Harold Titus's Blog - Posts Tagged "e-h-hurst"
Civil Rights Events -- Mississippi 1961 -- McComb Project Fails
Here is a useful map of Mississippi. https://socketize.com/7124/no7141/
Who was Bob Moses?
With an M.A. in philosophy from Harvard and a job teaching mathematics at the prestigious Horace Mann School in Riverdale, New York, I was a part of what W. E. B. DuBois termed "the talented tenth"--a black man who could succeed in the white world playing by white rules. I had had an elitist education since I was eleven, passing a citywide competitive exam to attend Stuyvesant High School in downtown Manhattan. President of my senior class, I received an academic scholarship to Hamilton, where I was one of three black students at the college.
It was at Hamilton, thanks to my French professor, that I discovered Camus. I read The Rebel and The Plague and began asking hard political questions: "Can revolution be humane?" "Can the `victim' overthrow the `executioner' without assuming his office?" For a time I believed that the only change worth working for was a change of heart, and so I joined a group of campus Pentecostals who traveled on weekends to Times Square to testify to the coming of the Kingdom. I considered becoming a preacher like my grandfather, but my father had his doubts. "That's not just any job," he said. "You've got to be called." …
In the fall of 1956 I began graduate work in philosophy at Harvard. … Before long, however, I tired of thinking about thinking and the meaning of meaning. In that remote realm of tautologies, indexes, and surds, I was in danger of forgetting that the meaning of life was no abstract speculation but my immediate and concrete concern. …
Then in the spring of 1958 my forty-three-year-old mother died of cancer; my father was so distraught he had to be hospitalized at Bellevue for several months. I dropped out of Harvard, accepted a job teaching math at Horace Mann High School, and moved back to Harlem to look after him. My father and I had always been close; we used to have long talks about what America denied and offered. Like many of his generation, he had been hamstrung by the depression. Intelligent, articulate, and handsome, he sacrificed his talents for the sake of his family, accepting a low-paying job as a security guard at Harlem's 369th Division Armory. He and my mother scrimped and saved to ensure that my brothers and I would get ahead. The stress and strain took their toll: my mother once suffered a minor breakdown, and my father would sometimes slip into fantasies that his name was not Gregory Moses but Gary Cooper--a man brave enough, in spite of his cowardly town, to stand up for what was right.
My only civil rights activity at that time was to participate in the Youth March for Integrated Schools that Bayard Rustin sponsored in Washington. Then, one day in February 1960, I saw a picture in the New York Times of the sit-ins that had just begun in Greensboro, North Carolina: a row of neatly dressed black students sat at a Woolworth's lunch counter, while a crowd of white toughs in duck-tails and sleeveless T-shirts waved a Confederate flag and shouted at their backs. Some of the students tried to read books, others stared calmly at the camera. I was struck to the core by the determination on their faces. They weren't cowed, and they weren't apathetic--they meant to finish what they had begun. Here was something that could be done. I simply had to get involved.
Over spring break, I visited my father's brother, a teacher at Hampton Institute in Virginia. One day I saw some students picketing stores in Newport News. I slipped into the line of march and suddenly felt a great release. All my life I had repressed my resentments and played it cool. Now the sense of affirmation and the surge of energy that came from this mere gesture at protesting were exhilarating. I had had a taste of action and wanted more. That evening I went to a mass meeting where Reverend Wyatt Tee Walker of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference spoke. He talked about the need to collect money to defend the Reverend Martin Luther King from legal harassment, mentioning that Bayard Rustin was directing a fund drive in New York.
When I got back to Harlem, I volunteered my services to the Committee to Defend Martin Luther King, and so every day after school, I devoted time to organizing a Harry Belafonte fundraising rally at the armory where my father worked. But I didn't feel right licking envelopes while others were putting their lives on the line. I confided my discontent to Bayard Rustin, whose advice I respected.
"Go down to Atlanta, Bob," he told me. "I'll write to Ella Baker to tell her you're coming. She and Martin will find something for you to do."
As soon as my teaching duties were over for the summer, I packed my bags and took a bus headed south (Heath 1-3).
“The sits-in woke me up,” recalled Harlem, New York-native Robert “Bob” Moses, discussing how his involvement with southern struggle began. When he first arrived in Mississippi in the summer of 1960, there was no student movement in the state. Moses was sent by Ella Baker to find students from the Deep South to participate in a SNCC conference that October in Atlanta. SNCC’s voter registration efforts began when Bob Moses met Cleveland, Mississippi NAACP president Amzie Moore, one of the people Miss Baker had put him in contact with. Moore decided to attend the October conference and placed the idea of voter registration on SNCC’s table.
Moses learned of the denial of Black voting rights from his discussions with Amzie Moore. “I was taught about the denial of the right to vote behind the Iron Curtain in Europe; I never knew that there was denial of the right to vote behind a Cotton Curtain here in the United States.” Moore also told Moses that he wanted to use the energy of the student activists in SNCC for voter registration. The young math teacher promised to come back the following summer after his classes at the Horace Mann school were out.
When Moses returned in 1961, Moore told him he was not quite ready to begin organizing in the Delta and sent him to his NAACP colleague, C.C. Bryant, in McComb. There, with other local community leaders, Bob Moses began SNCC’s first voter registration organizing effort.
What SNCC workers learned while working in that small Southwest Mississippi city, and the surrounding rural counties, forever shaped SNCC’s organizing style. Moses nurtured the development of local grassroots leaders, and he recognized the untapped potential power and unheard voice of locals who spoke up at meetings and participated in voter registration efforts. ‘‘Leadership is there in the people,’’ he said. ‘‘You don’t have to worry about where your leaders are, how are we going to get some leaders…If you go out and work with your people, then the leadership will emerge” (Bob Moses 1-2).
Herbert Lee
A Wisconsin Republican, John Doar had been asked to stay on in the Kennedy Justice Department partly because he had pioneered a go-out-and-poke-around-for-yourself approach to civil rights lawsuits, which made him unusual among Washington desk-bound lawyers. With Moses, Doar visited Negro farmers who were afraid to come to registration meetings because of the intangible reality of rural life—ominous messages maids and sharecroppers were hearing—and several were particularly worried about signs of anger on the part of E. H. Hurst, a state representative of local influence, against Herbert Lee, an NAACP farmer who attended Moses’ registration meetings. Doar promised to drive out to Lee’s farm on his next trip, but he found waiting at his office the next day a message from Moses that Hurst had just shot Lee to death in full public view outside the Liberty cotton gin (Branch 50-51).
Herbert Lee had played a key role in supporting the Amite County voter registration movement. He helped found the Amite branch of the NAACP along with E.W. Steptoe in 1953, and he was an active member even after law enforcement began cracking down on the organization in 1954. As a prosperous independent dairy farmer, Lee could sell his goods across state lines where he would get a better price and protect himself from the economic pressures from local whites for his civil rights work. When SNCC came to Amite to help Steptoe register blacks to vote, Lee offered to ferry activists around the county as they canvassed the area to recruit registration applicants. Because of his economic independence, Lee had the freedom to openly fight the area’s oppressive racial policies, but this would draw the ire of his white neighbors (Ramsey-Smith 68).
