entire summer of 1964? In mid-November, the COFO staff meets in Greenville after the Freedom Ballot. They discuss the idea of a summer project involving a large number of northern white students. The debate is long and intense.

Proponents — among them Fannie Lou Hamer, Lawrence Guyot, and CORE's Dave Dennis — argue that Mississippi's iron-grip of repression can only be broken by creating a crises which forces the federal government to seriously confront the state. Asking the sons and daughters of white America to join them on the front line of danger might do that. And if nothing else, it would focus national media attention on the realities of Black oppression in the Deep South. As SNCC Chair John Lewis put it: "Mississippi was deadly, and it was getting worse each day. Our people were essentially being slaughtered down there. If white America would not respond to the deaths of our people, the thinking went, maybe it would react to the deaths of its own children." [2]

Moreover, bringing white supporters to share the dangers of Mississippi will prove to Black communities that they are not alone, that there are people across the country who stand with them. By breaking down the sense of isolation, fear can be reduced and participation encouraged.

But many other dedicated and experienced COFO organizers — including Sam Block, Wazir Peacock, Hollis Watkins, Charlie Cobb, Ivanhoe Donaldson, and Macarthur Cotton — firmly oppose to the idea. Some argue that white volunteers will increase the danger to local Blacks because the presence of white "race traitors" will enrage the Klan and Citizens Council. And unlike Black activists, whites cannot blend into the community, instead they will be beacons drawing the attention of both KKK and cops.

Others are concerned that recruiting an army of white students is an admission of racial dependence — that Blacks need whites to get anything done — and that whites urging Blacks to register to vote will simply reinforce traditional patterns of racial subservience. Ever since the sit-ins of 1960, Movement activists have confronted and opposed racism in whatever form, whenever and wherever they encountered it, but the strategic premise of the summer project is based on using the racism of a mass media that covers whites but not Blacks, and the racism of a federal government that has not protected Blacks, but which might protect whites. The proposal for a summer project appears to acquiesce in, and accommodate, the very racism they are trying to oppose.

Moreover, many Black organizers are uneasy that whites — with skills and confidence born of privilege, Ivy League educations, and ingrained attitudes of superiority — will push aside both Black organizers and emerging local leaders. One long-time SNCC organizer expressed the worry of many, "The white volunteers who know more about office work such as organizing files and making long-distance calls will end up in charge, telling me what to do."

Though it is not obvious at the time, when dedicated organizers doing serious work with real people passionately disagree, it is usually the case that both sides have valid points. When abstract issues are debated in coffee houses and university classrooms, choices may seem clear. But when you're actually on the ground there are often no ideal solutions to imperfect realities. The Greenville meeting ends with no decision.

But as the discussion continues over the following weeks a central fact emerges — the local people who are the heart and soul of the Movement need and want all the help they can get. If northern students are willing to put their bodies on the line in Mississippi, local Blacks in the freedom struggle will welcome them no matter what color they are. The firm support for the summer project by local leaders like Fannie Lou Hamer, Amzie Moore, and E.W. Steptoe carries great weight with field secretaries who are deeply committed to the principle of, "Let the people decide." As does Mrs. Hamer's argument that, "If we're trying to break down segregation, we can't segregate ourselves."

The debate continues at COFO's meeting in December, ending with a tentative agreement for a very limited summer project of no more than 100 white students. At the end of December 1963, SNCC's Executive Committee weighs the pros and cons at length. The motion they adopt — " To obtain the right for all citizens of Mississippi to vote, using as many people as necessary to obtain that end " — implies a large project with many northern whites.

The final decision comes down to the January COFO meeting held in Hattiesburg after Freedom Day which itself becomes an argument for the summer project. The presence of white clergymen on the line at the Forrest County courthouse not only restrains police violence and state repression of free speech rights, but encourages Blacks to try to register in large numbers — 150 on Freedom Day, more than 500 over the following weeks.

The COFO meeting is interrupted by news from nearby Amite County — Louis Allen has been murdered. Bob Moses later recalled, "...it became clear that we had to do something, something big, that would really open the situation up. Otherwise they'd simply continue to kill the best among us. ... that's when I began to argue strongly that we had to have the Summer Project." A majority of the COFO staff agree. The concerns regarding large numbers of white volunteers remain serious and real, but something has to be done to confront white terror in Mississippi. The Summer Project — which grows and expands into Freedom Summer — is on.

Pulling it Together

Though the mass media seems to believe that Freedom Movement events simply occur spontaneously, in real life careful planning is essential and where planning is absent failure results. By March, the basic structure of Freedom Summer is coming into focus — recruitment and training of volunteers, voter registration, building the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), challenging Mississippi's all-white delegation at the Democratic Party convention in Atlantic City, Freedom Schools, community centers, and legal support. But as always, the devil is in the details and some of the issues are thorny.

Finances. The Freedom Movement is always starved for funds, and with the loss of VEP grants the financial situation is desperate. The original (highly optimistic) plan calls for a large Summer Project budget, but by early May only $10,000 has been raised and there is not even $5 to fix the clogged toilet at COFO Headquarters in Jackson. Comedian and Movement stalwart Dick Gregory does a fund-raising tour that nets $97,000, but that is nowhere near enough, and on three occasions before summer SNCC is unable to pay its staff their munificent salary of $10 per week (equal to $75 a week in 2013).

Nonviolence. The issue of nonviolence is troublesome. Some activists hold to Gandhian "philosophic" nonviolence, but most organizers in Mississippi are "tactically" nonviolent. They adhere to nonviolence on protests because anything else is both counter-productive and suicidal, but self-defense outside of demonstrations is a different matter. Most Blacks in Mississippi are armed, and they are determined to defend both themselves and Freedom Movement guests.

But civil rights workers are caught in a "trick bag" — unarmed they cannot defend themselves from the Klan, but police frequently stop, harass, and arrest them, and possession of a weapon can be used as a pretext for charges carrying heavy prison sentences. If the stop occurs on an isolated rural road with no witnesses, there is nothing to prevent the cops from shooting the activist in cold blood and then claiming "self-defense" with the activist's gun as "evidence." In regards to firearms, some field secretaries adopt the self-defense philosophy of "Rather be caught with it, than without it," others who judge the danger of police assassination and prison to be greater rely on agile feet and a fast car to escape.

Within SNCC, questions related to nonviolence are hotly debated: Should SNCC staff carry guns? Should weapons be stored in offices and freedom houses? Should SNCC declare itself in favor of armed self-defense as Robert Williams did? The decisions they reach are based on practical politics and tactical realities. Away from protests and those public events where search and arrest is highly likely, going armed is left up to individual staff members, but the highly-visible white volunteers who are most likely to be stopped and searched are not to carry weapons. Weapons are not to be kept in offices or freedom houses because police raids are expected and the presence of guns can be used to whip up media-hysteria and jail Movement leaders on phony charges. But during the night, armed locals will be stationed as guards around offices and freedom houses as necessary. SNCC will not publicly endorse armed self-defense at this time — but neither will they condemn it.

Anti-Communism. Though finally beginning to weaken, in 1964 the "red scare" anti-communist hysteria of the McCarthy era still exerts a powerful influence on government, the media, and mainstream America. Government officials and many liberal organizations & individuals still shun groups that work with, or have among their members, "known Communists," "pinkos," or "fellow-travelers." Dr. King and SCLC endure, and at times succumb to, unremitting pressure from the Kennedys and President Johnson to disassociate themselves from individuals whom FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover deems too radical, including Jack O'Dell, Stanley Levison, and Bayard Rustin.

Few Freedom Movement activists have ever met an actual real-life Communist, but those who have generally consider them to be part of the, "You're going too fast, you're going too far" wing of the liberal establishment. So to those on the front lines of the Movement, the obsession over "Communist influence" is absurd and laughable — except when it threatens desperately needed fund raising. Which it very much does.

With rare exceptions, CORE and SNCC resist pressure to disassociate themselves from "dangerous radicals." Their attitude is that so long as leftists refrain from disrupting the Freedom Movement with extraneous political controversies, anyone willing "to put their body on the line" is welcome to participate regardless of their political beliefs or affiliations.

After John Lewis' speech at the March on Washington, and with growing media attention on the upcoming Summer Project, liberal pundits such as Theodore White and Arthur Schlesinger step up their attacks on SNCC, and SNCC's association with "Reds," while conservatives such as Evans & Novak allege that SNCC has been "penetrated" by "subversive elements." The FBI's COINTELPRO operation increasingly focuses on SNCC, working to isolate it and destroy its funding base. A favorite tactic is to plant smear stories in the media. One example is the The New York Times article titled, " Hoover Says Reds Exploit Negroes ," which runs shortly before the start of Freedom Summer. Hoover is enraged when Lewis responds with "The Director of the FBI should spend less time turning over logs looking for the Red Menace and more time pursuing the bombers, midnight assassins, and brutal racists who daily make a mockery of the United States Constitution."

