Freedom Summer
Dale and I packed up and moved down State Highway 19 to Meridian. The real possibility of violence was on the minds of all of us who worked the back roads of Mississippi in the summer of 1964. In the nine years since Emmett Till was lynched in Money, Mississippi, on August 28 1955, 18 African Americans had been murdered in Mississippi: Clinton Melton and Rev. George W. Lee in 1955; all nine members of the Taplin family in 1956; O. Moore in 1957; Woodrow Daniel in 1958; Mack Parker and Luther Jackson in 1959; Medgar Evers in 1963; Charles E. Moore and Henry Dee in 1964; and finally James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman had disappeared. No one had ever been brought to justice for any of these killings.
We were back in Philadelphia the next morning and interviewed those who would talk to us. Most people were cordial and honest about their feelings, but everyone in Mississippi was afraid, both white and Black. Every black family we talked to had a story about a family member or a neighbor who had been shot or hung or beaten or had his property taken away. Whatever part of the state I was in, black families told me the same story: “I know it’s hard all over Mississippi, but it’s hardest right here.”
A white volunteer from Indiana, Jane Adams told me, “I thought that if I could live through the first fifteen minutes, I’d be all right.” But it wasn’t like that. There wasn’t constant, imminent danger, only random moments when you’d find yourself in a situation where you could be beaten or killed. One volunteer I talked to told me he had been in the state for several weeks when he decided to visit a Presbyterian church in Canton. He and two other friends dressed in suits and ties were turned away at the door and told they were not welcome. On the way back to his temporary Canton lodgings, they were jumped and beaten by a group of white men. Those moments were much more terrifying than you ever thought they would be.
Dale and I went to the banks of the Neshoba River as police dragged the bottom from small motorboats, looking for the bodies of Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman, policemen laughing quietly among themselves when the weight at the end of the drag line turned out to be a newspaper coin machine.
We returned to New York and produced a show on the Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman’s disappearance and the Freedom Summer project. It got us a grant to cover the summer, and I had the responsibility of finding a reporter both skilled enough and savvy enough to work in the South. The trouble was, that reporter could be badly hurt or killed.
In the end I assigned myself the job. I had already been initiated. I knew how to speak in whispers in public places, never to mention race or Negroes or even journalism in public. I knew to be particularly careful in restaurants. I knew that when traveling on back country roads to drive quickly, never to stop, to avoid stores and gas stations that did not cater to tourists or were black owned. I knew to stay in my room after dark. Never walk on dark streets alone, to tape the car door light switch so it wouldn’t go on when you opened the door, making yourself an easy target. I knew to make sure the hood and gas cap were locked.
I needed a reliable portable audio recording machine. The best in the world was the NAGRA, manufactured by hand in those days by Rudolph Gudelski in the garage of his home outside Basel Switzerland. We called Gudelsky. He explained that there was a long waiting list for a new NAGRA. Shipping one to us was out of the question. I asked my assistant to book me a flight to Geneva and left the next day with enough cash to buy a NAGRA.
I rented a car in Geneva and drove to Gudelski’s home. He was working in his garage, assembling one of the sleek, machine tooled portable recorders. My eagerness, enterprise and the stories of the dangers that I faced in Mississippi, convinced Gudelski to sell me one on the spot. I flew back to New York, packed and headed to Mississippi with a suitcase of clothes, a new NAGRA, a COMREX wireless audio system, a hidden microphone and a box full of audio tapes.
Mississippi was targeted for voter registration because it had the lowest percentage of African Americans registered to vote in the United States. In 1964 less than seven percent of eligible black voters were registered and many of those registered were too afraid to go to the polls. Seventy thousand African Americans had tried since 1961, only to be beaten back by poll taxes, rigged literacy tests, impossible office hours and, when none of that worked, by economic retaliation, arson, beatings and lynching. There was no reason to believe that “outside agitators,” in this case northern college students and sympathetic journalists, would be treated any differently. As governor Ross Barnet told an enthusiastic audience in Jackson as the summer began, “Thank God when the freedom riders get to Jackson, they go to jail.”a
I produced 12 ½-hour radio documentaries on Freedom Summer. Some of the soundbites are very long, as much as four minutes, but the cadence of the voices reveals the deep thoughts and feelings behind them. I intrude as little as possible. Taken together, they offer a much more comprehensive look at Freedom Summer than I can offer in these posts.