Herbert Lee was the first local person to be killed because of his involvement with SNCC. On September 25, 1961, Lee drove to the cotton gin in Liberty, Mississippi. State legislator E.H. Hurst approached Lee with a gun in his hand saying he wanted to talk. “I won’t talk to you unless you put the gun down,” Lee said. Hurst ran towards Lee’s truck and shot him.
The murder took place in broad daylight in front of a dozen people. “Lee’s body lay on the ground that morning for two hours, uncovered, until they finally got a funeral home in McComb to take it in,” Bob Moses remembered. Hurst claimed that Lee had attacked him with a tire iron, and the sheriff coerced the Black witnesses into corroborating his story. Hurst was acquitted by an all-white coroner’s jury that same afternoon.
Lee and Hurst lived on adjoining farms and played together as boys. Through adulthood they maintained a cordial relationship. At one point, Hurst had helped Lee apply for a loan for his farm. Hurst’s affections towards Lee changed when he started attending voter registration classes and driving Bob Moses around the county. His association with SNCC made him a target.
The murder was devastating to SNCC. At Lee’s funeral, his wife approached Moses and said, “You killed my husband! You killed my husband!” “I had no answer,” he remembered, “It is one thing to get beaten, quite another to be responsible, even indirectly, for a death.”
Lee’s death forced SNCC to confront its inability to protect local people from white retaliatory violence. Before Lee was killed, the Department of Justice sent Assistant Attorney General John Doar to Amite County. E.W. Steptoe and Bob Moses spoke with Doar and told him that Hurst had threatened Lee because of his involvement with the Movement. The Department of Justice refused to offer Lee any protection.
After Lee’s death, Doar asked the FBI to open a federal investigation. The local FBI rejected his request three times before they finally looked into Lee’s death. Meanwhile, SNCC tried to find a witness who could testify in a federal case. A man named Louis Allen recanted and offered to testify against E.H. Hurst. But word got out about Allen’s offer. For three years, Allen faced harassment and economic reprisals for his willingness to testify and on April 7, 1964, the night before he planned to leave Mississippi, he was killed outside his home (Herbert 1-2).
Interviewed several years later by Eyes on the Prize, Moses said: … the Citizens Councils and the Klans in Mississippi, they were in back of the action which resulted in those kind of murders. Because what we knew was that there were meetings in Liberty drawing cars and license plates from all across the southern part of Mississippi, and on up into the middle part of Mississippi. People coming and sitting down talking, what are they going to do about this voter registration drive. Now, we don't know what they planned, but we do know that after the meetings there's violence began to break out, direct attacks on us as the voter registration workers and then these murders. First Herbert Lee and then a couple years later Lewis Allan, both killed right there in Liberty, Mississippi (Interview 2).
One girl in particular was affected by Moses’ condition, as he wrote, “At the mass meeting, a young girl kept staring at me… I think the sight of my battered and bandaged head registered some great outrage in Brenda [Travis].” The next day, August 30th, high school student Brenda Travis, along with recent graduates Bobbie Talbert and Ike Lewis, organized a sit-in at the white section of the Greyhound bus terminal in McComb. Just as in the sit-in at the Woolworth lunch counter, police quickly arrested the young activists and sent them to jail for roughly one month (Ramsey-Smith 67).
On October 2, the NAACP and the SCLC paid for the bond of the five young activists, including the high school students Brenda Travis and Isaac Lewis. While Watkins, Hayes, and the others could risk their safety by continuing their civil rights work, Travis and Lewis wanted to further organize their classmates to build a larger nonviolent student movement. This presented a difficult problem for the black Burglund High School, where school administrators had little appetite for the chaos that would be brought on by open civil rights work. The murder of Herbert Lee made the issue especially sensitive, as students would no doubt use him as a symbol to continue rebelling. Commodore Dewey Higgins, principal of the high school, expelled the two students in hopes that the rest of the student body would be too afraid to continue organizing with SNCC (Ramsey-Smith 70).
… more than 100 Black high-school students led by Hollis Watkins and Curtis Hayes ditch school and march in McComb to protest Lee's killing and the expulsion of Brenda Travis. When they kneel in prayer at City Hall, they are arrested, as are the SNCC staff who are with them. Bob Moses, Chuck McDew, and Bob Zellner (SNCC's first white field secretary) are beaten. The SNCC workers are charged with "Contributing to the delinquency of minors," a serious felony.
More than 100 students boycott the segregated Burgland High School rather than sign a mandatory pledge that they will not participate in civil rights activity. SNCC sets up "Nonviolent High" for the boycotting students with Moses teaching math, Dion Diamond teaching science, and Chuck McDew teaching history. Nonviolent High is one of the seeds from which grow the "Freedom Schools" that spread across the state three years later in the summer of '64.
Late in October, an all-white jury convicts the SNCC members on the "Contributing" charge. Their attorneys appeal, but bail is set at $14,000 each (equal to $107,000 in 2012 dollars). Unable to raise such a huge amount, they languish in prison. With their SNCC teachers in jail, Nonviolent High cannot continue, and the boycotting students are accepted by Campbell Junior College in Jackson.
Meanwhile, arrests, beatings, and shootings continue. CORE Freedom Riders are brutally attacked by a white mob when they try to integrate the McComb Greyhound station. Paul Potter and Tom Hayden of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) are dragged from their car and beaten in the street when they come to McComb to support the Movement. Shotgun blasts from a Klan nightrider almost kill Dion Diamond and John Hardy.
Despite their repeated promises of protection for voter registration, Kennedy, the Justice Department, and the FBI do nothing. The DOJ's legal efforts are feeble and ineffective. The arrests, the reign of terror, and the brazen murder of Herbert Lee by a state official, all take their toll. The McComb-area voter registration drive is suppressed — for the moment.
Finally, in December, SNCC manages to raise the bail money and the jailed SNCC staff are released on appeal.
In a narrow sense, McComb is a defeat for SNCC — the project is suppressed and driven out by arrests, brutality, and murder. But in a broader sense it is an important milestone; the crucial lessons learned in McComb form the foundation for years of organizing to come, not just in Mississippi but in hard places across the South — places like Selma Alabama and Southwest Georgia. In McComb they discover that courage is contagious and that local people — particularly young people — will respond to outside organizers. They discover that as student activists they have much to teach, but also much to learn from the community, and that if they respect the community the community will in turn protect, feed, and nurture them. And from the community will come new leaders and new organizers to expand and sustain the struggle.
Bob Moses wrote: One of the things that we learned out here [in Amite County] was that we could find family in Mississippi. We could go anyplace in Mississippi before we were through, and we knew that somewhere down some road there was family. And we could show up there unannounced with no money or no anything and there were people there ready to take care of us. That's what we had here in Amite. One of the things that happened in the movement was that there was a joining of a young generation of people with an older generation that nurtured and sustained them. ... It was an amazing experience (McComb 4-7).
Veteran activist Tom Hayden says a key to Moses's success as an organizer was his hunger to learn from local people. "Bob listened," Hayden wrote in The Nation. "When people asked him what to do, he asked them what they thought. At mass meetings, he usually sat in the back. In group discussions, he mostly spoke last. He slept on floors, wore sharecroppers' overalls, shared the risks, took the blows, went to jail, dug in deeply" (Speech 1).