But the national leaders of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund in New York and Washington threaten to withdraw their considerable legal and financial support if the Summer Project accepts help from anyone affiliated with the National Lawyers Guild (NLG). NLG attorneys have defended Communists, and some self-acknowledged Communists and former-Communists are NLG members. NLG attorneys have also defended labor unions, peace activists, abortionists, beatniks, homosexuals, and others deemed by the establishment to be social-undesirables.

Leaders from the NAACP, CORE, SCLC, and National Council of Churches (NCC) all advise SNCC to reject any assistance from the NLG. But NLG lawyers such as Arthur Kinoy, William Kunstler, Len Holt, Ben Smith, and Victor Rabinowitz have been in the forefront of the struggle throughout the South. SNCC refuses to abandon its "body on the line" principle, and NLG lawyers provide legal services throughout the summer — as do NAACP lawyers.

"What If?" Controversies. No one really knows what to expect. In a very real sense the Summer Project is a huge leap of faith into the unknown — "jumping off a cliff and learning to fly on the way down" — as one SNCC activist put it. Inevitably, there are long, intense discussions about hypothetical "what if" situations. What if, for example, the daughter of a U.S. Senator is arrested, who decides when she is bailed out? The Movement? The daughter? Her father? If she's arrested with local Blacks, must everyone be released together? What happens if her father pulls strings to spring her while the local folk languish in jail? How do you weigh their safety and suffering against the political value and media attention of continued incarceration?

As it turns out, when actual events on the ground pose these kind of questions they are answered on the basis of the specific circumstances at that time and place, rather than abstract theories and principles. And for the most part, the summer volunteers prove to be courageous and committed, standing in solidarity with Mississippi Blacks regardless of their parents' fears, desires or demands.

Mississippi Girds for Armageddon

Mississippi's white power-structure and local media react to Freedom Summer as if they face invasion by another "War of Northern Aggression" (their term for what the rest of the nation knows as the "Civil War"). Amid rhetoric about "..savage blacks and their Communist masters," and the absolute necessity of, "...the strict segregation of the races controlled by Christian Anglo-Saxon white men, the only race that can build and maintain just and stable government," the Klan issues its own warning — on a single night crosses are burned in 64 of the state's 82 counties. Some of the churches that had agreed to host Freedom Schools are firebombed. In many cases, shortly before buildings are burned their fire insurance policies are suddenly canceled by their white insurance agents — a typical example of the Ku Klux Klan and White Citizen Council working in tandem.

The state legislature passes laws outlawing Freedom Schools, allowing officials to declare dawn-to-dusk curfews, and making it a crime to pass out leaflets advocating a boycott. The number of State Troopers is doubled, cities and towns hastily deputize and arm white men (many of them Klansmen) to repel the "beatnik horde." Jackson police purchase 200 new shotguns, stockpile tear gas, build troop carriers and searchlight trucks, and convert an armored car into an urban battle tank. Mayor Allen Thompson tells a reporter: "This is it. They are not bluffing, and we are not bluffing. We are going to be ready for them. ... They won't have a chance."

Washington Does Nothing

While white Mississippi mobilizes to defend the "Southern Way of Life" with billy clubs and jail cells, guns and bombs, the White House and Justice Department do nothing. Despite repeated pleas from civil rights leaders, they refuse to condemn or criticize the hate and hysteria being whipped to fever pitch in Mississippi. They refuse to issue any public statement or give any private signal that violence or state repression against nonviolent voter registration efforts will be prosecuted as required by federal law. They refuse to even acknowledge that registering voters and teaching children are neither criminal acts nor subversive plots. FBI Director Hoover does, however, tell the press: "We will not wet-nurse troublemakers."

In early June, just before the project is to begin, a Black delegation travels from Mississippi to Washington to warn of impending violence and beg for protection. The President is out of town. The Attorney General is unavailable. Congress is uninterested in holding any hearings. The FBI rebuffs them as subversives and Communist dupes.

Desperate for someone to hear their pleas, the delegation holds a conference at the National Theater, addressing a volunteer panel of writers, educators, and lawyers, along with several hundred ordinary citizens. Fannie Lou Hamer describes the brutal police beating in Winona MS, Mrs. Allen testifies about the recent murder of her husband, a boy of 14 tells of police brutality against peaceful pickets, and SNCC worker Jimmy Travis talks of being shot in Greenwood and asks for federal marshals to protect voter registration workers. Legal scholars describe the statutes allowing — in fact, requiring — the federal government to enforce the law, make arrests, and protect the rights of voters. The transcript is sent to President Johnson and Attorney General Robert Kennedy. There is no response.

At the volunteer-orientation in Oxford Ohio, DOJ official John Doar addresses the volunteers who are about to go down into Mississippi. They ask him: "What will be the role of the federal government in protecting our lives?" He replies that so far as their government is concerned they will have to take their chances with a hostile state — defenseless. They will be in the same situation that southern Blacks have endured for generations. The volunteers boo, but Bob Moses stops them, saying, "We don't do that." He tells them that Doar is just being honest.

This utter failure of the Johnson administration and Congress has tragic human consequences.

I remain convinced to this day that the slightest intervention — public or private — indicating firmly to the Mississippi authorities that acts of terrorism and lawlessness would bring serious federal consequences would have saved lives. But that would have required a 'profile of courage' from someone in the Johnson administration. — Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael). [1]

Recruitment & Training

Recruitment. The responsibility of recruiting the volunteers falls mainly on Friends of SNCC and CORE chapters in the North. By March, brochures have been printed and SNCC leaders like John Lewis are touring campuses and speaking before Movement and religious groups.

Recruitment focuses on the elite private and state universities. In part, this is practical politics, those are the schools where the sons and daughters of the rich and powerful are to be found. But more important are the hard financial realities. SNCC and COFO are broke, the Summer Project is operating on a frayed shoestring. There are no funds to pay for transportation or bail bonds. Summer volunteers have to pay their own way and bring $500 in cash (equal to $3700 in 2013) for bail and other expenses. Most students — particularly Black students whose families are scraping every dime to keep them in college — don't have and cannot possibly raise that kind of money. And many Black students have to work at full-time summer jobs to pay for Fall tuition.

CORE chapters, Friends of SNCC in the North, campus SNCC affiliates in the South, NAACP youth groups, and independent civil rights organizations are the other major source of volunteers. As it turns out, close to half of all Summer Project volunteers have previously been active in the Freedom Movement, primarily in the North. Most of them are students, though not necessarily from elite colleges. Some have been arrested on protests, many have participated in pickets and marches, others have been involved in fund-raising and support work.

Parental Opposition. The opportunity to endure long hours, muggy stifling heat, likely arrest, possible violence, and perhaps even death, all for no pay and no reward other than the satisfaction of a just cause, proves surprisingly attractive. Well over a thousand young men and women apply. Their parents, however, are not so enthusiastic. Most parents fear for their children's safety — with good reason. And among whites, some oppose the whole concept of equality and civil rights for Blacks. Others are aghast at the thought of social interaction (to say nothing of sex) between their daughters and Black men. In tenor with the times and to avoid legal repercussions from litigious fathers and mothers, SNCC requires that female volunteers under the age of 21 provide written consent from their parents — many of whom outright refuse. Male volunteers are not required to obtain parental permission.

The number of male and female students who want to participate but whose parents prevent them from applying is unknown, but at least a quarter of those who do apply and later withdraw do so because of parental opposition (lack of money is the major cause). But there's a rebellious wind beginning to stir among America's youth, and many Summer Project participants go to Mississippi in open and wrenching defiance of their families. For them, the soundtrack of their conflict Bob Dylan's 1964 song, "The Times They Are A-changin'"

Come mothers and fathers

Throughout the land

And don't criticize

What you can't understand

Your sons and your daughters

Are beyond your command

For some volunteers, the break they make with family is permanent. But most parents either initially support their sons and daughters determination to fight for freedom or they reluctantly come to do so over the course of the summer. And once they realize how serious is the danger their children have chosen to face, many step up and take a stand. In some areas, parents form support groups to lobby Washington, others send money and supplies, or publish letters they receive from Mississippi in local papers and church bulletins.

Screening the Applicants. By April, applications are arriving at COFO headquarters in Jackson — close to 1200 by June — and the screening process begins. The most important issue of concern is a volunteer's willingness to accept and work under the leadership of Blacks who might have little or no formal education. Where feasible, candidates are interviewed by SNCC or CORE staff, Friends of SNCC or CORE chapters, or sympathetic professors.

