TWENTY
MISSISSIPPI FREEDOM SUMMER, 1964
By THE FALL OF 1963, few additional Blacks had been registered to vote in Mississippi, despite the best efforts of the COFO staff—most of them from SNCC. The Greenwood registration drives had produced little; after some initial publicity, the press had moved elsewhere. The federal government had intervened when violence seemed imminent but made no move to help get Blacks registered to vote.
SNCC’s Bob Moses had begun discussing the idea of a “Freedom Vote” campaign for the fall. Mississippi’s unregistered Blacks would be asked to cast “Freedom Votes” in a mock election that paralleled the statewide election in Mississippi that fall. For Moses and other COFO workers, the Freedom Vote was both an organizing tool and a chance to demonstrate that Blacks in Mississippi did want to vote.
Freelance social activist Allard Lowenstein suggested to Bob Moses that he be allowed to recruit white students for the fall Freedom Vote campaign; they would provide needed manpower, and their white skins could provoke interest from the news media that Black skins could not produce. Lowenstein recruited one hundred Yale and Stanford students to come to Mississippi between late October and November 4; they worked with the COFO staff to turn out Black citizens for a mock Freedom Vote in which Dr. Aaron Henry and Tougaloo chaplain Ed King were candidates for governor and lieutenant governor. Their platform was radically different from the usual Mississippi candidates—they called for school desegregation, fair employment, a $1.25 minimum wage. Over eighty thousand Blacks cast Freedom Votes while journalists flocked to interview the white students, and FBI agents appeared where none had been before.
During a SNCC staff meeting in Greenville in mid-November, the idea of more white students coming to Mississippi for a longer time was considered. While no decision was made, several noted that the white students did bring publicity and an increased federal presence. Others worried of the disruption of local leadership and potential dominating effect of white volunteers.1 By the December COFO meeting, the idea was discussed again. There were suggestions that the number of whites be limited to one hundred. In late December, the SNCC Executive Committee approved the idea and sent SNCC staff to COFO’s January 1964 meeting to lobby for approval. The COFO staff gave its approval.
Moses had argued, “These students bring the rest of the country with them. They’re from good schools and their parents are influential.”2 Later, Forman wrote, “We made a conscious attempt . . . to recruit from some of the Ivy League schools . . . to consciously recruit a counter power-elite.”3
For the Summer Project, COFO divided Mississippi along the lines of its congressional districts—CORE would work in the Fourth District; SNCC had the other three. From the very first, there were political differences SNCC had to overcome. Lowenstein had reportedly told Stanford students they would work during the summer under his direction, as had Boston recruiter Barney Frank.4 Lowenstein further wanted the summer’s work directed from New York. SNCC and COFO would not allow him to dominate. At Moses’s insistence, SNCC moved its national headquarters from Atlanta to Greenwood.
SNCC’s traditional poverty controlled its recruiting—the volunteers would have to be self-supporting, limiting the number of Blacks, few of whom could afford to spend a summer without salary working in Mississippi. It also meant that volunteers would be older than typical college students. Most recruitment was done by Friends of SNCC groups that SNCC had already established to provide funds and political support. Other civil rights groups with campus chapters—especially CORE—did recruiting too. To avoid control by Lowenstein or other outsiders, applications were sent directly to the COFO office in Jackson.
The applicants were hardly typical Americans. Average median family income in the United States in 1960 was $5,660; the Freedom Summer applicants’ family income was nearly 50 percent higher—$8,417. Median income for a Mississippi Black family was only $1,444. Thus, the poorest people in the United States would play hosts for the summer for the children of the most privileged. Applications came from 233 schools, but the highest-ranking public and private schools provided more than half of the applicant pool. Forty percent came from Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and Princeton alone; 145 others came from elite public schools—Berkeley, Michigan, Wisconsin. They were also the children of the powerful, if not the rich. The children of historian Arthur Schlesinger and Representative Donald Edwards (D-CA) were volunteers.5
Of the applicants, 10 percent were married, usually to another potential volunteer. Fewer than 2 percent were parents. Ninety percent of the applicants were white, a figure not as surprising as it may seem. Along with the requirement that volunteers be self-supporting, during the 1961–62 school year, Blacks were only 2.9 percent of all college students in America. Forty-nine percent of the applicants were female, a higher number than the percentage of women in college; in 1964, women were only 39 percent of undergraduate students in the United States.