Works cited:
“Bob Moses.” SNCC Digital Gateway, SNCC Legacy Project and Duke University. Web. https://snccdigital.org/people/bob-mo...
Branch, Taylor. Parting the Waters. Digital Education Systems. Web. https://library.duke.edu/digitalcolle...
Heath, William. “The Children Bob Moses Led.” The Washington Post. Web. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/...
“Herbert Lee Murdered.” SNCC Digital Gateway, SNCC Legacy Project and Duke University. Web. https://snccdigital.org/events/herber...
“Interview with Bob Moses.” Eyes on the Prize: America's Civil Rights Years (1954-1965). Washington University Libraries. May 19, 1986. Web. http://digital.wustl.edu/cgi/t/text/t...
“The McComb Project.” Civil Rights Movement History 1961. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/timhis61.h...
Ramsey-Smith, Alec. “A Tremor in the Middle of the Iceberg”: The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and Local Voting Rights Activism in McComb, Mississippi, 1928-1964. Department of History, University of Michigan. Web. https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstr...
“Speech on Freedom Summer at Stanford University." Say It Loud, Say It Plain: A Century of Great African American Speeches. Web. http://americanradioworks.publicradio...
Who was Bob Moses?
With an M.A. in philosophy from Harvard and a job teaching mathematics at the prestigious Horace Mann School in Riverdale, New York, I was a part of what W. E. B. DuBois termed "the talented tenth"--a black man who could succeed in the white world playing by white rules. I had had an elitist education since I was eleven, passing a citywide competitive exam to attend Stuyvesant High School in downtown Manhattan. President of my senior class, I received an academic scholarship to Hamilton, where I was one of three black students at the college.
It was at Hamilton, thanks to my French professor, that I discovered Camus. I read The Rebel and The Plague and began asking hard political questions: "Can revolution be humane?" "Can the `victim' overthrow the `executioner' without assuming his office?" For a time I believed that the only change worth working for was a change of heart, and so I joined a group of campus Pentecostals who traveled on weekends to Times Square to testify to the coming of the Kingdom. I considered becoming a preacher like my grandfather, but my father had his doubts. "That's not just any job," he said. "You've got to be called." …
In the fall of 1956 I began graduate work in philosophy at Harvard. … Before long, however, I tired of thinking about thinking and the meaning of meaning. In that remote realm of tautologies, indexes, and surds, I was in danger of forgetting that the meaning of life was no abstract speculation but my immediate and concrete concern. …
Then in the spring of 1958 my forty-three-year-old mother died of cancer; my father was so distraught he had to be hospitalized at Bellevue for several months. I dropped out of Harvard, accepted a job teaching math at Horace Mann High School, and moved back to Harlem to look after him. My father and I had always been close; we used to have long talks about what America denied and offered. Like many of his generation, he had been hamstrung by the depression. Intelligent, articulate, and handsome, he sacrificed his talents for the sake of his family, accepting a low-paying job as a security guard at Harlem's 369th Division Armory. He and my mother scrimped and saved to ensure that my brothers and I would get ahead. The stress and strain took their toll: my mother once suffered a minor breakdown, and my father would sometimes slip into fantasies that his name was not Gregory Moses but Gary Cooper--a man brave enough, in spite of his cowardly town, to stand up for what was right.
My only civil rights activity at that time was to participate in the Youth March for Integrated Schools that Bayard Rustin sponsored in Washington. Then, one day in February 1960, I saw a picture in the New York Times of the sit-ins that had just begun in Greensboro, North Carolina: a row of neatly dressed black students sat at a Woolworth's lunch counter, while a crowd of white toughs in duck-tails and sleeveless T-shirts waved a Confederate flag and shouted at their backs. Some of the students tried to read books, others stared calmly at the camera. I was struck to the core by the determination on their faces. They weren't cowed, and they weren't apathetic--they meant to finish what they had begun. Here was something that could be done. I simply had to get involved.
Over spring break, I visited my father's brother, a teacher at Hampton Institute in Virginia. One day I saw some students picketing stores in Newport News. I slipped into the line of march and suddenly felt a great release. All my life I had repressed my resentments and played it cool. Now the sense of affirmation and the surge of energy that came from this mere gesture at protesting were exhilarating. I had had a taste of action and wanted more. That evening I went to a mass meeting where Reverend Wyatt Tee Walker of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference spoke. He talked about the need to collect money to defend the Reverend Martin Luther King from legal harassment, mentioning that Bayard Rustin was directing a fund drive in New York.
When I got back to Harlem, I volunteered my services to the Committee to Defend Martin Luther King, and so every day after school, I devoted time to organizing a Harry Belafonte fundraising rally at the armory where my father worked. But I didn't feel right licking envelopes while others were putting their lives on the line. I confided my discontent to Bayard Rustin, whose advice I respected.
"Go down to Atlanta, Bob," he told me. "I'll write to Ella Baker to tell her you're coming. She and Martin will find something for you to do."
As soon as my teaching duties were over for the summer, I packed my bags and took a bus headed south (Heath 1-3).
“The sits-in woke me up,” recalled Harlem, New York-native Robert “Bob” Moses, discussing how his involvement with southern struggle began. When he first arrived in Mississippi in the summer of 1960, there was no student movement in the state. Moses was sent by Ella Baker to find students from the Deep South to participate in a SNCC conference that October in Atlanta. SNCC’s voter registration efforts began when Bob Moses met Cleveland, Mississippi NAACP president Amzie Moore, one of the people Miss Baker had put him in contact with. Moore decided to attend the October conference and placed the idea of voter registration on SNCC’s table.
Moses learned of the denial of Black voting rights from his discussions with Amzie Moore. “I was taught about the denial of the right to vote behind the Iron Curtain in Europe; I never knew that there was denial of the right to vote behind a Cotton Curtain here in the United States.” Moore also told Moses that he wanted to use the energy of the student activists in SNCC for voter registration. The young math teacher promised to come back the following summer after his classes at the Horace Mann school were out.
When Moses returned in 1961, Moore told him he was not quite ready to begin organizing in the Delta and sent him to his NAACP colleague, C.C. Bryant, in McComb. There, with other local community leaders, Bob Moses began SNCC’s first voter registration organizing effort.
What SNCC workers learned while working in that small Southwest Mississippi city, and the surrounding rural counties, forever shaped SNCC’s organizing style. Moses nurtured the development of local grassroots leaders, and he recognized the untapped potential power and unheard voice of locals who spoke up at meetings and participated in voter registration efforts. ‘‘Leadership is there in the people,’’ he said. ‘‘You don’t have to worry about where your leaders are, how are we going to get some leaders…If you go out and work with your people, then the leadership will emerge” (Bob Moses 1-2).
Herbert Lee
A Wisconsin Republican, John Doar had been asked to stay on in the Kennedy Justice Department partly because he had pioneered a go-out-and-poke-around-for-yourself approach to civil rights lawsuits, which made him unusual among Washington desk-bound lawyers. With Moses, Doar visited Negro farmers who were afraid to come to registration meetings because of the intangible reality of rural life—ominous messages maids and sharecroppers were hearing—and several were particularly worried about signs of anger on the part of E. H. Hurst, a state representative of local influence, against Herbert Lee, an NAACP farmer who attended Moses’ registration meetings. Doar promised to drive out to Lee’s farm on his next trip, but he found waiting at his office the next day a message from Moses that Hurst had just shot Lee to death in full public view outside the Liberty cotton gin (Branch 50-51).