Freedom Schools
Freedom summer was not popular with many mainstream civil rights leaders and liberals. Mississippi was too dangerous and intractable. But James Foreman, Executive Director of SNCC, told me, “We rejected that concept. We rejected it first of all because people were suffering; secondly, other people were not prepared to go there and we were; thirdly because of the political significance of that area.” COFO had been working in Mississippi, and Freedom Summer was an outgrowth of that work, Foreman explained. In the end, almost 1000 northern students went to Mississippi in the summer of 1964.
The big red Ford that Hertz gave me at the airport (the last car available from any car rental agency they said) carried county plates that identified it as an airport rental. The red car tabbed me as a northern reporter, a form of humanity even lower than civil rights workers in the minds of many Mississippi whites. In the capital of Jackson, I stayed in hotels and motels with other members of the press, but as I began to work the back roads of the state, I found myself often alone, the only outsider in town.
The isolation caught up with me in Greenville. I was in town to interview the crusading, liberal newspaper editor Hodding Carter, but the Carters were in Maine for the summer. Greenville had been a center of civil rights action for years. Bob Dylan and Peter Seeger had performed in Greenville the summer before. But on that July evening of 1964, I felt alone in the hotel and I had a funny feeling. I propped a chair under the door handle to jam it shut before falling asleep.
The next morning when I came down for an early breakfast the dining room was packed and people started snickering as soon as they saw me, holding their hands up to cover their mouths. I sat down at the counter and ordered breakfast. I ate quickly, paid for the night and breakfast, headed out to my car, which I’d parked directly in front of the hotel’s entrance the night before for security reasons. All four tires on the red ford had been slashed.
According to the hotel desk clerk, no one was available to help me, so I jacked the car up and rolled the first tire down the street toward a gas station a couple of blocks away. I had to walk in the street, because the white boys leaning against the store fronts would stick their feet out and try to trip me up, which seemed like great fun for them. The first gas station, white owned, wouldn't help. The next, just across the railroad tracks was black owned, but they also refused. I pleaded. The black attendant told me to wheel the tires down one more block, turn left and work my way to the back of his station, where no one could see. I did this with each of the four tires. I was the town’s entertainment for several hours, but nobody slashed them again. I got my bag from the desk clerk and headed out of town. I never stayed in a hotel or motel again in Mississippi. I stayed in the homes of black folks.
Those warm nights in the back woods of Mississippi, surrounded by gracious members of large, extended families, are still vivid. There was an incredible grace to people's relationships, an acceptance of vast differences of behavior, all included in the whole of the community. On the two occasions when white night riders drove by firing their guns at homes I was staying in, the women and children calmly took cover while the men got their shotguns and hunting rifles and waited quietly to see if that was the end of it. Then the chatter and the music would begin again. There was always music, from the rocking gospels at church on Sunday to the dances on Saturday night and the blues on lonely porches as the heat began to cool in the evenings.
Valley View was seventy miles north of Philadelphia, a small, poor, rural community outside of Canton, Mississippi. I listened to a country preacher with the cadences of rock and roll, celebrating the miracles of Jesus. Kids told me they went to work in the cotton fields at age ten and made $2.25 a day, the same as their parents. I listened to their dreams of becoming doctors, lawyers, teachers and asked if they thought they could ever go to college. They mumbled “No.” All the children wanted to leave Mississippi. One youngster said she’d like to go to “the North pole, because it’s just way away.”An older man I asked to describe Mississippi, told me to the raucous laughter of his friends, “If you don’t mind my using the word, I’d say Mississippi’s Hell.”
Harmony was twenty miles south of the church where the three civil rights workers disappeared, but it was an oasis in Negro Mississippi, about as good as it got. Civil Rights workers were happy to get an assignment to Harmony. It had been a self-sufficient African American Community for a hundred years. Five square miles of Black owned land purchased after the civil war. Harmony had the first school for ex-slaves in Mississippi.
It was a successful school until 1954, when the Supreme Court decision to integrate public schools led the State of Mississippi to take control of local schools and systematically destroy successful black schools. On average, the state of Mississippi spent four times as much educating a white child as a black child. "Colored" schools, as they called them, glorified the "Southern way of life," ignored Black contributions and distorted history and science to justify segregation. At least one county board of education mandated. "Neither foreign languages nor civics shall be taught in Negro schools. Nor shall American history from 1860 to 1875 be taught."
Harmony resisted and an interlocked white ruling elite that included lawyers, judges, bankers and newspaper editors, made them pay for it. As one Harmony mother told me, “We been on the freezing out side ever since.” The mothers who were waging a legal battle to regain control of their schools had lost almost everything, land to unwarranted bank foreclosures and even firings from low paying jobs plucking chicken feathers.