In truth, we ended up actively discouraging many more people than we accepted. [We needed volunteers who were] in control of their lives. Sober, intelligent, self-controlled, disciplined folk who were clear on what they were getting into and why. ... People, we hoped, who could handle a kind of stress they had never before imagined, much less encountered. ... No missionaries going to save the benighted Negro or martyrs looking for redemption through suffering. ... No mystics. No flakes. No kids in rebellion, looking for attention or to get back at Mom and Dad. No druggies, beatniks, or premature-hippie types — too irresponsible. Plus folks in Mississippi wouldn't know what to make of them. Nobody flunking out of school and looking for a place to crash. No self-righteous ideologues or zealots out to make a personal statement to the world. — Kwame Ture. [1]

The Volunteers. Most histories estimate the number of Freedom Summer volunteers at between 700 and 1,000. This includes the 550-600 who attend one of the two training sessions at Western College for Women in Ohio and some or all of the many who arrive in Mississippi later. But those estimates mainly count the volunteers who formally apply through COFO and work the majority of the 10-week Summer Project. The figures may, or may not, include the 140 or so SNCC and CORE field staff. It is unclear how many of the 300-500 professionals and graduate students who serve a week to a month (or more) with medical, legal, and religious organizations are included. The 700- 1,000 figure certainly does not include the unknown number of out-of-state volunteers who come to Mississippi and participate for various lengths of time through personal or family connections, or direct organizational affiliations with SNCC, CORE, NAACP, SCLC, SCEF, or other Movement organizations. So the actual number of Freedom Summer participants from outside the state cannot be accurately assessed. Yet it is legitimate to say that in the summer of 1964 the very best of America came to Mississippi to confront and challenge the very worst.

The average age of Summer Project volunteers recruited by COFO is 21 (though a few are well into adulthood including at least one veteran of the Lincoln Brigade in the Spanish Civil War). Depending on how you count the volunteers, roughly 85-90% of them are white, the remaining 10-15% are Black with a few Latinos and Asians. Most of them are from middle and upper-middle class families, and the majority (57%) are from the top 30 universities in the nation (123 are from Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and Princeton alone). Almost half (48%) are already members of a Freedom Movement organization (mostly CORE or Friends of SNCC), 21% actively participate in a religious group, and 14% belong to leftist or Socialist organizations. Not surprisingly, the graduate student and professional volunteers recruited by supporting organizations for legal, medical, and religious duties are older, and among them are even fewer Blacks.

But focusing on the out-of-state volunteers — their numbers and who they are — can give the false impression that they are the central element of Freedom Summer. Nothing could be farther from the truth. It is Black Mississippians who are the heart and soul of Freedom Summer — the local activists who provide leadership and guidance, the youth who canvas and help teach in Freedom Schools, the Freedom School students, the Citizenship School teachers, the families who feed and house outside volunteers, the people who register FDP voters in their homes and shops and churches, the men who guard the Freedom Houses at night, the people who drive workers around the county, the ministers and deacons who open their churches, and of course the courageous men and women who risk their lives and livelihood by trying to register to vote at the courthouse. They too are unpaid volunteers, and they number in the many thousands, far more than the northerners.

Volunteer Orientation. Two orientations for Summer Project volunteers are funded and coordinated by the National Council of Churches (NCC). Berea College in Kentucky agrees to host the sessions, but they back out when faced with angry denunciations from southern alumni and trustees. Western College for Women in Oxford, Ohio (today, part of Miami University) steps up with an offer to use their campus.

The first of the week-long sessions for roughly 300 volunteers begins June 13, the second session commences June 20. Most of those attending the June 13 orientation are assigned to voter registration and building the MFDP, most of those at the second are to be Freedom School teachers or work in the community centers. Roughly 150 volunteer lawyers and law students, from the National Lawyers Guild and other organizations also participate, as do clergy recruited by the NCC. About 100 SNCC and 40 CORE staff members and local activists provide most of the training, along with guest speakers such as Bayard Rustin, James Lawson, and Vincent Harding (see Freedom Summer Orientation Briefing).

COFO Project Director Bob Moses tells them:

Don't come to Mississippi this summer to save the Mississippi Negro. Only come if you understand, really understand, that his freedom and yours are one. ... Maybe we're not going to get many people registered this summer. Maybe, even, we're not going to get very many people into Freedom Schools. Maybe all we're going to do is live through this summer. In Mississippi, that will be so much! — Bob Moses. [2]

The format is varied — general assemblies, small group discussions, work team meetings. The curriculum is intense: racism, voter registration, poverty, Movement history, exploitation, the Black community, police repression, role of the federal government, health, purpose and strategy of the Summer Project, housing, Jim Crow and segregation, psychology & sociology of oppression and liberation, songs, safety rules and procedures. And above all — violence.

Stories of violence, warnings of violence to come, training in how to survive beatings and jailings, frank discussions about fear and courage and endurance. Workshops in Nonviolent Resistance teach the techniques of survival when under attack, and the volunteers are trained in the safety practices and security procedures that are habitual with SNCC and CORE field staff:

Don't let cops or whites see you enter or leave the Black home where you are staying.



Don't carry the names of local supporters on you, don't tell cops or strangers who you are living with.



Keep the shades down at night and never stand in a lighted doorway.



Remove the dome light of your car so it doesn't illuminate you when the door is opened.



Each morning check your car for bombs (Volunteer David Gelfand does, and discovers 4-sticks of dynamite wired to his ignition).



Learn all roads in and out of town, and the danger spots to avoid.



Vary your driving routes, and never let anyone pass you on a deserted road.



Always be prepared for arrest and police-search at any time.



Never go anywhere alone.



Leave word where you are going and when you are expected to get there. Check-in on arrival.



The Role of Volunteers There is thorough discussion about the role of volunteers in relationship to the Black communities they will be working with. The volunteers are to bring their energy, ideas, and skills to the service of the local community, but they not there to be leaders, or to supplant local activists. In a memo to volunteers, Annell Ponder of SCLC's Citizenship Schools program sums up the tight line they are expected to walk:

Let the people speak for and with you. Whenever possible get some good, strong local person (and there are many around) sold on your idea and ask him or her to tell others about it. You may need to do all of the arranging and contacting for setting up the opportunity in some cases (often spelling out or rehearsing with the local what he should get over, or going along with him) but if people see one of their neighbors either alone or with one of the volunteers making a bold step forward, they are more likely to see such action as possible for themselves. ... Talk to them with confidence, with a sense of "expectation." ... Remember that they are adult, though many of them will be overly dependent because of this repressive culture ... As you work you must somehow resist the temptation to do things for the people, but share the work, the planning and the decision-making with them, so they realize that if the center is to continue after the summer, they will have to do it. — Annell Ponder. [17]

Black and White Together (Mostly). The dominant theme of the orientation sessions is Black & white together fighting racism. But given the realities of race, class, and culture in America there are inevitable tensions.

In her excellent memoir, Freedom Summer, volunteer Sally Belfrage recalled:

[The Black staff] were very much an in-group, because of what they have gone through together. They tend to be suspicious of us, because we are white, northern, urban, rich, inexperienced. We are somewhat in awe of them, and conscious of our own inferiority. ... Implicit in the songs, tears, speeches, work and laughter was the knowledge, secure in both them and us, that ultimately we could return to a white refuge. The struggle was their life sentence, implanted in their pigment, and ours only so long as we cared to identify... — Sally Belfrage. [3]

SNCC worker Frank Smith commented: "I grew up hating all white folks. It wasn't till a couple of years ago that I learned that there could be good white — and even now I sometimes wonder."

Emotions are intense and complicated. The COFO staff are uneasy about the role of white activists in Mississippi, and deeply ambivalent about sending them into the danger that they are so familiar with and the white volunteers so utterly ignorant of. Said one Black organizer: "We cried over you in the staff meeting, because we love you and we are afraid for you."

Was there tension? What'd you expect? 'Course there was. Were people nervous and edgy? Wouldn't you be? Was this based on race? Not really. I mean, yes, the Mississippi staff was mostly black, Southern, and poor, and the volunteers mostly white, Northern, and middle class. ... In truth, many of the volunteers, like most white Americans, had never really been around black people in any significant way. And the Southern staff was not in the habit of assuming anything about strange white folk. ... Given the climate they had left in Mississippi, people had a deep foreboding. But race per se was the least of it. ... — Kwame Ture [1]

Everywhere they go the white volunteers are followed by the mass media in full feeding frenzy — reporters, photographers, TV cameras. But they only focus their attention on the whites, ignoring the Black freedom fighters who have risked their lives on the front lines for years. The resentment of Black staff and volunteers is volcanic, and the white volunteers also become disgusted. Said one: "At the beginning it made me feel important. But they have a way of degrading everything they touch. I feel unclean."

I think that a lot of the exaggeration about racial tension came from the media. They were of course all white and probably felt real discomfort in our black presence. The press also really contributed to this 'racial difference' in their own inimitable way by making it immediately clear what story they had come to report. What and who, so far as they were concerned, represented the real importance of the event. — Kwame Ture. [1]

The Disappearance of Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman. The first group of volunteers leave Ohio and go down into Mississippi on June 20th. On the following day three of them, including one summer volunteer, disappear. See Lynching of Chaney, Schwerner & Goodman.