Herbert Lee had played a key role in supporting the Amite County voter registration movement. He helped found the Amite branch of the NAACP along with E.W. Steptoe in 1953, and he was an active member even after law enforcement began cracking down on the organization in 1954. As a prosperous independent dairy farmer, Lee could sell his goods across state lines where he would get a better price and protect himself from the economic pressures from local whites for his civil rights work. When SNCC came to Amite to help Steptoe register blacks to vote, Lee offered to ferry activists around the county as they canvassed the area to recruit registration applicants. Because of his economic independence, Lee had the freedom to openly fight the area’s oppressive racial policies, but this would draw the ire of his white neighbors (Ramsey-Smith 68).
Herbert Lee was the first local person to be killed because of his involvement with SNCC. On September 25, 1961, Lee drove to the cotton gin in Liberty, Mississippi. State legislator E.H. Hurst approached Lee with a gun in his hand saying he wanted to talk. “I won’t talk to you unless you put the gun down,” Lee said. Hurst ran towards Lee’s truck and shot him.
The murder took place in broad daylight in front of a dozen people. “Lee’s body lay on the ground that morning for two hours, uncovered, until they finally got a funeral home in McComb to take it in,” Bob Moses remembered. Hurst claimed that Lee had attacked him with a tire iron, and the sheriff coerced the Black witnesses into corroborating his story. Hurst was acquitted by an all-white coroner’s jury that same afternoon.
Lee and Hurst lived on adjoining farms and played together as boys. Through adulthood they maintained a cordial relationship. At one point, Hurst had helped Lee apply for a loan for his farm. Hurst’s affections towards Lee changed when he started attending voter registration classes and driving Bob Moses around the county. His association with SNCC made him a target.
The murder was devastating to SNCC. At Lee’s funeral, his wife approached Moses and said, “You killed my husband! You killed my husband!” “I had no answer,” he remembered, “It is one thing to get beaten, quite another to be responsible, even indirectly, for a death.”
Lee’s death forced SNCC to confront its inability to protect local people from white retaliatory violence. Before Lee was killed, the Department of Justice sent Assistant Attorney General John Doar to Amite County. E.W. Steptoe and Bob Moses spoke with Doar and told him that Hurst had threatened Lee because of his involvement with the Movement. The Department of Justice refused to offer Lee any protection.
After Lee’s death, Doar asked the FBI to open a federal investigation. The local FBI rejected his request three times before they finally looked into Lee’s death. Meanwhile, SNCC tried to find a witness who could testify in a federal case. A man named Louis Allen recanted and offered to testify against E.H. Hurst. But word got out about Allen’s offer. For three years, Allen faced harassment and economic reprisals for his willingness to testify and on April 7, 1964, the night before he planned to leave Mississippi, he was killed outside his home (Herbert 1-2).
Interviewed several years later by Eyes on the Prize, Moses said: … the Citizens Councils and the Klans in Mississippi, they were in back of the action which resulted in those kind of murders. Because what we knew was that there were meetings in Liberty drawing cars and license plates from all across the southern part of Mississippi, and on up into the middle part of Mississippi. People coming and sitting down talking, what are they going to do about this voter registration drive. Now, we don't know what they planned, but we do know that after the meetings there's violence began to break out, direct attacks on us as the voter registration workers and then these murders. First Herbert Lee and then a couple years later Lewis Allan, both killed right there in Liberty, Mississippi (Interview 2).
One girl in particular was affected by Moses’ condition, as he wrote, “At the mass meeting, a young girl kept staring at me… I think the sight of my battered and bandaged head registered some great outrage in Brenda [Travis].” The next day, August 30th, high school student Brenda Travis, along with recent graduates Bobbie Talbert and Ike Lewis, organized a sit-in at the white section of the Greyhound bus terminal in McComb. Just as in the sit-in at the Woolworth lunch counter, police quickly arrested the young activists and sent them to jail for roughly one month (Ramsey-Smith 67).
On October 2, the NAACP and the SCLC paid for the bond of the five young activists, including the high school students Brenda Travis and Isaac Lewis. While Watkins, Hayes, and the others could risk their safety by continuing their civil rights work, Travis and Lewis wanted to further organize their classmates to build a larger nonviolent student movement. This presented a difficult problem for the black Burglund High School, where school administrators had little appetite for the chaos that would be brought on by open civil rights work. The murder of Herbert Lee made the issue especially sensitive, as students would no doubt use him as a symbol to continue rebelling. Commodore Dewey Higgins, principal of the high school, expelled the two students in hopes that the rest of the student body would be too afraid to continue organizing with SNCC (Ramsey-Smith 70).
… more than 100 Black high-school students led by Hollis Watkins and Curtis Hayes ditch school and march in McComb to protest Lee's killing and the expulsion of Brenda Travis. When they kneel in prayer at City Hall, they are arrested, as are the SNCC staff who are with them. Bob Moses, Chuck McDew, and Bob Zellner (SNCC's first white field secretary) are beaten. The SNCC workers are charged with "Contributing to the delinquency of minors," a serious felony.
More than 100 students boycott the segregated Burgland High School rather than sign a mandatory pledge that they will not participate in civil rights activity. SNCC sets up "Nonviolent High" for the boycotting students with Moses teaching math, Dion Diamond teaching science, and Chuck McDew teaching history. Nonviolent High is one of the seeds from which grow the "Freedom Schools" that spread across the state three years later in the summer of '64.
Late in October, an all-white jury convicts the SNCC members on the "Contributing" charge. Their attorneys appeal, but bail is set at $14,000 each (equal to $107,000 in 2012 dollars). Unable to raise such a huge amount, they languish in prison. With their SNCC teachers in jail, Nonviolent High cannot continue, and the boycotting students are accepted by Campbell Junior College in Jackson.
Meanwhile, arrests, beatings, and shootings continue. CORE Freedom Riders are brutally attacked by a white mob when they try to integrate the McComb Greyhound station. Paul Potter and Tom Hayden of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) are dragged from their car and beaten in the street when they come to McComb to support the Movement. Shotgun blasts from a Klan nightrider almost kill Dion Diamond and John Hardy.
Despite their repeated promises of protection for voter registration, Kennedy, the Justice Department, and the FBI do nothing. The DOJ's legal efforts are feeble and ineffective. The arrests, the reign of terror, and the brazen murder of Herbert Lee by a state official, all take their toll. The McComb-area voter registration drive is suppressed — for the moment.
Finally, in December, SNCC manages to raise the bail money and the jailed SNCC staff are released on appeal.
In a narrow sense, McComb is a defeat for SNCC — the project is suppressed and driven out by arrests, brutality, and murder. But in a broader sense it is an important milestone; the crucial lessons learned in McComb form the foundation for years of organizing to come, not just in Mississippi but in hard places across the South — places like Selma Alabama and Southwest Georgia. In McComb they discover that courage is contagious and that local people — particularly young people — will respond to outside organizers. They discover that as student activists they have much to teach, but also much to learn from the community, and that if they respect the community the community will in turn protect, feed, and nurture them. And from the community will come new leaders and new organizers to expand and sustain the struggle.