Most of the students came from the Great Lakes, Mid-Atlantic, and Far West. Almost half—46.3 percent—came from Illinois, New York, and California. Only 11 percent were from the South; most of these were Black.
The financial requirement set their average age at twenty-three. Twenty percent had completed their undergraduate education, and seniors and juniors outnumbered freshmen and sophomores by two to one. Twenty-two percent had full-time jobs; seventy percent of those who did were teachers.
Before the project began, the volunteers described themselves as optimistic and idealistic, religiously motivated, patriotic, and as conventional leftists, generally socialists. Of those, 48 percent belonged to a civil rights group, 21 percent to a church or religious group, 14 percent to a socialist or leftist organization, 13 percent to an affiliate of the Democratic or Republican Parties, 13 percent to an academic organization, and 10 percent to a teacher’s organization. Half belonged to a CORE chapter or a Friends of SNCC organization, 90 percent had some kind of civil rights experience, and 25 percent of the volunteers knew another volunteer.
All those under twenty-one had to have parental permission. Most were interviewed on campus by a Friends of SNCC organization. Seventy were rejected—most because they were underage or applied too late; 25 percent of the applicants were no-shows. When interviewed later, 25 percent of the no-shows said their parents had convinced them not to go.6
In preparation for the summer, the city of Jackson, Mississippi, increased its police force from 390 to 450, adding two horses, six dogs, and two hundred new shotguns, stockpiling tear gas, and issuing a gas mask to every policeman. They added three canvas-topped troop carriers, two half-ton searchlight trucks, and three giant trailer trucks to haul demonstrators to two large detention compounds at the state fairgrounds. The city’s pride was “Thompson’s Tank,” named after the mayor, a thirteen-thousand-pound armored battle wagon built to the city’s specifications at one dollar a pound.
The Mississippi that summer volunteers would enter had long relied on non-mechanized cotton farming. In 1960, 68 percent of all Mississippi Blacks lived in rural areas, compared to 38 percent of Blacks nationally. Median nonwhite income was the lowest in the United States; 86 percent of all nonwhite families in Mississippi lived under the federal poverty level. In 1960, the median number of years of school finished by Mississippi Blacks over twenty-five was the sixth grade. For whites, it was the eleventh grade. Forty-two percent of whites had finished twelve years of school; only 7 percent of Blacks had gone that far. In 1964, Mississippi spent $21.77 per Black child and $81.86 per white child on education. In Holly Bluff, Mississippi, education expenditures were $191.70 for each white child and $1.26 for each Black child.7
Infant mortality rates for Blacks were twice as high as for whites. Two-thirds of all Black housing was “deteriorated” or “dilapidated.” Half of all Black housing had no piped water; two-thirds of all Black housing had no flush toilets.
In 1960, only 7 percent of Mississippi Blacks old enough to register had registered to vote. Five counties had Black population majorities and no Black voters. In Coahoma County, 95 percent of the eligible whites were registered to vote.
Through the National Council of Churches, SNCC and COFO arranged for two weeklong training sessions for the summer volunteers to be held at Oxford College for Women in Miami, Ohio, from June 14 to 20. The Justice Department’s John Doar spoke and told them not to expect federal protection: “Maintaining law and order is a state responsibility.”8 The volunteers attracted a great deal of media attention. They were white, young, attractive, heading into potential danger, and willing to spend a summer living in primitive circumstances, the exact stuff from which media interest is born. Two hundred fifty of them left Oxford College in Ohio for Mississippi on June 20 and 21.