Word arrives in Oxford where the second orientation session is underway:

There was an interruption then at a side entrance: three or four staff members had come in and were whispering agitatedly. One of them walked over to the stage and sprang up to whisper to Moses who bent on his knees to hear. In a moment he was alone again. Still crouched, he gazed at the floor at his feet, unconscious of us. Time passed. When he stood and spoke, he was somewhere else; it was simply that he was obliged to say something, but his voice was automatic. "Yesterday morning, three of our people left Meridian, Mississippi to investigate a church-burning in Neshoba County. They haven't come back and we haven't had any word from them.... [3]

In the days that follow, hope wars with dread, hope that the missing are held in captivity but still alive, against the growing certainty that they have been lynched. Anxious parents call or come in person, urging, pleading, begging, their sons and daughters to come home and not go to Mississippi. A few leave, a few under the age of 21 are forced against their will to quit. But most hold fast.

On the last night of the second orientation, Bob Moses addresses the volunteers and tells them: "The kids are dead." When he finishes speaking the auditorium is deathly silent. Then a woman raises her voice in song, "They say that freedom, is a constant struggle..." The next morning the second wave of volunteers board the buses to go down into Mississippi.

10 Weeks That Shake Mississippi

See Organizational Structure of Freedom Summer for information on the component groups active in Mississippi in the summer of 1964.

The volunteers arrive in Mississippi on June 20th and June 27th. To the extent that they encounter whites, they are greeted with suspicion and outright hostility. But they feel welcomed — even loved — by the Black communities they become part of.

But the volunteers, white and Black both, soon discover that the Black community is split. Many local Afro-Americans eagerly await their arrival and the support they bring. As Holly Springs resident Rita Walker put it in Meeting the Freedom Workers, "I always pictured them coming in a bus with "FREEDOM" written on it. I would meet with some of my friends, and we would go up to the bus station and wait for them so that we could welcome them in." Others, however, fear white retaliation if they even speak to a civil rights worker — they are polite, but distant. They assure their white employers and landlords that they are not involved in "that mess," and when white volunteers approach them as social equals they are deeply uneasy and profoundly conflicted — hesitant to offend these white strangers, but terrified of what will happen to them if their boss or the sheriff thinks they are defying the "Southern Way of Life."

For the volunteers, the work is long and grueling. Up at dawn with the family they live with. No hot shower. No morning paper. No leisurely cup of coffee. Often, no toilet. Strange food for breakfast — hominy grits, collard greens, biscuits & gravy. Then out the door into the brutal, muggy heat.

It was hot, tiring, tedious work. Walking door-to-door, canvassing and convincing people to come to class at one of our Freedom Schools, to come to the courthouse to register to vote. Standing in unmoving lines outside those antebellum courthouses for hours on end, facing heat and hunger and harassment and worse. Our Freedom Schools — nearly fifty of them, all told — were often hardly more than shacks, with hand-painted signs out front and classes held as often on the grass or dirt outside as in, where the heat was stifling and the small rooms too dark to see. We reached people wherever we could, staging meetings and workshops in beauty parlors or barbershops, in storefront churches, even out in the fields where the people were plowing and chopping. — John Lewis [2]

Kwame Ture later said of the volunteers:

For most of them the next two and a half months would be the sternest test of their lives thus far. How would they do? This heah was for real now, Jack. For the most part, I'd say they did just fine. For the overwhelming majority — white or black — it would a life-changing experience politically and culturally. In black Mississippi, the whites experienced at first-hand a side of America they'd not seen and could scarcely have imagined. They learned something about their country, about black culture, and about themselves. Their presence changed black Mississippi, but clearly black Mississippi changed them even more. — Kwame Ture. [1]

Headquarters. Day-to-day, the Summer Project is coordinated out of the crowded COFO office on Lynch Street in Jackson which functions as command post, press room, administrative center, personnel department, bursar, supply depot, emergency first-aid station and basic training camp for volunteers who missed the Oxford orientation. A hand-lettered sign declares: No one would dare bomb this office and end all the confusion . The office is also a terminus for COFO's Wide Area Telephone Service (WATS). Volunteers monitor the life-saving WATS line around the clock, recording incidents of violence and arrest, dispatching lawyers and doctors, notifying press and Justice Department, and compiling the daily "WATS Report."

[ >WATS service was a forerunner of "800" numbers which did not yet exist in 1964. ]

For the duration of the Summer Project, SNCC's national office temporarily moves from Atlanta to Greenwood. For three months, this office on Avenue N becomes the nerve-center of SNCC activities nationwide, raising money, and mobilizing national political support for the Democratic convention challenge in Atlantic City. SNCC's nationwide WATS line in Greenwood is manned (or, more accurately, woman-ed) 24 hours a day. Local men with rifles are discreetly posted in the vicinity to protect the office which is also the home of two cats — one named "Freedom," the other "Now."

Projects. Local projects are the basic unit of organization. Each project is assigned to a designated county or community. Most are led by one or more SNCC or CORE staff members with a varying number of volunteers. Grouped by congressional district for administration and MFDP organizing, there are at least 44 projects across the state, with the heaviest concentration in the Delta (see map). The largest single project is in Hattiesburg serving Forrest County with 50 staff & volunteers. At the other end of the scale some projects have as few as two workers. The number of projects and the number of people assigned to them change over the summer, some projects start late, others grow and spawn new sub-projects, some wither and die in the face of unrelenting opposition from the white power-structure.

Projects are not imposed on Black communities. They are only established in places where local folk ask for them and are willing to provide housing for volunteers and a church or other building for Movement use. In many Mississippi counties, white opposition is so intense, the fear so great, that there is not enough local support to sustain any Freedom Summer activities. Though media attention is on the danger to white volunteers, the risks taken by local activists and those who open their homes are far greater. To defy the white power-structure by publicly standing for the Freedom Movement, or to break the segregation taboo by inviting whites — including young white women — into a Afro-American home, are irrevocable steps of enormous courage. The volunteers are scheduled to leave at the end of the summer, but local Blacks will bear the consequences for the rest of their lives. And white retaliation is swift and brutal — churches are burned, people are fired and evicted, there are arrests, beatings, and shootings that continue long after the summer ends.

Each project is led by a project director. All of them are Black except for Bob Zellner, a white SNCC veteran in Greenwood. The projects focus on:

Voter Registration. There are two kinds of registration: Official, legal, registration requires Blacks to defy social custom, police intimidation, and the threat of Klan violence. Those who go down to the courthouse to fill out the form and take the so-called "literacy test" also run the risk of economic retaliation organized by the White Citizens Councils. The unofficial, MFDP "freedom registration" is symbolic, but far less dangerous because it is done within the Movement and the Black community.

There are two kinds of registration: Official, legal, registration requires Blacks to defy social custom, police intimidation, and the threat of Klan violence. Those who go down to the courthouse to fill out the form and take the so-called "literacy test" also run the risk of economic retaliation organized by the White Citizens Councils. The unofficial, MFDP "freedom registration" is symbolic, but far less dangerous because it is done within the Movement and the Black community. Building the MFDP. This requires learning and teaching the rules and procedures of electoral parties and then organizing precinct, county, district, and state-level MFDP bodies in strict accordance with the official rules of the national Democratic Party. Blacks who take an active role in the party and assume leadership positions in the organization run increased risk of white retaliation. (MFDP Challenge to the Democratic Convention)

This requires learning and teaching the rules and procedures of electoral parties and then organizing precinct, county, district, and state-level MFDP bodies in strict accordance with the official rules of the national Democratic Party. Blacks who take an active role in the party and assume leadership positions in the organization run increased risk of white retaliation. (MFDP Challenge to the Democratic Convention) Freedom Schools. Most projects operate a Freedom School taught by volunteers. Mississippi's segregated school system is designed to keep Blacks in their proper place as determined by the "southern way of life" — subservient, low-paid, and isolated. The Freedom Schools challenge that regime, beginning a process of opening up new worlds of thought and possibility for Black children. Yet it is difficult to say who learns more, the Freedom School students or their volunteer teachers.

Most projects operate a Freedom School taught by volunteers. Mississippi's segregated school system is designed to keep Blacks in their proper place as determined by the "southern way of life" — subservient, low-paid, and isolated. The Freedom Schools challenge that regime, beginning a process of opening up new worlds of thought and possibility for Black children. Yet it is difficult to say who learns more, the Freedom School students or their volunteer teachers. Community Centers. Many projects open community centers that provide cultural and educational programs for the Black community, including political organization, adult-literacy courses staffed by Citizenship School teachers, health-education classes taught by MCHR volunteers, vocational training centers, and live theater shows by the Free Southern Theater. Libraries of books donated by northern sympathizers are established to serve communities who have been denied access to the state's publicly-funded but "white-only" libraries.