Bob Moses wrote: One of the things that we learned out here [in Amite County] was that we could find family in Mississippi. We could go anyplace in Mississippi before we were through, and we knew that somewhere down some road there was family. And we could show up there unannounced with no money or no anything and there were people there ready to take care of us. That's what we had here in Amite. One of the things that happened in the movement was that there was a joining of a young generation of people with an older generation that nurtured and sustained them. ... It was an amazing experience (McComb 4-7).
Veteran activist Tom Hayden says a key to Moses's success as an organizer was his hunger to learn from local people. "Bob listened," Hayden wrote in The Nation. "When people asked him what to do, he asked them what they thought. At mass meetings, he usually sat in the back. In group discussions, he mostly spoke last. He slept on floors, wore sharecroppers' overalls, shared the risks, took the blows, went to jail, dug in deeply" (Speech 1).
Works cited:
“Bob Moses.” SNCC Digital Gateway, SNCC Legacy Project and Duke University. Web. https://snccdigital.org/people/bob-mo...
Branch, Taylor. Parting the Waters. Digital Education Systems. Web. https://library.duke.edu/digitalcolle...
Heath, William. “The Children Bob Moses Led.” The Washington Post. Web. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/...
“Herbert Lee Murdered.” SNCC Digital Gateway, SNCC Legacy Project and Duke University. Web. https://snccdigital.org/events/herber...
“Interview with Bob Moses.” Eyes on the Prize: America's Civil Rights Years (1954-1965). Washington University Libraries. May 19, 1986. Web. http://digital.wustl.edu/cgi/t/text/t...
“The McComb Project.” Civil Rights Movement History 1961. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/timhis61.h...
Ramsey-Smith, Alec. “A Tremor in the Middle of the Iceberg”: The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and Local Voting Rights Activism in McComb, Mississippi, 1928-1964. Department of History, University of Michigan. Web. https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstr...
“Speech on Freedom Summer at Stanford University." Say It Loud, Say It Plain: A Century of Great African American Speeches. Web. http://americanradioworks.publicradio...
Civil Rights Events -- Mississippi -- Freedom Summer -- White Volunteers
Don't call me the brave one for going
No, don't pin a medal to my name
For even if there was any choice to make
I'd be going down just the same
—Phil Ochs, “Going Down to Mississippi” (Allen 1)
For nearly a century, segregation had prevented most African-Americans in Mississippi from voting or holding public office. Segregated housing, schools, workplaces, and public accommodations denied black Mississippians access to political or economic power. Most lived in dire poverty, indebted to white banks or plantation owners and kept in check by police and white supremacy groups such as the Ku Klux Klan. African-Americans who dared to challenge these conditions were often killed, tortured, raped, beaten, arrested, fired from their jobs, or evicted from their homes.
SNCC and CORE leaders believed that bringing well-connected white volunteers from northern colleges to Mississippi would expose these conditions. They hoped that media attention would make the federal government enforce civil rights laws that local officials ignored. They also planned to help black Mississippians organize a new political party that would be ready to compete against the mainstream Democratic Party after voting rights had been won.
More than 60,000 black Mississippi residents risked their lives to attend local meetings, choose candidates, and vote in a "Freedom Election" that ran parallel to the regular 1964 national elections. Several hundred African-American families also hosted northern volunteers in their homes.
Nearly 1,500 volunteers worked in project offices scattered across Mississippi. They were directed by 122 SNCC and CORE paid staff working alongside them or at headquarters in Jackson and Greenwood. Most volunteers were white students from northern colleges, but 254 were clergy sponsored by the National Council of Churches, 169 were attorneys recruited by the National Lawyers Guild and the Lawyers Constitutional Defense Committee, and 50 were medical professionals from the Medical Committee for Human Rights.
Administratively, the project was run by the Council of Federate Organizations (COFO), an umbrella group formed in 1962 that included not just SNCC and CORE but also the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and others. SNCC provided roughly 80 percent of the staff and funding for the project and CORE contributed nearly all of the remaining 20 percent. The Mississippi Summer Project director was Bob Moses of SNCC and the assistant director was Dave Dennis of CORE (What 1-3).
Veteran activist Tom Hayden says a key to Moses's success as an organizer was his hunger to learn from local people. "Bob listened," Hayden wrote in The Nation. "When people asked him what to do, he asked them what they thought. At mass meetings, he usually sat in the back. In group discussions, he mostly spoke last. He slept on floors, wore sharecroppers' overalls, shared the risks, took the blows, went to jail, dug in deeply" (Speech 1).
For Moses, the idealism of Freedom Summer was inseparable from the practical task of making it work. In 1962 SNCC and a group of civil rights organizations—the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC)—had joined together to form The Council of Federated Organizations (COFO).
A year later in the fall 1963 Mississippi state elections, COFO aided by Yale and Stanford students staged a symbolic “freedom vote” to show that if blacks could go to the polls without fear of reprisals, they would do so in record numbers. At unofficial polling booths set up in black communities across Mississippi, more than 80,000 blacks cast their protest votes for COFO’s candidates for governor and lieutenant governor candidates, Aaron Henry, the president of the Mississippi NAACP, and Ed King, a white chaplain at historically black Tougaloo College in Jackson.
Intrigued by out-of-state college students working as volunteers in a Mississippi election, the media gave the freedom vote campaign the kind of publicity SNCC had not received in its earlier voter registration efforts.
In the summer of 1964 Moses sought to build on the fall freedom-vote campaign. This time a presidential election, not simply statewide elections, would be at issue, but the publicity the freedom vote had won earlier was not all that led Moses to favor the Mississippi Summer Project, despite the doubts many in COFO had about the values of bringing large numbers of white college students to Mississippi.
The response of the white South to the 1963 March on Washington was a new wave of racial violence. The bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, in September 1963 was the event that got the most public attention in this period because it resulted in the deaths of four black girls who had been attending Sunday school.
Like everyone in the civil rights movement, Moses was horrified by the killings in Birmingham, but he was equally shaken by the death months later of Lewis Allen in January 1964. Allen was an eyewitness to the fatal 1961 shooting of Herbert Lee, a black farmer from Amite County who had been helping Moses with voter registration. The shooter was E. H. Hurst, a white state representative who was never indicted by a coroner’s jury after he claimed he was defending himself against Lee.
Allen offered to testify against Hurst, but when Moses asked the Justice Department to give Allen protection, Justice Department officials refused to do so, paving the way for Allen’s death. Moses believed such civil rights-inspired murders would continue to go unpunished in Mississippi if the victims were black, and he saw Freedom Summer as one antidote to that problem.
Moses was candid in 1964 about his motives for bringing white students to Mississippi at a time when so much of the country was indifferent to the killing of blacks in Mississippi. “When you come south, you bring with you the concern of the country—because the people of the country don’t identify with Negroes,” Moses told the predominantly white summer volunteers during their June training sessions at Oxford, Ohio (Mills 4-6).
