What a crazy country we live in. Young Negroes want to be middle-class white Americans. Young whites want to be Negroes.
Julius Lester
There are, to be sure, only a few thousand who actively identify with the black and white poor, who reject affluence and go to the slums rather than to the suburbs for which their training and intelligence qualify them. These have a sort of mystique, a sense of oneness with all the outcasts of society, including even the junkie and the streetwalker.
Michael Harrington
When University of Michigan student Tom Hayden met SNCC activists in 1960, he found “the models of charismatic commitment I was seeking. I wanted to live like them.” Other middle-class white college students experienced similar conversions. Constancia “Dinky” Romilly drift ed in confusion her first year at Sarah Lawrence. “There was nothing to work for, no struggle or activity you could sink your teeth into,” she remembered. Then African American college students in the South, joined by a few white students, began sitting in at dime store lunch counters, bus station cafés, and other segregated facilities. “That’s when my life began,” Romilly recalled. She packed her belongings and moved to Atlanta to work in SNCC’s headquarters. Student Sharon Jeff rey, a future cofounder of SDS, found her place at the University of Michigan organizing a civil rights conference and staffing sympathy pickets in support of the sit-ins. Bob Zellner, a student at Huntingdon College in Mobile, felt “sky high” listening to King speak and meeting sit-in activists. Though he did not remember their names, he remembered that the first SNCC people he met possessed “an aura of invincibility and a charisma I had never experienced.” Time and time again, young middle-class whites in the sixties described hearing about southern student activism or meeting southern student activists (mostly African Americans but also some whites) as encounters that changed their lives. Their feelings about the civil rights movement in the South sparked the process through which they began to see themselves as outsiders too.1
Love (what other name could describe these conversions?) is the neglected thread in the history of the origins of the New Left —middle-class whites’ love for outsiders. Sometimes this love was romantic and sexual: Hayden married Casey Cason, one of the southern student activists who affected him so strongly; Romilly married SNNC executive secretary Jim Forman. Anecdotal evidence suggests that many young activists in the movement had sex with each other. More broadly, however, love means intense feelings of affection for someone, and this emotion played an essential and yet unacknowledged role in the still contested history of the sixties.2
A great deal of white student activism grew out of the intersection of the romance of the outsider with changing political and moral beliefs in the national and transnational context of the civil rights and liberation movements. Young activists took the tradition of cultural opposition that they had inherited from the Old Left and fused it with their new ideas about authenticity. As a result, they imagined and tried to build coalitions based in shared emotions—alienation from white middle-class suburban America and love for the rebels and the margins—rather than shared class positions and political ideology. Oft en, in fact, they assumed that shared emotions meant shared interests.
Opponents of the civil rights movement and the New Left more broadly realized the importance of affection in these alliances. They called white middle-class civil rights supporters and activists Communists and beatniks, yes, but just as frequently they called them “nigger lovers.”
“The cell from which I write is perhaps seven feet high and no more than ten feet long,” Tom Hayden wrote his “SDS Friends” from the Albany City Jail in December 1961. He wanted “to help them see the facilities in which I’m trying to continue SDS administrative work this day (incidentally, my birthday)”:
The only light penetrates from a single bulb beyond the bars down the hall, and from the Negro quarters across the way. In a sense, I am glad for the semi-darkness because it blocks certain aspects of the cell I wouldn’t enjoy gazing upon in full illumination. For instance, the stained, seatless toilet and the rusted tin cup by the water spigot at the back of the cell. For instance, the wet patches of water, excretion and spittle that cover the floor where I sleep. For instance, the brown, half-inch long bugs which I can’t identify, but find more gentle than the roaches creeping upon my clothes.
“When they placed me here last night,” Hayden continued, “there were five men caged with me, all of them wearing off their inebriation. The police made it clear to them that I was’freedom riding with them niggers.’ “ Lucky for Hayden, the white men were not violent drunks. Some of the men talked to him all through the night. One old man constantly choked on the spittle that drained from his mouth and dried in his beard. “No nigger has life so bad as me,” another cellmate claimed. “We should be fightin’ for our equal rights.” The jail was never quiet. Policemen taunted a mentally ill man in another cell who seemed to think he was a train. People shouted conversations. Hayden heard “stirring singing.” 3
He was writing on “a smuggled piece of paper with a smuggled pen,” he insisted,
not just to give you a picture of conditions, but to carry on my correspondence with you regarding the SDS meeting in Ann Arbor, Michigan, December 29–31 … It is imperative for people already committed to the struggle for humanism and democracy in the common life [to] come together now to ask themselves basic organizational questions: given that SDS is office space, a little money, and a somewhat amorphous program administered by a modest staff at present, what direction do we want to give it … Our answers cannot be abstract if we want to do more than witness to the wrongs of a fallen world. Hayden did not explicitly answer his own question—that would violate the idea of democratic process at the center of the then almost two-year-old organization. The group would meet in Michigan and come up with a collective answer through long discussion. But his answer was there, in this letter and the reports he had been filing throughout the fall as the southern field secretary for Students for a Democratic Society. At the time, this loose coalition of about 575 campus activists shared a belief in the radical power of democracy. The members at the conference planned for that December were also becoming close friends. Hayden, in jail with the members of SNCC whom he had joined on a Freedom Ride from Atlanta to Albany, knew how he wanted the question answered. SDS should commit itself to the civil rights struggle. SDS should act.4