Many projects open community centers that provide cultural and educational programs for the Black community, including political organization, adult-literacy courses staffed by Citizenship School teachers, health-education classes taught by MCHR volunteers, vocational training centers, and live theater shows by the Free Southern Theater. Libraries of books donated by northern sympathizers are established to serve communities who have been denied access to the state's publicly-funded but "white-only" libraries. Letters. A strategic objective of the Summer Project is to raise national awareness of southern realities, demand federal action, and mobilize political support for the MFDP. All volunteers are urged to write frequent letters to family, friends, teachers, and ministers about the Freedom Movement and their experiences. Many volunteers arrange to have their letters published in local newspapers, school or church bulletins, or reproduced and distributed to informal networks. (See Letters From Mississippi Freedom Summer for examples.) This is before the era of cheap photocopy machines, so letters have to be retyped with carbon copies, or mimeographed from hand-typed stencils, often by parents who just days or weeks earlier had been desperately pleading with their daughters and sons not to participate in Freedom Summer. Some of these letters are later collected and published as a powerful statement in Letters From Mississippi (expanded and reissued in 2008).

For all participants — SNCC & CORE staff, local activists, and summer volunteers — Black and white — the projects become life-altering experiences. Writing years later, SNCC staff member Cleveland Sellers' remembrance of one project stands for them all:

The Holly Springs Project with Ivanhoe Donaldson as its director, was a true reflection of the "beloved community." This project became a fervent, collective spirit born out of the hearts of many caring, committed, and diverse individuals. The unsurpassable sense of love and hope among us created such an unbreakable bond that for one brief period of history the "band of brothers (and sisters)," the "circle of trust" felt invincible, even in the face of relentlessly imminent danger. Never has any experience paralleled the intense exhilaration and passion that we felt for our work, the local people and one another. — Cleveland Sellers. [5]

The social revolution. The Freedom Movement as a whole, and within it the Summer Project, is about more than just voter registration or education. It is at heart a social revolution. A revolution that defies fear, throws off enforced subservience, asserts dignity and rejects externally-imposed inferiority. A social revolution that demands an equal share of economic and political power. A social revolution that abolishes old relations, and forges new personal, political, and social identities.

Social revolutions are not made from manifestos or political analyses, but rather by people fundamentally altering their view of themselves and their place in society. Such revolutions are not imposed by leaders from above, but rather are nurtured from below. Nor are social revolutions accomplished in a single summer. The social revolution transforming the South neither began, nor ended, with Freedom Summer.

Today's commentary and analysis of the movement often miss the crucial point that, in addition to challenging the white power-structure, the movement also demanded that Black people challenge themselves. Small meetings and workshops became the spaces within the Black community where people could stand up and speak, or in groups outline their concerns. In them, folks were feeling themselves out, learning how to use words to articulate what they wanted and needed. In these meetings, they were taking the first step toward gaining control over their lives, and the decision making that affected their lives, by making demands on themselves. This important dimension of the movement has been almost completely lost in the imagery of hand-clapping, song-filled rallies for protest demonstrations that have come to define portrayals of 1960s civil rights meetings: dynamic individual leaders using their powerful voices to inspire listening crowds. Our meetings were conducted so that sharecroppers, farmers, and ordinary working people could participate, so that Mrs. Hamer, Mrs. Devine, Hartman Turnbow, all of them were empowered. They weren't just sitting there. — Bob Moses [6]

Unita Blackwell, a Mayersville Mississippi sharecropper with an 8th grade education recalls how the social revolution first affected her:

To have wonderful new friends — black and white, educated, people of means, some of them, who'd been places and done things I'd never even dreamed of — sitting on the floor or in the old broke-down furniture in my front room, talking about our lives and times, gave me a feeling I'd never had before. Nobody had to say that all of us were equal; we could feel it. These were the first moments of my life when I knew that people outside my family respected me for what I knew and what I had to offer. They wanted to know my ideas, to get my advice about what they should do. I was telling them what to do. Even in my own community, as a woman, my opinion didn't mean much unless it was in agreement with a man's. I had been beat way down, and the realization that I had something of value to give someone else was a powerful sensation. At the time I didn't even know how to describe it, but it gave me strength. — Unita Blackwell. [7] [ Unita Blackwell went on to become a SNCC field secretary and MFDP Delegate. In later life she became the first Black women in living memory to be elected Mayor of a Mississippi town, founded the U.S. China People's Friendship Association, received a Masters degree from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, and was awarded a MacArthur Foundation "Genius" Fellowship grant in 1992. ]

By definition, social revolutions run deep, deep down to the very bottom. The worst poverty and fiercest oppression is found among the plantation sharecroppers and farm laborers who endure semi-slavery on the vast feudal domains of the richest and most powerful cotton planters. Often they are forbidden contact with the outside world, terrorized by unrestrained physical and sexual violence of white foremen, forced to subsist on over-priced, shoddy goods at the company store — not even paid in money but rather working off constantly increasing debt. Yet by 1964, the Freedom Movement's social revolution has reached down even to these depths. For the organizers and volunteers sneaking onto plantations to visit the tumble-down shacks in the dead of night, the deadly dangerous work is reminiscent of Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railway stealing away slaves from America's "Egypt." As one summer volunteer recalled:

On a drooping cot to our right as we came in the door lay a small child (six months old). The child's eyes, nose, and mouth were covered with flies. Not being able to stand such a sight, I tried to chase them away only to be met with the reply of the mother "They will only come back again." The whole house seemed diseased, rotten, and splitting at the seams with infection. Nevertheless, the people knew what we were coming for, and the forms were filled out without our asking... This is a scene that was burned into all of our minds and which will make quiet sleep impossible." [4]

Violence. Across the state there is widespread violence, police repression, and economic retaliation against local Blacks and Freedom Summer participants. For example, the following violent incidents are culled from the daily WATS report for the single week of July 6-12:

July 6, Moss Point. Lawrence Guyot addressing a voter registration rally. Racists shoot into the crowd seriously wounding a woman. Three Blacks arrested when they chase the attackers. July 6, Jackson. McCraven Hill Missionary Baptist Church damaged by firebomb. July 6, Raligh. Two churches destroyed by fire. July 8, McComb. Freedom House bombed, wounding SNCC organizer Curtis Hayes and summer volunteer Dennis Sweeney. July 9, Vicksburg. Young Freedom School students stoned while walking to class. July 10, Hattiesburg. Klansmen attack Rabbi Arthur Lelyveld with steel pipes. He and two other summer volunteers hospitalized with injuries. July 11, Canton. Firebomb thrown at Freedom House. July 11, Vicksburg. Black cafe that served white volunteers bombed. July 11, Browning. Missionary Baptist Church destroyed by fire. July 12, Jackson. White man attacks Black woman at Greyhound depot. After being treated for injuries, she is arrested for "Disturbing the Peace." Her attacker is not charged. July 12, Natchez. Jerusalem Baptist and Bethel Methodist Churches burned to the ground.

And from the same period, the following reports of police harassment and abuse:

July 6, Itta Bena. Police seize a civil rights worker and disappear him, triggering a search by SNCC and federal agents. July 7, Greenwood. Six local students and three volunteers arrested for peacefully picketing. July 8, Hattiesburg. Rev. Robert Beech of National Council of Churches arrested on felony charges because his checking account is briefly overdrawn. July 8, Columbus. Three volunteers arrested for "trespass" after stopping at a gas station to buy cold soft drinks. July 9, Clarksdale. Cops spray cleaning chemicals on two Black girls inside the courthouse. A volunteer arrested for taking a photo of the incident. July 9, Gulfport. Four volunteers arrested on anti-picketing charges as they escort Blacks to courthouse for voter registration attempt. July 10, Greenwood. A cop overhears a SNCC staff member tell another activist: "We've got to get some damn organization in our office." The SNCC organizer is arrested and jailed for "Public Profanity."

COFO's assumption that the mass media and federal government will swiftly respond to attacks on white volunteers proves correct. The disappearance of Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman is headline news and lead story across the nation. Reporters flock to the state and the DOJ springs into frenzied action. But the strategy of using white students to bring attention and protection to all Movement participants — white and Black — fails.

For the most part, both the media and the federal government are only interested in attacks and threats against the white volunteers. A massive federal search is launched to find the missing men, and President Johnson meets with the parents of the two white activists at the White House. When white activists are beaten or shot at, the FBI quickly investigates (though they rarely arrest anyone). But both media and government show little interest in attacks on either local Blacks or Black freedom workers. Civil rights leaders demand that federal marshals be mobilized to protect people working on voter registration. They are ignored. The number of FBI agents assigned to Mississippi is increased from 15 to 150, but when FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover opens the new FBI office in Jackson, he assures white Mississippi that the FBI will give "no protection" to civil rights agitators.