For many whites in Mississippi, like Jackson Mayor Allen Thompson, the prospect of hundreds of mainly white volunteers coming to the state signaled a second “War of Northern Aggression.” And as Mayor Thompson put it, “They won’t have a chance.” So before the summer began, the number of state troopers doubled. The state legislature passed dawn-to-dusk curfews, and Ku Klux Klan numbers expanded. The legislature tried to outlaw planned Freedom Schools. Crosses were burned in 64 of the state’s 82 counties on a single night (Freedom 1).
Moses was right about the impact of so many white college students going to Mississippi. On June 21, three Mississippi Freedom Summer workers—James Chaney, a black Mississippian, and Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, both white New Yorkers—disappeared shortly after arriving in Meridian, Mississippi, from Oxford, Ohio. Their disappearance became national news (Mills 6).
Heather Tobis Booth … was among those at the University of Chicago who answered the call for volunteers.
“I had been brought up to believe we were in a society that should treat people equally,” she says. Her parents had taught that “we shouldn’t just say the words—we should work to make it happen.”
…
Looking back, alumni [of the University of Chicago] involved in Freedom Summer say it deepened their commitment to social justice and shaped their lives in lasting, if not always straightforward ways. They formed bonds with black civil rights activists and gained additional respect for the bravery of everyday people trying to claim their rights. Leaving Mississippi, “I felt we had accomplished a great deal,” says Peter Rabinowitz …
…
Once in Mississippi, volunteers like Booth and Rabinowitz were tasked with registering new voters, staffing community centers, and educating high school students in “Freedom Schools.”
These peaceful activities made volunteers targets of local law enforcement and violent attacks by the Ku Klux Klan. Arrests and fire bombings were a regular part of life for civil rights workers in Mississippi. SNCC organizers carefully screened applicants to the summer project to find those with the maturity to handle the heavy responsibility of the work.
Rabinowitz, whose father was a prominent civil rights lawyer, had been involved with the movement since junior high. He was tasked with teaching in a Freedom School, but had no idea what he would be asked to teach.
What he found was a group of high school students hungry to learn material that was not available in their segregated schools. Somewhat to his surprise, Rabinowitz’s students asked to study French.
It was a point of pride for students who had been told they would never need the language. “French was something that was taught in white schools but not in the black schools,” he explains. “This was something that had been kept from them.”
Rabinowitz taught his students elementary French and exposed them to the works of Jean-Paul Sartre. In so doing, he hoped to “convince them they were just as smart as anybody else.”
Booth spent the summer traveling through the cotton fields of rural Mississippi to register new voters. Many of the people she met lived under extreme poverty. Still, “they opened their homes and their hearts to us,” she says.
…
Throughout the summer, Northern volunteers were sheltered by the Mississippi black community. They stayed with black families, worked with black leaders of SNCC and other local organizations, and, for safety reasons, rarely ventured into white parts of town.
The culture shock could be intense. Goldsmith [another University of Chicago student] remembers a seasoned SNCC organizer taking him aside after he ate a sandwich in front of other workers and volunteers. He was told that in some impoverished parts of Mississippi, “you never eat in front of somebody else, because you don’t know if they’ve eaten today.”
From the student volunteers to the experienced SNCC organizers to the local families supporting the cause, everyone involved in Freedom Summer was united by the shared danger they faced.
The murder of three Freedom Summer volunteers—James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner—reminded everyone of the high stakes of their work.
Rabinowitz knew both Goodman and Schwerner personally. He had chosen a project in Meridian, Miss. specifically to work with them. Learning of their disappearance “didn’t give me pause, but it sure terrified me,” Rabinowitz said. …
Traveling in integrated cars posed a constant risk. Booth remembers hiding on the floor of a car to avoid being seen with black volunteers. She was briefly arrested early in her stay in Mississippi and spent several hours in jail before being released.
Yet Booth argues the dangers faced by Freedom Summer volunteers were far less severe than those faced by the new voters they registered.
“It was an act of courage and bravery and commitment to vote when they knew their lives might be threatened, their jobs might be threatened, they might be beaten,” she says.
“They weren’t going back to a safe place at the end of the summer” (Allen 2-7).
Chude Allen was 20 years old when she made the trek to Mississippi.
“I volunteered because I understood that the struggle to end segregation and racism in the South was one that was as important for White people as it was for Black people. This was my fight as well as other people’s fight,” says Allen. “I believed that racism was wrong and that segregation and the discrimination against African Americans was unjust and that unjust laws were to be challenged.”
On the first day of Freedom Summer, the student volunteers learned that Chaney, 21, Goodman, 20 and Schwerner, 24, were missing. The three had traveled to Neshoba County, Miss., to investigate the bombing of a Black church. They never returned. Organizers feared the worst. This was Mississippi after all. Missing, says Allen, meant they were dead.
“When I volunteered, I knew I might die,” says Allen, who worked in Freedom Schools in Holly Springs, Miss. “White people in the U.S. didn’t care if Black people died, but they cared if White people did and that is what happened. They would never have looked for them if it had just been James Chaney and two of his friends. No one would have cared” (Joiner 2).
The postcard looks ordinary enough. It's a message written from a 20-year-old to his parents, informing them that he'd arrived safely in Meridian, Mississippi for a summer job.
"This is a wonderful town and the weather is fine. I wish you were here," Andrew Goodman wrote to his mom and dad back in New York City. "The people in this city are wonderful and our reception was very good. All my love, Andy."
The card was postmarked June 21, 1964. That was the day Andy Goodman was murdered (Smith 1).
The ten weeks that comprised the “long hot summer” centered around several goals: to establish Freedom Schools and community centers throughout the state, to increase black voter registration, and to ultimately challenge the all-white delegation that would represent the state at the Democratic National Convention in August.
…
Freedom Summer included more than 44 projects, grouped by congressional districts across the state. These projects ranged in size and scope. For example, Hattiesburg had more than 50 volunteers and staff while some projects had as few as two workers. Most projects built upon existing movement activity and relationships with local Black leaders.
Yet other aspects of the summer project, such as the establishment of Freedom Schools marked a new element in the Mississippi Movement. In a state where funding for white schools sometimes quadrupled the amount spent on Black schools, all but three summer projects had Freedom Schools. Work-shop style courses ranged from basic reading and math, civics, African-American history to modern Africa and French.
…
Midway through the summer, the project’s emphasis shifted from voter registration towards challenging the Mississippi Democrat’s all-white delegation. Local people began attempting–without success–to attend delegate selection meetings. A Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) had been formed in April and a delegation of MFDP members was selected to challenge the so-called “regular” delegates at the national Democratic Party convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey in August.
By the end of Freedom Summer, there had been 6 known murders, 35 known shootings, 4 people critically wounded, at least 80 volunteers beaten, and more than 1,000 people arrested (Freedom 1-4).
On June 13 the first group of Freedom Summer volunteers began arriving at Western College for Women in Oxford, Ohio, for their training session. “If we can crack Mississippi, we will likely be able to crack the system in the rest of the country,” said John Lewis, today a long-serving Democratic congressman from Georgia, in 1964 chairman of SNCC.