That young people their own age were risking expulsion, beatings, and jail to change the South fascinated many white students from outside the region. College students in the early sixties had grown up with the romance of the outsider, with rock and roll and rebel movies, books by Salinger and Kerouac, Life magazine reports on Beat writers and radical painters, and, most importantly, the folk music revival. They had learned to value self-expression and to link this kind of individualism as well as emotional authenticity with people on the margins, with artists, outcasts, and the poor, and especially with rural African Americans. The “southern student movement,” as the waves of nonviolent protest that started with the Greensboro sit-ins were called, shook up white students on campuses from Berkeley to the University of Texas. In the South, white and black students moved by the courage of the Greensboro Four could simply organize their own sit-ins. But outside the region, the question of how to respond was more complicated. University of California, Berkeley students took the southern strategy of nonviolent direct action to the annual hearings of the House Un-American Activities Committee that May. Earlier that year CORE activists had helped Berkeley students organize pickets of local Woolworth’s stores in support of the southern sit-ins. Using what they had learned, student activists trained volunteers in nonviolent direct action. Over two days of anti-HUAC protests at City Hall, people in coats and ties or skirts and hose formed a peaceful circle around the building, sat-in inside the rotunda, and sang “The Star-Spangled Banner” and other songs. On the second day, the police ejected peaceful demonstrators from the building and washed them down the City Hall steps with fire hoses. As news and images of the anti-HUAC demonstrations circulated, Tom Hayden remembered thinking, “Heads were being broken and … I never saw anything like it in my whole life. after all, the people on the stairs were like us.” Berkeley students proved that students outside the South could act.5
In 1960 and 1961, at institutions everywhere outside the South, college students used existing campus political clubs and religious organizations or created new groups to organize sympathy pickets and other support for the civil rights movement. Christian students inspired by SNCC created the Northern Student Movement in 1961 to send white college volunteers into poor black communities in the urban North. The National Student Association (NSA), the most powerful student organization in the country in 1960 and not yet exposed as funded and controlled at the top by the CIA, invited SNCC members to its summer 1960 conference in Minneapolis. Tim Jenkins, a black SNCC member and Yale law student, became an NSA officer. By the summer of 1962, NSA was running a summer voter registration project in North Carolina. SDS was not the only student group looking at the civil rights movement and SNCC as models for national student organizing, but it was the most important.6
Many white middle-class students, energized by their fascination with southern black student activism, turned to politics during this time. Tom Hayden traveled south to experience the movement directly and then used the credibility he gained from his contact with the student activists there to tell its story. SDS’s first president, Al Haber, brought Old Left contacts and resources into the new campus politics. Together, they and other members of SDS would use nonsouthern student interest in the civil rights movement in the South—a belief in social justice that went hand in hand with the romance of the outsider—to help forge the New Left.
From the beginning, SDS leaders displayed uncanny timing. In the fall of 1959, Haber and Sharon Jeff rey began organizing a conference on human rights in the North. Haber was president of the Michigan chapter of the student wing of the League for Industrial Democracy, or SLID, a once national Old Left student group dying out everywhere, it seemed, but Ann Arbor. Haber heard about the February 1960 Greensboro protests from NSA, which sent out notices to affiliated student governments at colleges across the country. Jeff rey and other students soon organized local sympathy pickets at Wool-worth’s and other chain stores in town whose southern branches practiced segregation. Haber called the Greensboro students and invited them to the conference. And Hayden, who had reluctantly joined a couple of pickets—he found protesting “uncomfortable”—wrote a fiery editorial linking the student demonstrations at Michigan to the outpouring of student protest across the country.7
The SDS conference, at the end of that spring of rising student activism, was a smash success. About 150 students, active on their home campuses, came together with some of the Greensboro students to hear speakers and pass a series of recommendations. SDS—earlier that spring members had dropped the unappealing name SLID—would publish a national civil rights newsletter for students, plan a national civil rights conference, take the lead in coordinating student fund-raising, and create a national network of the student civil rights groups then emerging on many campuses outside the South. For a tiny organization struggling to turn its ties to the Old Left into a new student politics, it was a bold move. The ambition and breadth of the vision on display in the three typed pages of resolutions passed by the delegates was simply stunning. SDS proposed nothing less than to make itself the national coordinating committee of all student civil rights efforts across the country. Haber sent the list off to his contacts everywhere, including participants in the Raleigh Conference, the meeting that just two weeks earlier had created SNCC to coordinate the southern protests.8
Throughout 1960 and 1961, SDS continued to grow by connecting with the movement down south. Its national meeting in June included a reception for Florida students jailed for participating in sit-ins. The September issue of its newsletter, Venture, focused on civil rights. And Haber sent letters and telegrams in support of southern activists and their work. Connecting with Tim Jenkins in the fall of 1960, for example, Haber wrote to summarize and clarify their earlier conversation and outline SDS’s proposed relationship with the sit-in movement and SNCC. Again Haber pushed SDS as a national coordinator of student activism. The struggle for civil rights, he lectured Jenkins, broadened beyond “social equality” to include “questions of political power and economic organization,” was “not so much a Negro problem as a problem for all liberals devoted to a democratic society.” He did not have to add that thousands of southern students had participated in the sit-ins and that thousands more outside the South had demonstrated in support. What “students in the North” needed, he told Jenkins, was “greater personal knowledge of the movement”: “We must be able to know what is going on, to be able to identify personalities and feel some direct involvement in the struggle.” 9
For Tom Hayden, direct involvement—experience—was everything. Not particularly tall, his face scarred with acne, his shirttails usually flapping, Hayden appeared at odds with the trimmed and pressed world that still lingered from the late fift ies on American college campuses. He had not, like Jeff rey and Haber, grown up surrounded by liberal political organizing; Haber’s dad was a University of Michigan economics professor active in New Deal politics, and Jeff rey’s parents were both labor movement activists. In high school in a suburb of Detroit, Hayden read Catcher in the Rye and saw Rebel Without a Cause. The year he started college, he read Kerouac’s On the Road and fell in love with its celebration of young men exploring and embracing the wide expanse of America. Over the next three years, Hayden recalled, he spent his vacations hitchhiking “to every corner of America, sleeping in fields here, doorways there, cheap hotels everywhere, embracing a spirit of the open road without knowing where I wanted to go.” In a 1972 interview, he confessed being “very influenced by the Beat Generation.” He admitted that “politics was unimaginable to me. I’d never heard or seen a demonstration … There was no sense that there was something like a political form of protest, so whatever that was, it was mainly like trying to mimic the life of James Dean or something like that. It wasn’t political.” At Michigan, he read philosophy, rode motorcycles, and avoided the fraternity-sorority scene.10