When I arrived, the people of Harmony were building a community center after being denied access to their old, now closed school across the street. John Polcheck a Harvard graduate student, was drawn to Mississippi, like many other volunteers he said, “by conscience,” Polcheck taught in a Freedom school in Harmony.
Staunton Lynd, who helped plan the Freedom Schools, hoped to open twenty for 11th and 12th graders, the generation he saw as tomorrow’s movement leaders. Despite intense hostility from the authorities, forty Freedom Schools were opened that summer, teaching the U.S. Constitution and a less white-centric history of Mississippi.
I produced 12 ½-hour radio documentaries on Freedom Summer. Listening to them in the Twenty-first Century I am struck by the length of some of the sound bites, as much as four uninterrupted minutes. For me, the cadence of the voices reveals the deep thoughts and feelings behind them. I intrude as little as possible. Taken together, they offer a much more comprehensive look at Freedom Summer than I can offer in these posts.
Seeking the Hard Places
Nobody had any illusions about transforming Mississippi in a single summer. The idea was to empower a new generation of African Americans to shape their own lives in Mississippi. James Foreman, the executive director of SNNC, speaking at a rally in Indianola, Sunflower County, on a hot afternoon in an opened windowed room to a group of young people, spoke directly to the sheriff and his deputies, standing in the back of the room to intimidate the students, telling them that there was “a new Negro.” “Don’t bother to lock us up, don’t bother to beat us, cause we’re going to keep coming down to the court house to register to vote.”
It was explicitly a movement of young people. Foreman went on, “There ain’t too much we can do with them Uncle Toms. And there ain’t much we can do with those Aunt Nellies, now listen to me now, there ain’t nothing much we can do with those Aunt Nellies who are scared to get up off their rocking chair. You go up and try to talk to them and they say, hey no, you get away from here with all that mess. But there is something you and Mike Law and myself, (although I’m getting on up in there in age, I got my walking stick), can do. And one thing it seems to me that every child is this room has got to say tonight, is that he’s not going to run away from Sunflower County and go up to Chicago and live in no slum. He’s not going to run away up to Harlem in New York, but he’s going to stay here in Indianola and fight for his freedom.”
The new Negro, Foreman told the students, was proud to be a Negro, he didn’t see anything wrong with being a Negro. Foreman retold the old, whispered joke in both the South and the North, “If you’re white, you’re all right. If you’re brown, you can hang around, but if you’re black, stay back! We are here to tell the state of Mississippi that the New Negro is not afraid of being black and he ain’t gonna get back, but he’s gonna get up front.”
Freedom Summer would also put white young people at risk, drawing media attention to the situations African Americans faced all their lives. John Polcheck, from Harvard, had been beaten once when I met him mid-summer. He’d developed blisters from his construction work and gone to a clinic outside Harmony for treatment. Using standard precautions, he took along another volunteer, a white minister from Wisconsin. The two men entered the whites-only waiting room. The clinic had 14 beds for whites, three for Negroes and two for Choctaw Indians.
Polcheck and the minister were as low key as possible. The doctor in charge of the clinic came out and asked where they were from. As they answered truthfully, several men gathered behind them. Without warning, the doctor struck the minister in the face with his fist, throwing him back into the arms of a large burly man who held the minister while the doctor continued his beating. Polcheck tried to intervene and was beaten himself. The minister lost consciousness. The beatings stopped. The doctor told Polcheck to get out. Polcheck dragged the minister to the car and got out his keys. One of the men grabbed them. He said he’d called the sheriff. A deputy arrived in a pickup truck, hand cuffed the two men together and loaded them into the pickup. Pointing a finger at one or the other he told them, “That’s the one I want to kill.”
Polcheck and the minister were released the next morning unharmed. Both stayed through the summer.
In situations of random danger, time slows down and every moment stretches out with a heightened sense of awareness. Emotions run close to the surface, friendships developed for survival run deep, the stakes of every endeavor assume earth shaking proportions. Add to this the righteousness of their cause, which seemed undeniable. Life during Freedom Summer was all consuming.
Morris Rubin, a schoolteacher from New York City, had been assigned to Shaw, in the Delta West of Greenwood, “I didn’t know there were still places like Shaw in the United States. There’s an unpaved street with an open sewer, chickens running across the road, unpainted houses, one with a model A Ford parked outside.” Shaw looked like photographs taken during the Thirties. The state had given Shaw a brand-new school, but one without test tubes or burners for the laboratories, tools for the workshops, drinking fountains, student lockers, or text books for foreign languages.