…
The lunch counter sit-ins and Freedom Rides of the early ’60s had already made ending desegregation a dramatic issue for the nation. The aim of Freedom Summer was to build on that momentum by giving an explicitly political focus, centered on the right to vote, to the civil rights movement (Mills 2).
Works cited:
Allen, Susie. “”Remembering ‘Freedom Summer.’” The University of Chicago. Web. https://www.uchicago.edu/features/rem...
“Freedom Summer.” SNCC Digital Gateway, SNCC Legacy Project and Duke University. Web. https://snccdigital.org/events/freedo...
Joiner, Lottie L. “Mississippi Closes The Case On Freedom Summer Murders.” Daily Beast. June 21, 2016. Web. https://www.thedailybeast.com/mississ...
Mills, Nicolaus. “The 1964 Miss. Freedom Summer Protests Won Progress At a Bloody Price.” Daily Beast. June 21, 2014. Web. https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-196...
Smith, Stephen. “‘Mississippi Burning’ murders resonate 50 years later.” CBSNews. June 20, 2014. Web. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/mississi...
“"Speech on Freedom Summer at Stanford University." American RadioWorks. Web. http://americanradioworks.publicradio...
“What Was the 1964 Freedom Summer Project?” Wisconsin Historical Society. Web. https://www.wisconsinhistory.org/Reco...
No, don't pin a medal to my name
For even if there was any choice to make
I'd be going down just the same
—Phil Ochs, “Going Down to Mississippi” (Allen 1)
For nearly a century, segregation had prevented most African-Americans in Mississippi from voting or holding public office. Segregated housing, schools, workplaces, and public accommodations denied black Mississippians access to political or economic power. Most lived in dire poverty, indebted to white banks or plantation owners and kept in check by police and white supremacy groups such as the Ku Klux Klan. African-Americans who dared to challenge these conditions were often killed, tortured, raped, beaten, arrested, fired from their jobs, or evicted from their homes.
SNCC and CORE leaders believed that bringing well-connected white volunteers from northern colleges to Mississippi would expose these conditions. They hoped that media attention would make the federal government enforce civil rights laws that local officials ignored. They also planned to help black Mississippians organize a new political party that would be ready to compete against the mainstream Democratic Party after voting rights had been won.
More than 60,000 black Mississippi residents risked their lives to attend local meetings, choose candidates, and vote in a "Freedom Election" that ran parallel to the regular 1964 national elections. Several hundred African-American families also hosted northern volunteers in their homes.
Nearly 1,500 volunteers worked in project offices scattered across Mississippi. They were directed by 122 SNCC and CORE paid staff working alongside them or at headquarters in Jackson and Greenwood. Most volunteers were white students from northern colleges, but 254 were clergy sponsored by the National Council of Churches, 169 were attorneys recruited by the National Lawyers Guild and the Lawyers Constitutional Defense Committee, and 50 were medical professionals from the Medical Committee for Human Rights.
Administratively, the project was run by the Council of Federate Organizations (COFO), an umbrella group formed in 1962 that included not just SNCC and CORE but also the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and others. SNCC provided roughly 80 percent of the staff and funding for the project and CORE contributed nearly all of the remaining 20 percent. The Mississippi Summer Project director was Bob Moses of SNCC and the assistant director was Dave Dennis of CORE (What 1-3).
Veteran activist Tom Hayden says a key to Moses's success as an organizer was his hunger to learn from local people. "Bob listened," Hayden wrote in The Nation. "When people asked him what to do, he asked them what they thought. At mass meetings, he usually sat in the back. In group discussions, he mostly spoke last. He slept on floors, wore sharecroppers' overalls, shared the risks, took the blows, went to jail, dug in deeply" (Speech 1).
For Moses, the idealism of Freedom Summer was inseparable from the practical task of making it work. In 1962 SNCC and a group of civil rights organizations—the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC)—had joined together to form The Council of Federated Organizations (COFO).
A year later in the fall 1963 Mississippi state elections, COFO aided by Yale and Stanford students staged a symbolic “freedom vote” to show that if blacks could go to the polls without fear of reprisals, they would do so in record numbers. At unofficial polling booths set up in black communities across Mississippi, more than 80,000 blacks cast their protest votes for COFO’s candidates for governor and lieutenant governor candidates, Aaron Henry, the president of the Mississippi NAACP, and Ed King, a white chaplain at historically black Tougaloo College in Jackson.
Intrigued by out-of-state college students working as volunteers in a Mississippi election, the media gave the freedom vote campaign the kind of publicity SNCC had not received in its earlier voter registration efforts.
In the summer of 1964 Moses sought to build on the fall freedom-vote campaign. This time a presidential election, not simply statewide elections, would be at issue, but the publicity the freedom vote had won earlier was not all that led Moses to favor the Mississippi Summer Project, despite the doubts many in COFO had about the values of bringing large numbers of white college students to Mississippi.
The response of the white South to the 1963 March on Washington was a new wave of racial violence. The bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, in September 1963 was the event that got the most public attention in this period because it resulted in the deaths of four black girls who had been attending Sunday school.
Like everyone in the civil rights movement, Moses was horrified by the killings in Birmingham, but he was equally shaken by the death months later of Lewis Allen in January 1964. Allen was an eyewitness to the fatal 1961 shooting of Herbert Lee, a black farmer from Amite County who had been helping Moses with voter registration. The shooter was E. H. Hurst, a white state representative who was never indicted by a coroner’s jury after he claimed he was defending himself against Lee.
Allen offered to testify against Hurst, but when Moses asked the Justice Department to give Allen protection, Justice Department officials refused to do so, paving the way for Allen’s death. Moses believed such civil rights-inspired murders would continue to go unpunished in Mississippi if the victims were black, and he saw Freedom Summer as one antidote to that problem.
Moses was candid in 1964 about his motives for bringing white students to Mississippi at a time when so much of the country was indifferent to the killing of blacks in Mississippi. “When you come south, you bring with you the concern of the country—because the people of the country don’t identify with Negroes,” Moses told the predominantly white summer volunteers during their June training sessions at Oxford, Ohio (Mills 4-6).
For many whites in Mississippi, like Jackson Mayor Allen Thompson, the prospect of hundreds of mainly white volunteers coming to the state signaled a second “War of Northern Aggression.” And as Mayor Thompson put it, “They won’t have a chance.” So before the summer began, the number of state troopers doubled. The state legislature passed dawn-to-dusk curfews, and Ku Klux Klan numbers expanded. The legislature tried to outlaw planned Freedom Schools. Crosses were burned in 64 of the state’s 82 counties on a single night (Freedom 1).
Moses was right about the impact of so many white college students going to Mississippi. On June 21, three Mississippi Freedom Summer workers—James Chaney, a black Mississippian, and Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, both white New Yorkers—disappeared shortly after arriving in Meridian, Mississippi, from Oxford, Ohio. Their disappearance became national news (Mills 6).
Heather Tobis Booth … was among those at the University of Chicago who answered the call for volunteers.
“I had been brought up to believe we were in a society that should treat people equally,” she says. Her parents had taught that “we shouldn’t just say the words—we should work to make it happen.”