Not yet a member of SDS in the summer of 1960, Hayden hitchhiked to the Bay Area, “already known as the Mecca of student activism” because of the HUAC protests and the oppositional politics of the campus party SLATE. He investigated the new campus activism there, traveled to Los Angeles to cover the 1960 Democratic Convention, and then caught a ride to Minneapolis to cover the NSA’s annual convention. Twenty-five SNCC representatives from the South had also traveled to Minneapolis, and the conference voted on a resolution, proposed by Haber and hotly debated, endorsing the southern sitin movement’s civil disobedience. A blond graduate student and southern sitin veteran from the University of Texas stood up to speak. Confronted with injustice, she argued, a person can do nothing, can work within the law, can revolt violently, or can act nonviolently. But
I cannot say to a person who suffers injustice, “Wait.” Perhaps you can. I can’t. And having decided that I cannot urge caution, I must stand with him. If I had known that not a single lunch counter would open as result of my action, I could not have done differently than I did. If I had known violence would result, I could not have done differently than I did. I am thankful to the sit-ins if for no other reason than that they provided me with an opportunity for making a slogan into a reality, by making a decision into an action. It seems to me that this is what life is all about. While I would hope that the NSA congress will pass a strong sit-in resolution, I am more concerned that all of us, Negro and white, realize the possibility of becoming less inhuman humans through commitment and action.
That was it. Hayden fell in love with SNCC—with chairman Chuck McDew, a Talmud-quoting black Jew; with Bob Zellner, a white student from Alabama and SNCC field secretary; and with Sandra “Casey” Cason, the speaker who had swayed the convention. NSA voted to issue the statement of support. The SNCC people “lived on a fuller level of feeling than any people I’d ever seen,” Hayden remembered, “partly because they were making history in a very personal way, and partly because by risking death they came to know the value of living each moment to the fullest.” 11
The next year, Hayden repeatedly used his position as editor of the Michigan Daily to return to the South. In the fall, SNCC invited sit-in activists to attend an “action-oriented” conference in Atlanta, and Hayden went. A few months later, in February 1961, he went south again. With some Ann Arbor friends, he packed up a station wagon with food and clothing for sharecroppers evicted from their land for trying to register to vote in Fayette County, Tennessee. Cason met them there. James Forman, who would become SNCC’s executive secretary the following fall, was there helping the homeless and jobless sharecroppers organize “Freedom Village,” a tent city by the side of a road where people were trying to survive and draw national attention to their plight. Hayden met many of the residents and was deeply moved by their struggle for “food and other physical essentials” and for “essentials of a different order—the right to vote and participate in the democratic order.” It was Hayden’s first trip to the rural South. “We were walking down the street” after meeting with Freedom Village members, Hayden told a reporter years later, “and we ran into a gang that was just waiting for us with belts and clubs … We walked the other way as quickly as possible and went into the newspaper office and called the cops. But they just joined the toughs. We got in our car and raced out of town … That was my first run-in with the police,” he recalled. “They followed us fift y miles before we lost them.” Describing his life in 1960, Hayden insisted later, “I didn’t get political. Things got political.” 12
Hayden graduated in the spring of 1961, married Casey Cason at the end of that summer, and finally decided—Haber, Jeff rey, and others had been courting him since 1960—to take a job with SDS. That fall, in McComb, Mississippi, and Albany, Georgia, as he had in Tennessee, Hayden blurred the line between reporting observer and activist. He also turned his experiences into performances, speaking at Mount Holyoke, Bryn Mawr, Swarthmore, Yale, and elsewhere in the Northeast, “trying to get money and moral support for the Southern Negroes,” “carpetbagging backwards.” But it was Hayden’s dispatches from the South, which Haber edited and mailed to his contact lists of campus leaders, student groups, and SDS members, that spread both news of the southern student movement and a sense of the actual experience of direct action there. Hayden’s reports positioned SDS as the group to join for northern students who cared about the student movement in the South. If white Americans elsewhere worried that they too must act, then Hayden gave them an example of how. They could literally follow him into southern jails, but short of that, they could at least send in their dues and follow his experiences in the region.13
Edited by Haber, SDS’s “Southern Reports” combined accounts of SNCC activism and white southern retaliation unavailable elsewhere with appeals for funds and the creation of a national support network. An October 7 newsletter described the arrests of high school students and SNCC activists in McComb, SNCC’s voter registration efforts there and in surrounding counties, and the murder of local black activist Herbert Lee. SDS was working hard to bring students the news, Haber assured readers, “in the face of an almost total news blackout,” and Hayden was down there. Campus activists wanted and, indeed, needed to know the truth. And the truth was that more people might be killed: “A spokesman for the Justice Department told a representative from NSA that unless it appeared there would be’a lynching’ it would be difficult for the government to step in, despite the presence of FBI agents in the area.” The federal government was not going to help. What the southern students needed from students outside the region was money for bails and fines and staff salaries and voter registration schools, and SDS had secured $5,000 from its parent organization, LID. The southern students also needed people to think and plan, and again SDS was on the job. Most importantly, SNCC needed people to act. There was a “revolution” under way in Mississippi: “For the southern student this is a movement for a New South, a South not only dispossessed of segregation in all its legalistic and ritualistic forms, but a South in which the entire body politic and indeed the entire society is moulded out of a different fabric … and the South may serve as a catalyst toward a democratic revision of the entire national outlook.” 14
Casey Hayden traveled from SNCC’s Atlanta office, where she worked, to Hattiesburg, Mississippi, in July 1964. Randall Freedom Summer Photograph Collection, McCain Library and Archives, The University of Southern Mississippi.