The death of Black activist Wayne Yancey and serious injury to Charlie Scales in a mysterious "car crash" is another example. SNCC staff member Cleveland Sellers of the Holly Springs project later recalled:

I remember a black man, someone I had never seen before, rushed up to us and said, "A Freedom Rider has been killed up the road in a car crash!" We had not seen an ambulance nor any emergency vehicle. We began to scout around to see what was going on. We found the badly damaged car at a service station and then went to the hospital. Oddly, the police were already at the hospital. We were shocked to find Wayne's body lying in the back of the ambulance/hearse with blood dripping into a puddle beneath. We could not tell how long the body had been there or if Wayne had died at the scene or while still in the ambulance waiting for medical attention. Charlie was inside the hospital when we took Kathy Dahl, the project's nurse, inside to check on him. Even though the hospital had not provided extensive medical treatment to Charlie, the chief of police was trying to put him under arrest for vehicular homicide. Immediately Ivanhoe asked Kathy to work on getting Charlie to a Memphis hospital. Kathy, in her authoritative voice, said that Charlie was in need of immediate attention and if he didn't get to Memphis quickly he may die. The police chief was reluctant to let Charlie go. More negotiations were required for the sheriff to finally release Charlie, who was driven to Memphis and then flown to Chicago. Charlie maintained that he was lying on the ground immediately following the wreck, some white men walked over to him and said, "Stay still or you will get the same as your buddy. Wayne's death had a profound impact on those of us in Holly Springs, not only because we loved him like a brother, but because for some they saw first hand how the lives of poor black males were not valued in Mississippi. There was no fanfare, no FBI, no investigation, no massive press coverage. No named civil rights leader rushed down to Paris (Tennessee where he was buried). Just us, the family and our brother. — Cleveland Sellers. [5]

It is no surprise then that a bitterly ironic, hand-lettered sign hangs on one wall of the SNCC office in Greenwood:

There's a street in Itta Bena called Freedom

There's a town in Mississippi called Liberty

There's a department in Washington called Justice

It is the local Black community, not the federal government or local law enforcement, that provides protection. As volunteer Gren Whitman writes in his journal: "I am writing this at 6am. Just now coming down the hall from the bathroom, I met Mrs. Fairley coming down the hall from the front porch, carrying a rifle in one hand [and] a pistol in the other. I do not know what is going on ... [All she said was] "You go to sleep, let me fight for you."

A New Kind of Leadership. Though they are repeatedly cautioned not to act or think of themselves as leaders, the inexorable reality of day-to-day circumstances force staff and volunteers of both races into assuming leadership roles greater than most of them have ever previously experienced. And with that roll comes burdens of responsibility for their own lives and safety — and that of others.

From class background, academic or organizational experience, and general familiarity with the power manipulations and media-hype of American politics- as-usual, many volunteers are familiar with traditional styles of leadership based on social position, organizational title, personal prestige, intellectual brilliance, verbal rhetoric and calculated image enhancement. Nor are they unfamiliar with the posturing and domination, political maneuvering, self-aggrandizement, ego-gratification, and sexual-predation that so often characterizes the exercise of leadership in the halls of power, corporate offices, and groves of academia.

But by their example, many of the SNCC and CORE staff who head the projects provide the volunteers with a new model of leadership that is profoundly different from the American norm. Out in the field, away from headquarters, status and leadership is, for the most part, based on what people actually do, what they endure, and their success (or lack thereof) in organizing real people to do real things to improve their lives. One Freedom Movement activist later described the goal (if not always the reality): "No self-promoting, 'I'm the boss, look at me, do it my way,' type leaders. It's the concept of ego-less leadership. It was the complete opposite of the kind of leadership that seems so common today — 'I'm the leader! I'm in charge! I'm important! I'm on stage! I'm the one who goes on TV!"

At root, the difference in leadership stems from the organizer's point of view. Self-promoting, self-centered leaders seek power and prestige for themselves on the promise of providing benefits to their constituents. But an organizer's goal is to find and nurture leaders among the local folk who will build their own organizations and achieve a share of political power for themselves — thereby allowing the organizer to move on to some other community to repeat the process. At least in theory. In practical reality over the long run, that concept proves difficult to achieve, but in 1964, field secretaries of the Southern Freedom Movement are doing their level best to live up to that ideal.

Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael) of SNCC is project director for the 2nd Congressional district in the Mississippi Delta, and therefore an acknowledged leader by necessity. From that perspective, he later described the demands placed on him:

People depended on you to inspire confidence. You inspired confidence by showing confidence. Yeah, they expected clarity and decisiveness at all times. But the decisions had to be seen to be fair and intelligent. No stupid moves. No bombast, no empty guarantees: no overstated promises that you couldn't keep and which people knew you couldn't keep. You had to be credible. To keep trust, you had to perform. To keep authority, you had to earn it, over and over. To lead not by fiat, but by example and work. — Kwame Ture. [1]

Direct Action and the Civil Rights Act

Shortly after the volunteers arrive in Mississippi, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is signed into law on July 2nd. Though its passage is a huge victory for the Freedom Movement as a whole, it presents serious problems for the Summer Project.

From the beginning, with the first voter-registration effort in McComb after the Freedom Rides SNCC's Mississippi strategy has been based on two premises: First, that the primary goal must be achieving political power for Blacks, which requires voter-registration. Second, that most Afro-Americans in the state cannot afford to patronize white restaurants or theaters, so integrating them is at best merely symbolic. But there is a long-standing disagreement between those who argue that integration efforts provoke so much white violence and state repression that voter-registration is crippled, and those who believe that defiant action by young people awakens courage in adults, helps them rise above their fears, and encourages them to register. That may be true, argue others, but staff and volunteers languishing in jail cells can't canvas or organize and diverting desperately need funds to bail them out weakens the central effort.

But after passage of the Act, young Blacks across the state are eager to defy segregation and exercise their new rights. They want to "spit in the eye" of white racists by integrating hamburger joints and movie theaters. Three years of Movement activity have filled them with courage and now they believe the law is on their side.

Whites, however, are already enraged by the mere existence of Freedom Summer and further inflamed by Johnson signing the Act. In Greenwood and other communities, carloads of armed thugs prowl the streets looking for trouble, some are members of the Sheriff's posse, some are outright Klan. One of these "auxiliary" deputies is Byron De la Beckwith, and everyone in Leflore County, Black and white, know that he murdered murdered Medgar Evers.

The question is thrashed out in meeting after meeting. The majority of SNCC staff agree with Bob Moses that they have to remain disciplined, stick to the plan, and not let themselves or the Movement become distracted. But some staff and some summer volunteers argue that it was the sit-ins and Freedom Rides of the early 1960s that sparked and energized the Movement and that if the Civil Rights Act is not tested and enforced immediately it will wither away and become just another unenforced law. By and large, adults in the community agree that now is not the time for integrating lunch counters. But young activists not yet old enough to vote are restless, in some communities they take independent action on their own, and when they are arrested or beaten a portion of Movement time and resources has to be diverted in response. Yet at the same time, their courage and defiance does encourage and inspire their elders.

The issue is most acute in Greenwood which has been a center of Freedom Movement activity since early 1962. It comes to a head after national NAACP leaders swoop into town accompanied by reporters and FBI agents. They integrate a few upscale establishments to great media acclaim and then drive off. Afterwards, no one, not even SNCC, can restrain Greenwood's Black youth from direct action at "white-only" establishments. Then Silas McGhee goes to the movies, touching off a new front in the struggle. There are arrests and beatings and shootings. SNCC staff and summer volunteers have to be shifted from voter registration and MFDP organizing to raising bail money and keeping protests disciplined, focused, and nonviolent.

Martha Lamb is the Registrar of Voters for Leflore County. She is notorious for her refusal to register Afro-Americans. To dramatize her violation of Black voting rights and pressure her to obey federal law, federal court rulings, and the U.S. Constitution, July 16 is declared "Freedom Day" in Greenwood. For more than a week there are mass meetings and house-to-house canvassing to urge Black citizens to sign up as members in the MFDP and then attempt to register at the courthouse en masse on Freedom Day. To support those trying to register, and call attention to the denial of basic human rights in Mississippi, Black students eager for direct action are asked to peacefully picket the courthouse in violation of the state's anti-picketing law — it is certain they will be arrested. Most of the summer volunteers also want to join the line, but if everyone is in jail the main work of the project halts, so only a limited number are chosen.

On July 16, the line of Black adults waiting to register stretches down the courthouse steps and around the corner. No more than three are allowed into the courthouse at a time. The line crawls forward at a snail's pace — most will never even reach the door. A swarm of local and state police harass and intimidate them, as do "deputized" toughs and furious white citizens.