…
Looking back, alumni [of the University of Chicago] involved in Freedom Summer say it deepened their commitment to social justice and shaped their lives in lasting, if not always straightforward ways. They formed bonds with black civil rights activists and gained additional respect for the bravery of everyday people trying to claim their rights. Leaving Mississippi, “I felt we had accomplished a great deal,” says Peter Rabinowitz …
…
Once in Mississippi, volunteers like Booth and Rabinowitz were tasked with registering new voters, staffing community centers, and educating high school students in “Freedom Schools.”
These peaceful activities made volunteers targets of local law enforcement and violent attacks by the Ku Klux Klan. Arrests and fire bombings were a regular part of life for civil rights workers in Mississippi. SNCC organizers carefully screened applicants to the summer project to find those with the maturity to handle the heavy responsibility of the work.
Rabinowitz, whose father was a prominent civil rights lawyer, had been involved with the movement since junior high. He was tasked with teaching in a Freedom School, but had no idea what he would be asked to teach.
What he found was a group of high school students hungry to learn material that was not available in their segregated schools. Somewhat to his surprise, Rabinowitz’s students asked to study French.
It was a point of pride for students who had been told they would never need the language. “French was something that was taught in white schools but not in the black schools,” he explains. “This was something that had been kept from them.”
Rabinowitz taught his students elementary French and exposed them to the works of Jean-Paul Sartre. In so doing, he hoped to “convince them they were just as smart as anybody else.”
Booth spent the summer traveling through the cotton fields of rural Mississippi to register new voters. Many of the people she met lived under extreme poverty. Still, “they opened their homes and their hearts to us,” she says.
…
Throughout the summer, Northern volunteers were sheltered by the Mississippi black community. They stayed with black families, worked with black leaders of SNCC and other local organizations, and, for safety reasons, rarely ventured into white parts of town.
The culture shock could be intense. Goldsmith [another University of Chicago student] remembers a seasoned SNCC organizer taking him aside after he ate a sandwich in front of other workers and volunteers. He was told that in some impoverished parts of Mississippi, “you never eat in front of somebody else, because you don’t know if they’ve eaten today.”
From the student volunteers to the experienced SNCC organizers to the local families supporting the cause, everyone involved in Freedom Summer was united by the shared danger they faced.
The murder of three Freedom Summer volunteers—James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner—reminded everyone of the high stakes of their work.
Rabinowitz knew both Goodman and Schwerner personally. He had chosen a project in Meridian, Miss. specifically to work with them. Learning of their disappearance “didn’t give me pause, but it sure terrified me,” Rabinowitz said. …
Traveling in integrated cars posed a constant risk. Booth remembers hiding on the floor of a car to avoid being seen with black volunteers. She was briefly arrested early in her stay in Mississippi and spent several hours in jail before being released.
Yet Booth argues the dangers faced by Freedom Summer volunteers were far less severe than those faced by the new voters they registered.
“It was an act of courage and bravery and commitment to vote when they knew their lives might be threatened, their jobs might be threatened, they might be beaten,” she says.
“They weren’t going back to a safe place at the end of the summer” (Allen 2-7).
Chude Allen was 20 years old when she made the trek to Mississippi.
“I volunteered because I understood that the struggle to end segregation and racism in the South was one that was as important for White people as it was for Black people. This was my fight as well as other people’s fight,” says Allen. “I believed that racism was wrong and that segregation and the discrimination against African Americans was unjust and that unjust laws were to be challenged.”
On the first day of Freedom Summer, the student volunteers learned that Chaney, 21, Goodman, 20 and Schwerner, 24, were missing. The three had traveled to Neshoba County, Miss., to investigate the bombing of a Black church. They never returned. Organizers feared the worst. This was Mississippi after all. Missing, says Allen, meant they were dead.
“When I volunteered, I knew I might die,” says Allen, who worked in Freedom Schools in Holly Springs, Miss. “White people in the U.S. didn’t care if Black people died, but they cared if White people did and that is what happened. They would never have looked for them if it had just been James Chaney and two of his friends. No one would have cared” (Joiner 2).
The postcard looks ordinary enough. It's a message written from a 20-year-old to his parents, informing them that he'd arrived safely in Meridian, Mississippi for a summer job.
"This is a wonderful town and the weather is fine. I wish you were here," Andrew Goodman wrote to his mom and dad back in New York City. "The people in this city are wonderful and our reception was very good. All my love, Andy."
The card was postmarked June 21, 1964. That was the day Andy Goodman was murdered (Smith 1).
The ten weeks that comprised the “long hot summer” centered around several goals: to establish Freedom Schools and community centers throughout the state, to increase black voter registration, and to ultimately challenge the all-white delegation that would represent the state at the Democratic National Convention in August.
…
Freedom Summer included more than 44 projects, grouped by congressional districts across the state. These projects ranged in size and scope. For example, Hattiesburg had more than 50 volunteers and staff while some projects had as few as two workers. Most projects built upon existing movement activity and relationships with local Black leaders.
Yet other aspects of the summer project, such as the establishment of Freedom Schools marked a new element in the Mississippi Movement. In a state where funding for white schools sometimes quadrupled the amount spent on Black schools, all but three summer projects had Freedom Schools. Work-shop style courses ranged from basic reading and math, civics, African-American history to modern Africa and French.
…
Midway through the summer, the project’s emphasis shifted from voter registration towards challenging the Mississippi Democrat’s all-white delegation. Local people began attempting–without success–to attend delegate selection meetings. A Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) had been formed in April and a delegation of MFDP members was selected to challenge the so-called “regular” delegates at the national Democratic Party convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey in August.
By the end of Freedom Summer, there had been 6 known murders, 35 known shootings, 4 people critically wounded, at least 80 volunteers beaten, and more than 1,000 people arrested (Freedom 1-4).
On June 13 the first group of Freedom Summer volunteers began arriving at Western College for Women in Oxford, Ohio, for their training session. “If we can crack Mississippi, we will likely be able to crack the system in the rest of the country,” said John Lewis, today a long-serving Democratic congressman from Georgia, in 1964 chairman of SNCC.
…
The lunch counter sit-ins and Freedom Rides of the early ’60s had already made ending desegregation a dramatic issue for the nation. The aim of Freedom Summer was to build on that momentum by giving an explicitly political focus, centered on the right to vote, to the civil rights movement (Mills 2).
Works cited:
Allen, Susie. “”Remembering ‘Freedom Summer.’” The University of Chicago. Web. https://www.uchicago.edu/features/rem...
“Freedom Summer.” SNCC Digital Gateway, SNCC Legacy Project and Duke University. Web. https://snccdigital.org/events/freedo...
Joiner, Lottie L. “Mississippi Closes The Case On Freedom Summer Murders.” Daily Beast. June 21, 2016. Web. https://www.thedailybeast.com/mississ...
Mills, Nicolaus. “The 1964 Miss. Freedom Summer Protests Won Progress At a Bloody Price.” Daily Beast. June 21, 2014. Web. https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-196...
Smith, Stephen. “‘Mississippi Burning’ murders resonate 50 years later.” CBSNews. June 20, 2014. Web. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/mississi...
“"Speech on Freedom Summer at Stanford University." American RadioWorks. Web. http://americanradioworks.publicradio...
“What Was the 1964 Freedom Summer Project?” Wisconsin Historical Society. Web. https://www.wisconsinhistory.org/Reco...