At stake, then, were both the future of the South and the future of SDS. As Hayden wrote Haber in a confidential report on a September 1961 SNCC meeting in Jackson, the fight against the segregationists was transforming southern students into radicals. There was a “crazy new sentiment that this is not just a movement but a revolution, that our identity should not be with our Negro predecessors but with the new nations around the world, and that beyond lunch counter desegregation there are more serious evils which must be ripped out by any means: exploitation, socially destructive capital, evil political and legal structure, and myopic liberalism which is anti-revolutionary. Revolution permeated discussions like never before.” He cautioned Haber, “In our future dealings, we should be aware that they have changed down there, and we should speak their revolutionary language without mocking it, for it is not lip service, nor is it the ego fulfillment of a rising Negro class, but it is in truth the fact of life in the South this minute, and unless the North or the government or nuclear war intervenes, we are going to be down here soon ourselves in jail or fighting, or writing, or being lynched in the struggle.” It was, Hayden assured Haber, “a good, pure struggle, the kind that can bring hope to Africans and Asians and the rest of the hungry peoples, and it’s a struggle that we have every reason to begin in a revolutionary way across the country, in every place of discrimination that exists. There is no reason for us to be hesitant anymore … There is no reason for us to think we can do something more important out of jail.” SDS had been using the southern student movement for its own purposes, Hayden argued. “Two years ago we falsified this movement to claim it was the event with which we identified. We didn’t. We saw it was something that we should extend, that we could both help in justice to ourselves and which could at the same provide a cutting edge for more reforms throughout society. Well now the Southern movement has turned itself into that revolution that we hoped for, and we didn’t have much to do with it’s turning at all. The southern students did … Now,” he insisted, “they are miles ahead of us, looking back, chuckling knowingly about the sterility of liberals, tightening grimly against the potency of the racists. In the rural South, in the’token integration’ areas, in the cities, they will be shouting from the bottom of their guts for justice or else.” SDS was not leading; it was following. If the organization really wanted to lead the American student movement, “we had better be there.” 15
“There” meant an actual place, of course. It meant the South, the towns and cities where the sit-ins occurred and the roads the Freedom Riders traveled. It meant Atlanta, where SNCC had its headquarters, and Jackson, where Hayden had attended a SNCC meeting and written his report. But “there” also mean an imaginative place, “the South,” a place far away from the white midwestern suburb where Hayden had grown up. It meant a space outside modern America, full of authentic and yet marginal people. It meant black southerners.
It was in McComb, where the project motto was “A voteless people is a voiceless people,” that Hayden became a participant in the civil rights movement, where he acted or at least was acted upon, where he put his body in the struggle. Years later, he still recalled how SNCC people had smuggled him and Paul Potter, NSA national affairs vice president and a future SDS president, into town on October 9.
We had to stay in a motel and arrange, by clandestine means, to meet a car in a darkened section of the black ghetto in a Southern town in Mississippi. We had to be let out of a rented car, and lie on the back floor of a parked car in a parking lot. Somebody then picked it up and drove us—because it would have been too dangerous for whites and blacks to be in the same vehicle, even at night. They drove us to a house where all of the shutters were down, the windows were reinforced, and we had a meeting in the cellar with Bob [Moses] and some of the other people to talk about the voter registration campaign.
It was “devastating,” Hayden remembered, to discover that we must use “clandestine means to discuss the most conventional kind of tactic, namely the registration of voters, because what we were up against was a whole organized system that was out to kill us.” Crossing into the South, Hayden and Potter had become part of this “us.” They too had become outsiders.16
In McComb, the two northern students, representing themselves as journalists, interviewed the editor of the local paper and the chief of police and spoke with local blacks. On October 11, they sat in their parked car outside the black high school and watched the students march to protest the murder of Herbert Lee and to support other students expelled for sit-in activities. The police rolled up and asked them what they were doing. “We try, but we can’t protect everyone around here,” the officers told them, “especially outsiders like yourselves.” Told to go to the police station, Hayden and Potter drove away, with a police car trailing. after a few blocks, the police turned off. Suddenly, “the right door was ripped open by a white man, Carl Hayes, who pulled Paul into the street and beat him. He then came after me, struck me on the head and across the kidneys in the car, dragged me to the street, kicked me once, struck me again and once again, then left me alone.” The plumber, as Hayes was described in the press, then ran away. Hayden “stood up from my sitting position, and noticed the students marching by us. Then the police’escort’ arrived, asking what had happened.” While Hayden was talking to the police, “a fat, almost stereotypical Southern racist was screaming in a high voice that Paul and I had been fighting and fell out of the car on our heads, and now we were trying to blame a white man for having hit us.” In the chaos, a person Hayden refused to identity told the “journalists” to leave the motel that night because “they are coming to take you.” The police then transported Hayden and Potter to the station, where an investigator for the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, who had arrived at the scene of the beatings just as the police pulled up, questioned the pair. Given a choice between jail and leaving town, Hayden and Potter sped north in their rental car, still wearing their bloody clothes.17
Years later, Hayden revealed that the man who warned them was the photographer following the march, who saw Hayes attack Hayden and Potter and took the pictures. Soon after, local whites destroyed his camera, but he had already removed the film and hidden the negatives. The next day, the Associated Press picked up the image of Hayes hitting Hayden. Newspaper readers around the country saw a skinny young white man in a suit futilely flinging his arms up to protect himself from the punch a big white man in tight jeans and a cut-off shirt had just landed on the right side of his head. In the years before the Birmingham dog and fire hose shots, this photograph circulated as an iconic image of nonviolent protest meeting segregationist brutality. A white southerner’s fists and the national and local media made Hayden into a civil rights protester.18