On the 21st, Bob Moses spoke to the volunteers. “Yesterday,” he said, “three of our people left Meridian, Mississippi, to investigate a church burning in Neshoba County. They haven’t come back, and we haven’t had any word from them.”9 The three missing were Mickey Schwerner, a white CORE worker from New York; James Cheney, a Black volunteer from Meridian, Mississippi; and Andrew Goodman, a white volunteer from New York. They were already dead when Moses made his announcement.
The summer’s original 550 volunteers were supplemented over the summer by 400 to 450 more; there were never more than 600 in the state at one time. There were originally thirty-two COFO projects spread out through the state, but by the summer’s end, COFO had established forty-four projects. The safest area proved to be the Gulf Coast—a tourist area more progressive than the rest of the state, where illegal gambling and drinking had long been tolerated. The most dangerous was the Third District in Southwest Mississippi, where SNCC had begun its voter registration in Amite County four years before. Two-thirds of the summer’s bomb attacks happened in the Third District.
The volunteers were divided between voter registration work in forty-two of the forty-four projects, Freedom Schools in thirty of the projects, and community centers in twenty-three projects.
WORKERS FROM SNCC and COFO had helped to found the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP)—an alternative to the racist all-white state Democratic Party—in April 1964. In June 1964, the MFDP fielded candidates in Mississippi’s primaries for the US House and Senate elections: John Houston, John Cameron, Victoria Gray, and Fannie Lou Hamer. All four lost but decided to run as independents in the November elections. The state board of elections kept them off the ballot. They decided to run another Freedom Vote campaign like the previous fall, to dramatize the extent of voter disfranchisement in the state. Many of the summer volunteers spent their time preparing for the Freedom Vote as well as in regular registration work and in documenting the delays, obstructions, harassment, and terror that could become the evidence for lawsuits, the MFDP’s convention challenge, and a congressional challenge in the fall.
Volunteers also helped to organize the complicated steps—from precinct conventions to county conventions to district conventions to state conventions—to establish the MFDP as a bona fide party. On August 6, sixty-eight delegates, sixty-four Blacks and four whites, were elected to represent the party at the Democratic Convention in Atlantic City. In the process of the summer’s work, many of the volunteers learned organizing skills they would take with them into what would become the New Left.
Other volunteers worked in Freedom Schools. Conceived by Charlie Cobb, the schools, his proposal laid out, would “provide an educational experience for students which will make it possible for them to challenge the myths of our society, to perceive more clearly its realities, and to find alternatives, and ultimately, new directions for action.”10 In March 1964, the National Council of Churches sponsored a meeting to develop a curriculum: it consisted of remedial education, to make up for the meager education Black children had received from the public schools; leadership development, to find future leaders for Black Mississippi through study of the civil rights movement and Black history; and contemporary issues, to attempt to relate local, national, and world affairs to the children’s current condition. A nonacademic curriculum included arts and crafts, poetry, playwriting, and establishing a student newspaper. Staughton Lynd, a Spelman College history professor, was the director of the Freedom Schools program. Over thirty-five hundred students attended.
At the summer’s end, four project workers had been killed, four people critically wounded, eighty workers beaten, thirty-seven churches bombed or burned, thirty Black businesses or homes burned, and over one thousand people arrested.11 Eighty of the volunteers decided to stay after the summer was over, the majority of whom were white women.
While Freedom Summer actually registered few voters, it built community centers, widened the horizons of some Mississippi schoolchildren, and invited America into Mississippi through the eyes and experiences of the summer volunteers. It established the MFDP, which would play an important role in Mississippi politics for years to come. The MFDP’s lawsuits against the state’s continual attempts to gerrymander, block, and otherwise interfere with the right to vote established important legal principles that had a widespread effect on reapportionment and voting rights throughout the nation. SNCC wanted to do more than challenge segregation in the Deep South. At the Democratic Convention in Atlantic City, it intended to challenge the Democratic Party itself. As the Mississippi staff prepared for the Atlantic City challenge and slowed down from Freedom Summer, the SNCC staff in Selma, in Central Alabama, was heating up.