The first wave of young pickets and summer volunteers walk single file along the sidewalk singing freedom songs. They are quickly arrested. Their "One Man/One Vote" and "End Voting Discrimination" signs are torn from their grasp and they are shoved into a police bus. Their singing intensifies: "Ain't gonna let nobody turn me 'round, turn me 'round..." The pickets are staggered throughout the day, wave after wave are arrested, 111 in all, including 13 summer volunteers and some SNCC staff. Those arrested are sentenced to 30 days in jail and $100 fine. They go on hunger strike. After 6 days they are released on appeal bond of $200 each. The work of the project — voter registration, building the MFDP, Freedom Schools, and community organizing continues.

Internal Tensions.

Fear, exhaustion, heat, the passion and depth of commitment, cultural differences of wealth & poverty, black & white, north & south, urban & rural, and the enormous gap between hope and reality, all combine to create an emotional pressure cooker that intensifies inherent conflicts of race, gender, and class. As the weeks pass, the strains increase, "Fear can't become a habit," writes one volunteer — but it can, and it has.

Race. The deepest tensions are around race. Most of the white volunteers are fervently committed to the ideal of an inter-racial "beloved community." But the habits and assumptions of white superiority are deeply ingrained and often manifest despite their best intentions. In the pressure of events, some of the white volunteers fail to understand that their skills, training, and confidence are the product of privilege. In their eagerness, they sometimes push Blacks aside. Then they are bewildered and hurt when Black staff members verbally slap them down.

After three years of Mississippi's blood and brutality, and three years of failure on the part of liberal white America and the federal government to live up their professed ideals and oft-stated promises, some of SNCC and CORE's Black staff no longer see inter-racial brotherhood, integration, or appeals to white liberalism as a viable strategy for ending the nightmare of racism, segregation, exploitation, and powerlessness. They find it hard to trust any whites, even the summer volunteers working beside them. Some of them are moving towards Black pride, Black self-reliance, and Black Power. Inevitably, there is friction with both white volunteers and those Black activists who still adhere to the beloved community outlook.

The mass media exacerbates and exaggerates these internal tensions. Black organizers who have endured years on the front lines are deeply embittered when the white gentlemen of the press ignore them and instead milk recently arrived white volunteers for their wisdom and insight regarding America, race, and politics. And when Black anger is expressed to the white volunteers, the mass media emphasizes it out of all proportion, over-reporting the conflicts as if to deny the broader current of racial solidarity that characterizes Freedom Summer.

See Whites in SNCC for a more extensive discussion of these issues.

Gender. Tensions related to gender fester beneath the surface — particularly among some of the white women volunteers. In 1964, the term "sexism" has not yet come into wide use, and compared to issues of race there is little articulation and even less discussion about discrimination against women in the broader society, women's roles and treatment within the Movement, or inequality and abuse in personal interactions between women and men. One woman later said: "Sexism was not something that ... had been made conscious to me at the time, but looking back on [Freedom Summer], that's ... what it was."

Some SNCC staff view the presence of white women volunteers as a mixed blessing.

Not through any fault of the women's, but because of the deeply ingrained, almost psychotic Southern male attitudes about 'white womanhood.' This was cause for real concern, Jack. Young white women in the black community would be seen as a provocation and a flash point for violence. That was reality. A security risk to themselves and everyone else in communities in which lynching was by no means a distant memory. ... One expedient was to try to 'hide' the women in libraries and freedom schools as opposed to sending them canvassing door-to-door. (Course, some women did do canvassing, but in all-women or all-white teams.) — Kwame Ture [1]

Yet while individual safety and project security are valid concerns, they are not the only factors. Though some Black women are involved in voter registration, most are assigned to Freedom Schools, community centers, and office jobs. For some staff and volunteers, particularly some of the men, there is a hierarchy of work-related prestige; voter-registration is the "real" work, Freedom Schools and community centers are of secondary importance, and office-clerical is the least valued (except when paychecks or operating expenses arrive late, of course). Since work assignments are skewed by gender (9% of the women are engaged in voter-registration, for example, compared to 47% of the men), this sometimes results in women being treated as second-class freedom fighters — not unlike the way society at large under-values women, and "womens work."

But "sometimes" is not the same as "always," and "some men" is not the same as "all men" — particularly in SNCC. Some project directors and field leaders in SNCC's area of operations are Black women, and overall the number of SNCC women in significant leadership roles is far higher than in other Freedom Movement organizations such as CORE, SCLC, and the NAACP.

See Women & Men in the Freedom Movement for a more extensive discussion of these issues.

Class. Issues and tensions rooted in class are examined the least and only rarely discussed. After a generation of red-baiting and McCarthyism, concepts of class division, class oppression, class consciousness, and class warfare are the taboo topics of American politics (as to some extent they still are today). In 1964, awareness of such issues has barely begun to stir. Most of the white volunteers are from the middle and upper-classes, but aspects of class are often overlooked, or interpreted solely as Black-white issues — or as North-South or urban-rural cultural differences.

Class divisions also exist within the local Black community, among Black volunteers and staff, and between college-educated Blacks and rural farm laborers. After years of organizing experience working in the poverty-stricken communities of the agrarian South, John Lewis later touched on SNCC's growing awareness of class when he wrote:

As for our black volunteers and staffers, we had to be as sensitive and careful about our behavior and appearance as the whites. We knew we could easily be resented by the local blacks as outsiders, college-educated kids from a different class, really from a different country from the one in which they lived. We had to be extremely careful about any hint of condescension or superiority, from the way we acted to the way we dressed. Overalls became the standard outfit for our black volunteers. Blue denim bib overalls and a white T-shirt underneath, became the symbol of SNCC. And it was practical. It fit our lifestyle of sleeping on sofas and floors and walking miles and miles of dusty back roads. It also identified us with the people we were working with — farmers and poor people. — John Lewis. [2]

For more information on Freedom Summer:

Books: Mississippi Movement

Web:

Mississippi Movement & MFDP A Discussion

Freedom Summer

Freedom Schools

Mississippi Movement

Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party

Freedom Summer Digital Collection (Wisconsin Historical Society)

Documents:

Freedom Summer & Freedom Schools

Articles by Freedom Summer Participants

Letters From Freedom Summer Participants



Lynching of Chaney, Schwerner & Goodman (June)

CORE field secretaries Mickey and Rita Schwerner arrive in Meridian at the beginning of 1964. Meridian is the seat of Lauderdale County and the center of CORE organizing in east-central Mississippi. Along with local CORE leader James Chaney of Meridian, they meet frequently with Freedom Movement supporters in adjacent Neshoba County, and Mt. Zion Church in the unincorporated Longdale community agrees to host a Freedom School for the upcoming Summer Project. On the evening of June 16, while CORE staff is in Ohio for the orientation of the summer volunteers, Klansmen attack the church, beat members of the congregation, and burn the building.

On Saturday, June 20, Schwerner and Chaney return to Meridian with the first wave of volunteers. They enter a state where press and political leaders from the Governor on down are whipping up a frenzy of hate and violence among the white population. Instead of countering their incitements, FBI Director Hoover tells white Mississippi, "We will not wet-nurse troublemakers."

The next day, Schwerner, Chaney, and summer volunteer Andy Goodman, drive up to Neshoba County to meet with local Blacks about the church burning. Sheriff's deputy Cecil Price — who is also a member of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan — stops them for "speeding" (their car is well known to both cops and Klan as a CORE vehicle). But instead of issuing a ticket to the driver, he arrests all three men, incarcerating them in the county jail in Philadelphia. None of them are allowed to make any phone calls. While the three are held incommunicado, Price contacts his KKK associates and the Klan gathers. They arrange with Sheriff Lawrence Rainey to release the civil rights workers once an ambush has been set up on the road back to Meridian.

Search procedures are initiated at the Meridian CORE office when the three miss their check-in time. Summer volunteer Louise Hermey, on her first day in Mississippi, begins calling jails and hospitals. The Neshoba County jail denies all knowledge of the three, though in fact they are being held there. The SNCC office is notified, and Mary King alerts the FBI and Justice Department — who show little interest. Had the federal government bestirred itself during the five hours Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman are held in jail, the Sheriff might have hesitated before turning them over to Klan lynch mob. But the Feds do nothing (as usual).

Around 10:30pm, when the Klan is ready and Price is positioned on the road in his squad car, Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman are released from jail and told to "get out of town." As they drive the dark road towards Meridian, Price pulls them over with his police siren. He then turns them over to the Klan murder squad. They are taken to an isolated spot where James Chaney is savagely beaten and all three are shot to death. In the early morning hours of Monday, June 22nd, their bodies are buried in an earthen dam on the property of wealthy landowner Olen Burrage. Their car is driven into Bogue Chitto swamp and set on fire.

By Tuesday, the story of their disappearance is on the front page of the New York Times and the burned out car is discovered in the swamp. Now Lyndon Johnson and the federal government suddenly wake up — two white men (and a colored kid too) are missing, probably murdered. The FBI and military search teams are ordered into action. LBJ meets with the parents of Goodman and Schwerner who have come to Washington from New York to plead for federal action. Johnson assures them that "everything possible" is being done. In Mississippi, Chaney's mother waits for word of her son. There is no White House invitation for her.