Back in Atlanta, Hayden worked on Revolution in Mississippi, an SDS special report, published in January 1962 and read broadly by campus activists across the country. The pamphlet included authenticating documents, a preface by SNCC chair McDew, a foreword by SDS chair Haber, and a Bob Moses letter smuggled out of the Magnolia, Mississippi, jail. The title page printed Revolution in Mississippi over the then little known words of the song “We Shall Overcome.” “How,” Hayden asked at the start, “do we make the situation real to outsiders—those who know not the people involved, the state, the country, and most of all, the social, political, economic, cultural, religious, historic pattern we have labeled segregation? … This report is intended to make the facts real.” Outsiders to Mississippi, Hayden predicted, would read these facts and then ally themselves with the outsiders within Mississippi, local blacks and SNCC activists. Together, they would create a new political coalition, win the revolution in Mississippi, and create a truly democratic America.19
Hayden’s writings had their desired effect on a growing SDS. One later leader recalled that “these reports were very important to me: that’s really the reason I went into SDS.” From November 1961 to January 1963, membership grew from 575 to 900. More importantly, the organization was able to gain crucial national publicity. College students who did not necessarily belong learned about SDS by reading Hayden’s publications or seeing the photograph of his beating in the newspaper. Haber and Jeff rey had been right to see civil rights activism as the spark that could ignite campus activism. Hayden’s willingness to “put his body on the line” like his SNCC idols had given SDS’s civil rights connection concrete form. For students outside the South, reading Hayden’s Revolution in Mississippi was like singing along with the Freedom Singers, close, really close, to being there.20
Haber and Hayden, then, successfully used interest in the southern student movement to build SDS even as they also tried to use SDS to help the civil rights activists in the South. And it worked not just because there was great injustice in the South. There was great injustice in Detroit, right down the road from Ann Arbor, and in New York City, where Haber ran the national SDS office at the time. There was great injustice in the treatment of African Americans most places in America. It worked because popular culture had already taught many college students from outside the region how to romanticize southern blacks. It was not hard, then, for some young whites to transfer these feelings to SNCC workers. And SNCC’s work was so exciting. “On a theoretical level, you can say that we believed in wanting to make history and achieve civil rights,” Hayden recalled. “But there was something else: the middle-class emptiness of alienation that people talk about, and then suddenly confronting commitment. The whole emotion of defining not only yourself, but also your life by risking your life, and testing whether you’re willing to die for your beliefs, was the powerful motive, I believe.” Hayden had quoted Haber on this very point in a piece he wrote for Mademoiselle in August just before he went south: “Students have a mystique about action. They are thrilled by action per se,” Haber told Hayden. “The passion usually associated with ideology is transferred to the actual doing of the deed.” Acting, participating in the civil rights movement in the South, made whites like Hayden into outsiders too.21
In New York City that fall, Al Haber was busy pushing a different message. Acting now, for Haber, meant students outside the South needed to send money to support SNCC. More than a year before Seeger played his series of dates down south and the Freedom Singers became a group, Haber proposed a series of folk music concerts at colleges and high schools across the five boroughs to raise awareness about and funds for SNCC. These campus concerts would culminate in a large, citywide benefit starring “perhaps Odetta, Ola Tunji, and Harry Belafonte” and “participants from action areas of the Southern struggle.” “There is no doubt,” Haber wrote SNCC’s Diane Nash, “that a campaign of this sort—beginning at the campus level and culminating in a mass city program could greatly contribute to the work of the committee.” Later that fall and early winter, SDS’s “SNCC fund raising program” held at least seven campus concerts and one citywide event for the high schools.22
But Haber had an even grander vision. Acting now meant not waiting to learn how to help the southern students. It meant acting here. Students outside the South needed to learn about what was happening to the region in order to imagine the ways they could act at home in this national struggle. Haber, in fact, pushed this point when he edited Hayden’s reports: “We must begin not to share simply the forms of protest, but to translate the spirit of social revolution to the situations in our immediate experience that demand action.” Haber called for “the complete extension of the movement to our own locales”: “Support action” must “be translated into direct attack on local situations.” Support activities, like Hayden’s suggestion that SDS organize University of Chicago students to boycott the Illinois Central headquarters because Freedom Riders were being arrested at the railroad’s station in Jackson, suggested that the fight lay elsewhere. Haber wanted SDS “to examine the character of discrimination in New York City with emphasis on housing, employment, schools, credit and political democracy.” Acting now meant figuring out how to act in places like New York City. SDS would have to commit itself to the issue of civil rights everywhere.23
That December, Haber and Hayden decided to hold a small conference to translate their new vision of SDS as a national student movement into some more coherent organizational form. Though they thought the organization should focus on civil rights, other participants answered the call for papers by presenting other ideas including poverty, university reform, or peace. Participants could not reach a consensus but did find that they shared a rebellious style, “a kind of open Bohemianism filtered through the Beats that put a premium on honesty and naturalness.” Somehow, they fused this social easiness with the passion and intellectual intensity of geeky honor students and the sense of entitlement, the belief that whatever they were doing was important, of many middle-class white kids. They shared, then, not a particular political program but a way of being in the world. At the conference, they decided to turn their disagreements into their purpose. Instead of writing a national plan for civil rights or peace work, they would codify what they believed. They would write a manifesto for the new student politics. At the bottom of the December 29–31 conference schedule were the words “January 1—the new left goes forth.” 24
What had been meant at least partly as a joke became instead a prophecy. What was lost was Haber’s idea that SDS could coordinate a national student movement for civil rights, not just by romanticizing activists down south and sending money and volunteers there but also by helping generate student activism on the problem of civil rights in New York City and elsewhere in the North. The Northern Student Movement was never large enough to take up the task. Celebrating the civil rights movement in the South and raising funds for work there remained more popular on nonsouthern campuses throughout the sixties than building the movement outside the region.25
Unlike folk music fans, SDS leaders did not just want to feel a connection with the people imagined as living on the margins of modern America. Unlike SNCC staff members through 1963, most of whom were black college students, most SDS leaders did not just want to help local blacks engage in nonviolent direct action. Instead, the core members of SDS wanted to explain and expand the connection and articulate how an alliance of poor southern blacks and American college students could be the basis of revolutionary social change in America.