Hartman Turnbow from Holmes County expressed SNCC’s inspiration and its courage: "Power seek tha weak places, water seek tha low places, but SNCC done seek the hard places, seem like t' me.”
Right to Vote
The main business of Freedom Summer was registering voters. African Americans had not taken part in the political processes of Mississippi since the breakdown of reconstruction in 1877. Although African Americans were 42% of Mississippi’s population in 1964, and the majority population in the southeastern part of the state, they got an average of 6 years of education in inferior schools compared with 11 years for whites in better schools. They had a 50% chance of being unemployed, and they were restricted to the most menial jobs ... short term, seasonal, marginal, and unreliable. The average income of an adult African American was $600 a year compared to $2,000 a year for whites. In rural areas, 75% of African American homes had no running water and 90% had no flush toilets in 1964.
Without access to the political process, these injustices could never be addressed. I asked Claude Sutton, a farmer, why whites didn’t want African Americans to vote. “Well I would say it kind of like this. He know that if he had the same chance to vote as you has, he know you could vote for someone who would give you more justice than the other man give you now.” Would it hurt the white man? “Of course, cause he couldn’t treat us like he does.”
Freedom Summer’s voter registration drive was headed by Donna Moses, working with 400 staff and volunteers. Out of 425,00 possible African American voters, Mississippi state officials said about 20,000 were registered. Moses said they never found any of them. SNCC had been trying to register Mississippi voters since 1960. Out of 69,000 attempts, only 4,700 had been registered.
There were hundreds of stories. Five women who had attempted to register in Indianapolis, told me they were asked to fill out forms and then to wait at home. During the next two weeks, they all lost their jobs in white homes and businesses, had their homes shot into and were harassed on the streets. Hartman Turnbow’s home was attacked with Molotov cocktails and men shooting with hunting rifles. Fanny Lou Hammer from Rulesville lost a job of 18 years and was severely beaten in a jail cell.
Unable to take part in regular Democratic Party activities, Freedom Summer leaders decided to form their own Freedom Democratic Party. Voter registration success varied. Where SNCC had been working for several years, people signed up immediately. Elsewhere they were reluctant to register. But local young people supported the volunteers and applied heavy pressure on their parents. One of the local kids told me, “I think the older people, they don’t take leadership in this, but they're for us.” In the end, about 80,000 Mississippi African American signed up for the FDP.
It was a remarkable accomplishment for 400 young people, culminating in a statewide convention where the overwhelming sense of hope was intoxicating. FDP delegates believed they had a real chance to replace the regular Mississippi delegation at the upcoming Democratic Convention in Atlantic City. After all, they had used the nation’s own democratic procedures to create a party that represented the population of Mississippi far more accurately than the official party which was 100% white. President Johnson, seeking election to a presidency that Kennedy’s death had handed to him, had other plans. He wanted a convention without challenge or controversy.
In Atlantic City on August 22nd, The Democratic Party’s Credential Committee listened to Fanny Lou Hammer describe her horrendous beating for trying to register to vote. Her comments went out live to the entire country. Johnson, listening in the White House, was appalled by the impact of her words, and he called an immediate press conference. The networks cut away from Fanny Lou Hammer’s troubling testimony to cover the president.
The president wouldn’t listen, but the protests continued. Johnson offered a compromised. Two delegates from the FDP of his choosing would be allowed to vote at the convention. He enlisted the support of his liberal allies former presidential candidate Hubert Humphry, labor leader Walter Reuther, African American older statesman Roy Wilkins and even the FDP’s own lawyer, Joe Rauh who advised the FDP to accept the compromise.
It was a decisive moment in the liberal/radical coalition that is largely ignored by the history books. Liberals, troubled by the endless demonstrations of the early Sixties, told civil rights leaders to give them up in favor of lawful actions, such as voter registration. The federal government and liberal wing of the Democratic Party would help them. SNNC and COFO did that brilliantly during Freedom Summer, much to surprise of everyone.
They had won playing by the rules. They should be seated as the Mississippi delegation. The liberal establishment didn’t care. They took the victory away. Young people fighting for social change felt abandoned. John Lewis later called it “the turning point of the civil rights movement.” Lewis explained, “For the first time, we had made our way to the very center of the system. We had played by the rules, done everything we were supposed to do, had played the game exactly as required, had arrived at the doorstep and found the door slammed in our face.”
Do Not Fold, Staple, or Mutilate
Everyone who spent time in Mississippi in the summer of 1964 shared a certain feeling of guilt when the summer was over, and they returned to safety. In Mississippi they had witnessed and participated in a huge leap forward by an abused but proud people. Some had paid a heavy price. Schwerner, Goodman and Chaney were found dead in early August. Three other civil rights workers were killed that summer, 80 people were badly beaten, 35 were shot at or injured, 35 churches were burnt down, and 30 homes and buildings were bombed. At least a thousand Civil Rights workers were arrested.