Secure in their certainty that bodies buried beneath an earthen dam can never be found, Mississippi officials claim it is all a hoax, a Communist plot to stir up sympathy for agitators, and that the missing men are hiding in Mexico. Or, as Mississippi Governor Paul Johnson tells reporters: "Those boys are in Cuba."

The Freedom Movement, of course, knows different, and the murders hit hard. Like most Freedom Movement activists, the three are young — one is a native Mississippian, one a staff field secretary, and one a summer volunteer — and all those who are putting their bodies on the line know that next time it could be them. Protests and sit-ins are mounted at federal buildings around the country — New York, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco — and speaking for the Goodman family, attorney Martin Popper tells the press: "The murder of the boys is the first interracial lynching in the history of the United States."

The number of FBI agents assigned to Mississippi is increased ten-fold, from 15 to 150, and for the first time an FBI office is established in the state. But Hoover again reassures white Mississippi that the FBI will give, "no protection," to civil rights workers.

Throwing corpses of murdered Blacks into the nearest river is a traditional component of the "southern way of life," so hundreds of Navy sailors are assigned to search the swamps, and Navy divers drag the rivers. Soon Black bodies are being pulled from the waters. Among them are Henry Hezekiah Dee and Charles Eddie Moore, lynched by the Klan after Moore is expelled from Alcorn A&M for participating in civil rights protests. The Klansmen falsely believe that Dee and Moore are "Black militants" collecting guns for a race war against whites. For this imaginary crime they are murdered. Another young victim, tentatively identified as 14-year old Herbert Oarsby, is found wearing a CORE T-shirt. The remains of five other Black men are never identified. But none of the bodies are those of the missing white men, and both the media and the FBI quickly loose interest in them. (Forty-three years later, in 2007, a Klansmen is convicted in the Moore and Dee murders after Jackson Free Press and Canadian Broadcast Corporation reporters locate the killer and uncover new evidence. Their stories prod the Justice Department to finally reopen the case.)

In Neshoba County, a paid informant directs the FBI to the dam where the three are buried, and their bodies are recovered on August 4th. Rita Schwerner tells the press, "My husband, Michael Schwerner, did not die in vain. If he and Andrew Goodman had been Negroes, the world would have taken little notice of their deaths. After all, the slaying of a Negro in Mississippi is not news. It is only because my husband and Andrew Goodman were white that the national alarm has been sounded."

At his eulogy for James Chaney, CORE leader Dave Dennis voices the rage, anguish, and turmoil of Movement veterans and summer volunteers alike:

I want to talk about right now the living dead that we have right among our midst, not only in the state of Mississippi but throughout the nation. Those are the people who don't care, those who do care but don't have the guts enough to stand up for it, and those people busy up in Washington and other places using my freedom and my life to play politics with. That includes the President on down to the Governor of the state of Mississippi. ... I blame the people in Washington DC and on down in the state of Mississippi just as much as I blame those who pulled the trigger. ... I'm tired of that! Another thing that makes me even tireder though, that is the fact that we as people here in the state and the country are allowing it to continue to happen. ... Your work is just beginning. If you go back home and sit down and take what these white men in Mississippi are doing to us. ...if you take it and don't do something about it. ...then God damn your souls! — Dave Dennis. [14]

After the bodies are recovered, their families ask Freedom Movement attorneys Arthur Kinoy and William Kunstler to ensure that the legally-required autopsies be done correctly and reported accurately. They ask that MCHR doctors be allowed to inspect the bodies and observe the procedure. But when Movement doctors Charles Goodrich and Alfred Kogon attempt to do so, they are blocked by the cops — Mississippi officials refuse to allow access to anyone representing the Freedom Movement or the families.

The autopsy results are not released to the public, but mysterious leaks to the press imply that the three men were shot but not tortured or mutilated. The MCHR suspects a cover-up. They ask Dr. David Spain, a respected New York pathologist to inspect the bodies. State officials try to block a second autopsy, but the families hold firm and prevail. The first autopsy done under FBI and state authority had reported no injuries other than the fatal gunshots, but Dr. Spain discovers obvious evidence of horrendous torture and brutality suffered by James Chaney. He tells reporters:

I could barely believe the destruction to these frail young bones. In my 25 years as a pathologist and medical examiner, I have never seen bones so severely shattered, except in tremendously high speed accidents or airplane crashes. It was obvious to any first-year medical student that this boy had been beaten to a pulp. — David Spain. [15]

Mickey Schwerner's parents ask that his body be buried next to James Chaney, but that violates Mississippi's rigid code of segregation extending even unto death — whites and Blacks cannot be laid to rest in the same cemetery.

On December 4, the FBI arrests and charges 19 suspects (and, incidentally, demonstrates what everyone has always known, that the FBI does, in fact, have the power to make arrests in civil rights cases). The charges against all of them are dismissed six days later.

On January 15, 1965, most of the first group are rearrested. A total of 18 men are charged with conspiracy to deny the three their civil rights. But no one is charged with murder. Murder is a state crime that has to be prosecuted by Mississippi law enforcement officials who are themselves segregationists committed to white-supremacy. On October 20, 1967, seven of the defendants are convicted of federal conspiracy charges, the others are either acquitted outright or receive a mistrial. Among the convicted are Klan Imperial Wizard Sam Bowers and Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price. Sentences range from 3 to 10 years. Sheriff Rainey is among those acquitted.

After exhausting their appeals, the seven begin serving their sentences in March of 1970. None serve more than six years for lynching three young men. Meanwhile, the other murderers who were acquitted or had mistrials go about their lives, though everyone knows who they are and what they did. Rainey continues in office as Sheriff until his term ends and acquitted defendant E.G. Barnett is elected in his place.

Thirty years pass. Across the South, white Southerners are eager to ignore and suppress all memory of lynchings, assassinations, and oppression. Most white politicians and law enforcement officials switch parties from Democrat to Republican, but regardless of party they show no interest at all in investigating or prosecuting murder cases involving Movement-related killings in Mississippi or anywhere else.

But Black communities in the South do not forget, they know who the murderers are. Voter registration rises, Blacks are elected to office and begin to gain a share of political power. In both North and South a new generation of young activists, attorneys, journalists, and community leaders begin to demand belated justice. Journalist Jerry Mitchell of the Jackson Clarion-Ledger plays a key role in reawakening public interest in cases long buried by political expediency — he finds witnesses, uncovers concealed evidence, and locates suspects. As the 20th Century fades into history and the new century begins, public pressure forces Southern politicians and prosecutors to reopen old cases. Byron De La Beckwith is convicted for assassinating Medgar Evers and dies in prison in 2001. Two of the Birmingham church bombers are also sent to prison.

In 2001, former Neshoba County Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price begins to cooperate with state authorities who have reopened the Chaney, Schwerner, Goodman case. He suddenly dies in a mysterious "accident." In June of 2005, a Neshoba County jury convicts Edgar Ray Killen for manslaughter in the lynching of the three civil rights workers. He is sentenced to 60 years in prison. But as of 2008, activists continue to demand that charges be brought against the other murderers who still remain free despite a finding by the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court that:

There is ample — in fact, overwhelming — untainted evidence that the defendants conspired together to have Price, a deputy sheriff, arrest Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman, United States citizens; that Price would hold them in custody until such time that when released, Price, Arledge, Barnette, Roberts, Snowden, Jordan and Posey could and would intercept them, assault and kill them; and that each was present at and participated in the murder of the three men and the disposal of their bodies by burial fifteen feet beneath the top of an earthen dam deep in the woods. ... Specifically, we find ample proof of conspiracy and each appellant's complicity in a calculated, cold-blooded and merciless plot to murder the three men. [8]

Freedom Schools (Summer)

Photos

Origins

Prior to Freedom Summer, most Movement education efforts are aimed at adults. To one degree or another, the NAACP, CORE, SCLC, and SNCC are all involved in teaching adult literacy, political education, and how to pass the various literacy tests, with the largest and most sustained effort coming from thousands of SCLC's Citizenship School teachers.

But as more and more young people become active in the Freedom Movement, student-oriented educational activities begin to emerge and evolve. When more than a hundred Black high school students in McComb are expelled from school in 1961 for Movement activities, SNCC briefly establishes "Nonviolent High" to carry on their education. In Greenwood, the SNCC office is just down the street from the Black high school and SNCC field secretaries begin teaching impromptu after-school classes in 1962 and '63.

The need is self-evident. On average, the state of Mississippi spends four times as much educating whites as Blacks ($81.66 per pupil per year versus $21.77). Mississippi does not have a mandatory education law. Plantation owners can work Black (and poor white) children in the fields whenever they wish. In many counties, the "Colored" schools close during the spring cotton chopping and fall picking seasons. And when Black students do manage to attend one of