In the winter of 1962, Hayden stopped trying to be a SNCC activist and went to work instead as an intellectual. “Where,” he wrote SDS members, “does one begin thinking about manifestos?” Hayden started by working on a speech, which later became a SDS pamphlet called Student Social Action: From Liberation to Community, in which he attempted to assimilate what he had learned in the South into a general program for student activism. Like some other early SNCC and SDS leaders, he turned to the work of two intellectuals in particular, Albert Camus and C. Wright Mills. Casey Hayden had introduced him to Camus’s conception of “genuine rebellion,” in Hayden’s words “standing up to injustice even if life is’absurd,’ without apparent meaning.” The very act of rebellion, Hayden recalled learning from Camus, “asserted a human nature worth preserving from extermination and drew the individual from solitude to solidarity.” And this kind of resistance made a college student like Hayden into an outsider too. Looking for a way to weld Camus’s existentialism into a practical political program, Hayden turned to Mills.26
Mills “became the oracle of the New Left, ” Hayden remembered, by “combining the rebel life-style of James Dean and the moral passion of Albert Camus with a comprehensive portrayal of the American condition.” Mills gave Hayden a way of understanding America’s “power elite,” a much more complicated, less conspiratorial conception of the operation of power than the left’s Marxist theory of the “ruling class.” As importantly, Mills articulated a broader, more psychological idea of alienation and of the sources of oppression that led to political change. Mills’s great subject was the inner life, the steady erosion of psychic freedom, related but not reducible to economic and political freedom. The growth of bureaucracy and the mass media and the shallow compensatory pleasures of consumerism, Mills argued, endangered the psychological independence of the American middle class. Mass society was killing not just economic independence but also individual self-expression. “The independent artist and intellectual,” Mills insisted, were “among the few remaining personalities equipped to resist and to fight the stereotyping and consequent death of genuinely lively things.” Individual self-expression should be the goal of left politics. Mills’s analysis transformed Camus’s rebellion into a political act in the restoration of American democracy and imagined middle-class Americans as a potential vanguard of political change.27
In “Student Social Action,” Hayden fused Camus and Mills to offer a compelling vision of white middle-class college students as outsiders. The powerlessness of students on college campuses, he argued, paralleled the powerlessness of African Americans in the segregated South. Both groups were deprived of a political voice. Both groups experienced “deep alienation” from the decision-making institutions of society. College students should see southern African Americans and other oppressed groups as their allies in a new political coalition of the alienated. Together, they should work for “genuine independence”: “a concern not with image or popularity, but with finding a moral meaning in life that is direct and authentic for the self.” “I believe,” Hayden wrote, drawing on his experiences in the South, “that independence can be a fact about ordinary people. And democracy, real participating democracy, rests on the independence of ordinary people.” Following Mills, Hayden broadened his definition of independence to include psychological freedom and cultural determination, the right to self-expression, as well as economic security and political representation, the right to vote. United with “the masses of hungry, aspiring, utopian peoples intervening in history for the first time,” students should act to restore “the individual personality to a creative and self-cultivating role in human affairs.” “The time has come,” Hayden concluded, “for a reassertion of the personal.” 28
That winter, SDS leaders had asked Hayden to write a draft of what they called an “agenda for the left “ and a “manifesto of hope.” “Student Social Action” was the warm-up. The plan was for Hayden to submit his work in progress to SDS members who would then form working groups at the annual conference to hammer out the final document. The manifesto that came out of this process, the Port Huron Statement, took its name from the United Auto Workers camp on the northern Michigan lakeshore where fewer than sixty SDS members and people affiliated with other organizations like SNCC met that June.29
Like Hayden’s “Student Social Action,” the Port Huron Statement radically positioned white college students as outsiders with a crucial role to play in a New Left political alliance. And it accomplished this essential revision of the Old Left’s vision of a coalition grounded in economic exploitation by expanding the definition of oppression to include psychological and cultural alienation: “The goal of man and society should be human independence: a concern not with an image of popularity but with finding a meaning in life that is personally authentic, a power of mind not compulsively driven by a sense of powerlessness, nor one which unthinkingly adopts status values.” Boldly, SDS’s manifesto also offered a way to achieve its vision of the good life, “participatory democracy.” In this “truly democratic alternative to the present,” society would be organized to encourage independence and provide the means for the individual to “share in those social decisions determining the quality and the direction of his life.” SDS’s complicated relationship with the civil rights movement and Hayden’s own romanticization of SNCC activists deeply influenced the Port Huron Statement’s imagination of a new form of politics.30
SDS members working on the Port Huron Statement self-consciously attempted to “speak American.” They understood the political capital to be gained by dramatizing the difference between democratic rhetoric and reality, by parading the fact that there were outsiders and insiders in the land of equality. Participatory democracy, in this vein, was a patriotic code word for a move toward democratic socialism. But it was also much more. As Hayden recalled about SDS, “Everything for us had to be new.” Participatory democracy was a way to make the student movement into a New Left, to rebel against the Old Left as well as contemporary liberals and conservatives, for liberals, too, increasingly supported African-American civil rights, integration, and poverty programs for the urban poor. Participatory democracy was a challenge to liberal top-down, expert-heavy programs for accomplishing these goals.31