What stayed with those who took part was not primarily about registering to vote or integrating educational institutions, but about empowering African Americans to control their own destiny. Registering to vote, integrating educational institutions, going to Freedom Schools were all means to an end: personal and community empowerment. Freedom Summer was about urging young Negroes to stay in their local communities and shape their own future.
As the summer volunteers returned to their colleges and universities, that goal began to raise inevitable questions. If they were fighting for the rights of Mississippi African Americans to determine their own future, maybe they should be struggling for the right to determine their own destiny.
Tools used by organizers in the South, quickly spread to college campuses across the country. What young people had in mind was a transformation of American society. James Foreman was clear that the “New Negro,” ready to shape his own destiny, would be joined by “new whites” ready to shape theirs. As the decade continued, women, Native Americans, Hispanics, all those at the margins of American society began to insist on their own empowerment.
Among the veterans of Freedom Summer in 1964 were Jack Weinberg and Mario Savio, University of California Berkeley students. On October 1st Jack Weinberg was sitting at a CORE table raising money for the Civil Rights Movement. When he refused to show his identification to campus police, they arrested him and shoved him the back of patrol care. Before it could leave, the patrol car was surrounded by students. It was stuck there for 32 hours, as the students used the car’s roof to make speeches. One of those speakers was a philosophy student named Mario Savio who encouraged people to stay until three demands were met: release Weinberg, reinstate eight suspended students and meet to discuss free speech issues.
Charges against Weinberg were dropped, but the university refused to budge on its policy that only official Republican and Democratic student organizations could engage in political activity on campus. Protests continued and on December 2, on the steps of Sprout Hall, Mario Savio told a crowd, “We have an autocracy which runs this university. It's managed. ,,, Now, I ask you to consider: if this is a firm, and if the Board of Regents are the board of directors, and if President Kerr in fact is the manager, then I'll tell you something: the faculty are a bunch of employees, and we're the raw material! But we're a bunch of raw material[s] that don't mean to have any process upon us, don't mean to be made into any product, don't mean to end up being bought by some clients of the University, be they the government, be they industry, be they organized labor, be they anyone! We're human beings!”
After wild applause, Savio went on, “There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part; you can't even passively take part, and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!”
Fifteen hundred students rushed into Sproul Hall and took it over. Employees were dismissed and the doors were locked. In all, four thousand students staged a sit in at Sproul Hall, hoping to re-open negotiations on campus free speech. Students studied, watched movies, and sang folk songs led by Joan Baez. Teaching Assistants taught "Freedom classes,” like the freedom schools in Mississippi.
They were still there the next day. At midnight, Alameda County deputy district attorney Edwin Meese III telephoned Governor Edmund Brown, Sr, asking for authority to proceed with a mass arrest. They began at 3:30 am. Eight hundred students were dragged away, to the spend the night in the Santa Rita Jail about 25 miles away. Later that month, the university brought charges against them, which in turn led to larger student protests. Even conservative fraternities and sororities got involved.
"At the beginning, we didn’t realize the strength of the forces we were up against. We have learned that we must fight not only [the] Dean, Chancellor and President Kerr, but also the Board of Regents with their billions of dollars and Governor Brown with his army of cops. But neither did they realize the forces they were up against. At the beginning, they thought they had only to fight a hundred or so 'beatniks,' 'Maoists,' and 'Fidelistas.' But they put eight hundred of the 'hard core' in jail and found they still had to face thousands of other students and faculty members.”
"The source of their power is clear enough: the guns and clubs of the Highway Patrol, the banks and corporations of the Regents. But what is the source of our power? It is something we see everywhere on campus but find hard to define. Perhaps it was best expressed by the sign one boy pinned to his chest: 'I am a UC student. Please don't bend, fold, spindle, or mutilate me.' The source of our strength is, very simply, the fact that we are human beings and so cannot forever be treated as raw materials--to be processed."
The University eventually backed down, appointing a new acting chancellor who made the steps of Sproul Hall an open discussion area for students of all political persuasions.
Under Elsa’s guidance, KPFA became the one place to turn to find detailed information about Berkeley’s Free Speech Movement. Her broadcasts were followed eagerly by WBAI’s listeners in New York, and we watched as the fever of Berkeley’s Free Speech Movement spread to Columbia University in New York City and to other colleges across America.