The concept of participatory democracy was also a way for SDS leaders to distinguish their organization from SNCC. Hayden, as edited by others at Port Huron, transformed what he understood as SNCC’s “mystique of action alone” into an ideology, an understanding of the good life and how it should be achieved. Direct action became self–determination, a concept at once narrower (more individual than communal) and broader (encompassing psychological as well as material acts). Self-determination linked what many southern blacks hoped to get out of the civil rights movement—political, economic, and social equality—with what civil rights activists and people like Hayden also got out of the civil rights movement—the individual psychological freedom that came from acting under the threat of violence and even death. Activists lost their self-consciousness in the emotional intensity that accompanied the danger of organizing. “The folk,” black or otherwise, supposedly lacked that self-consciousness all along. Self-determination—all the ways an individual could act to shape the world—would make everyone’s life authentic, just like Hayden’s heroes the SNCC field secretaries. No longer would the left simply stand for the elimination of poverty and political oppression. “The authentic life” included this old vision of utopia and so much more. With self-determination as its goal, the mostly white New Left imagined a political coalition capacious enough to include SDS members, SNCC activists, and “the folk.” 32
Feeling Real: The Economic Research and Action Project
What participatory democracy would look like in practice was anyone’s guess. The Economic and Research Action Project, or ERAP, was SDS’s attempt to find out. The Port Huron Statement and other SDS publications like Hayden’s Revolution in Mississippi gave SDS a growing influence among student activists. But SDS was not known for action, or for organizing anything other than about twenty campus chapters and a lot of meetings. Jeff rey and Hayden, who had worked in the South, wanted to move beyond analysis and providing ideas and into action. As Hayden, then SDS president, wrote in the March–April 1963 SDS Bulletin, grassroots activists worked unseen in every community: “What we need is a way to transfer these invisible rebellions into a politics of responsible insurgence. Can the methods of SNCC be applied to the North? … Can we spread our organizational power as far as our ideological influence, ” Hayden asked, “or are we inevitably assigned to a vague educational role in a society that increasingly is built deaf to the sounds of protest?” In March, Hayden had written Walter Reuther of the United Auto Workers. In early August, the UAW gave SDS $5,000 for a project devoted to economic problems. On August 28, many SDS leaders participated in the March on Washington, where King and others spoke of an integrated mass movement to create a better America. Days later, at the 1963 National Student Association convention, Stokely Carmichael and other SNCC activists advised white students to organize in white communities. The leadership of SDS met right after the convention to discuss how their organization might respond. They had a model: SNCC’s community organizing in places like McComb and Albany. They had a vision: They would organize the white as well as black poor and unemployed, in places like northern cities and the mining country around Hazard, Kentucky, where SNCC was not working. They had the funds. And they believed they could recruit college students to provide the labor. They founded ERAP to create the plan.33
SDS leaders disagreed about whether ERAP should focus more on action or research. Did making a plan mean conducting extensive preliminary research or deciding quickly where to create community-organizing projects that would then generate their own data for analysis? Carl Wittman, a Swarthmore student, SDS member, and the leader of a campus group that successfully allied with African Americans in nearby Chester, Pennsylvania, in a series of nonviolent mass actions in November, wrote a SDS working paper with Hayden that winter. “An Interracial Movement of the Poor?” argued that poor people across the nation were natural allies because they had common needs: “improved housing, lower rents, better schools, full employment, extension of welfare and social security assistance. These are not’Negro issues’ per se; rather, they are precisely those issues which should appeal to lower-class whites as well as Negroes.” And white students as well as African Americans could organize the poor by living among them at their economic level: “ We are the people and we work with the people. Only if conscious cooperative practice is our main style will our ideology take on the right details, only then will it be tested and retested.” SDS needed to put participatory democracy into practice. “It is the role we play in the community, in developing a voice and a power among the poor,” they argued, “that will give us a legitimate and radical place.” into practice. Activists would become radicals—achieve their own “authentic” lives and express their own values—by helping the poor realize their self-determination too. Hayden, Wittman, and their allies wanted ERAP to stop studying community organizing and actually do it.34
In the winter and spring of 1963–64, these disagreements about the future direction of ERAP and indeed SDS erupted into open debate. Haber led a group of SDS leaders who opposed “ghetto-jumping,” their term for community organizing. An even smaller group, led by New York City native Steve Max, one of the few SDS leaders who had not attended college, advocated what he called realignment. SDS should work in the South, Max argued, not because northern college students wanted to help southern blacks but because expanded voter registration in the region would break up conservative southern Democrats’ hold on Congress. Working in the South was not about feelings and finding authenticity. It was a way to move the Democratic Party to the left. Hayden and his allies eventually won the debate. Haber did not give up quietly, however, and his and others’ critique of using ERAP to move SDS into community organizing predicted many of the problems that would emerge as activists tried to build a new politics on the romance of the outsider.35
Todd Gitlin, then president of SDS, allied with Hayden in support of community organizing. In his analysis, “social change originates with the most dispossessed … Other classes will cluster around the dispossessed as they organize, since they are the most dynamic.” This was certainly how many SDS members felt about southern civil rights activists. But for Haber, this “into the ghetto” enthusiasm ignored “our role as a student organization.” It generated “an unfortunate anti-intellectualism in SDS,” pushed “students to leave the university,” and granted “a moral superiority for those who’give their bodies’ …’In the world’ has come to mean’in the slum,’ “ an analysis Haber found “slightly sick.” “Is radicalism subsisting in the slum for a year or two?” he asked. “The cult of the ghetto has diverted SDS from its primary and most difficult task of educating radicals. It says’come and do radical things.’ But when the student decides he has to make a living, SDS has given him no help in functioning as a radical in the middle class, professional world.” SDS, Haber concluded, “will have people deny what they are, and hence never learn how to apply their values in what they do.” At the June 1964 summer convention, a group calling itself Touch and Sex wrote a plan for action parodying the supporters of community organizing and their “feelie” politics.36
As these arguments raged, SDS leaders who supported community organizing were already at work creating what they envisioned as a northern counterpart to SNCC’s southern projects. By June 1964, they had chosen nine cities—Baltimore, Boston, Chester, Chicago, Cleveland, Newark, Philadelphia, Trenton, and Louisville—and one rural area, Hazard, Kentucky. They had selected about one hundred participants and held a six-day training institute the week before the NSA convention. Projects had already opened in Chicago and Cleveland. In response to President Johnson’s “unconditional war on poverty in America,” Congress was at work on a massive anti-poverty program based on the “maximum feasible participation of the poor,” an idea that like participatory democracy emphasized poor people’s ability to act to help themselves. ERAP put these ideas into action. SDS would lead American college students on the newly high-profile issue of poverty. Jeff rey, who went to work in Cleveland, believed they were doing nothing less than changing the world.37
ERAP participants arrived in their cities with a few dollars, a scattering of local contacts, and a general idea, often wrong, about where to find the poor whites many projects most hoped to organize. They rented run-down apartments and houses, often more than one, at least initially, so male and female activists could live separately and not upset community residents. An ERAP project’s first order of business was often its own community—how to make participatory democracy work in participants’ living arrangements. Most often, people decided to live communally, to pool their money and divide up tasks like buying and cooking the food and repairing the houses. They held long meetings on internal organization. How could they avoid hierarchies and differences of status? How could they make all decisions democratically? Was it okay to take off one day during the summer and go to the beach? They even invented new terms like “research keeper” and “broom keeper” to try to promote a sense of the equal value of all common work. Men, many groups decided, would have to learn to cook.38
Quickly, groups became proud of living in poverty. Since the organizing work itself yielded few results in the first months, ERAP members’ most tangible achievement was surviving in the slums. In the detailed letters they sent back to the SDS office, compiled into a national newsletter, projects competed to see who could survive on the smallest food budget, a steadily dropping number that reached less than fift y cents per person per day. Some groups passed out little cups of orange juice like communion wine. Everyone ate endless meals of peanut butter and jelly and powdered milk. Journalist Andrew Kopkind, in one of the first articles in the national media about SDS, insisted few “on the’outside’ “ could “imagine the completeness of their transformation, or the depth of their commitment … They are part of the slums,” he continued. “They get no salary; they live on a subsistence allowance … Most of the time they are broke … In the dining room of the Cleveland’project house’ last week,” he wrote, hung a sign: “Panic point. Bank balance $4.09.” Project participants often had to call “friends in the suburbs” for five or ten dollars in order to eat. They did not just organize the poor—they also lived the poverty. They tried to become poor people themselves.39
The organizing effort proved much harder than living on meager funding. Oft en it was difficult to find local people even interested in coming to meetings. ERAP workers fanned out through their neighborhoods daily, knocking on doors. They talked to women watching toddlers in hot apartments and men drinking on stoops and people waiting in line at unemployment and welfare benefit offices. They asked these people to participate in short surveys—what did they want to change in their neighborhoods? They collected and studied the answers and discussed the people they met. In each project area the greatest challenge proved to be finding a group to organize around some local issue in order to begin working toward the “real” goal of building “the Movement,” the larger coalition for radical change. In the summer of 1964, throughout the next year, and in the summer of 1965, SDS members experimented with eRAP projects in a changing list of cities across America.40
Groups that had the most success, such as those in Cleveland and Newark, took on specific local issues like welfare rights, daycare and recreation facilities, and traffic lights, jokingly called GROIN, for Garbage Removal or Income Now. Poor people, they found, came to meetings to work on immediate, concrete problems and did not often share organizers’ interest in participatory democracy and building a radical political movement in coalition with college students and poor people elsewhere. If life in the ghetto was “authentic” and “real,” then locals wanted a little less reality. As Hayden remembered about his experience working in Newark, “We finally saw that only the organizing experience itself, going through the struggle, was enough to unify the people.” ERAP activists learned to generate agitation around roaches and rats or the absence of stoplights or playgrounds. People mad about the way the city government was treating them—the welfare check denied or the slumlord protected—sometimes took the next step into political organizing. “Tragedy and protest,” as Hayden wrote sometime after that first summer, were “but one and the same.” 41
In Cleveland, for example, ERAP discovered that welfare mothers were an ideal organizing target and helped reactivate a defunct community group, Citizens United for Adequate Welfare (CUFAW). Welfare mothers, raising their children on little money in bad housing, had, in Jeff rey’s words, “life skills,” unlike chronically unemployed men. With the Cleveland ERAP project’s help, welfare recipients won fairer treatment from the city and the payment of benefits owed and yet denied. Buoyed by these individual successes, CUFAW and ERAP project members pushed for and won a citywide free lunch program in the public schools. They planned and hosted a poor people’s conference, bringing community people from other ERAP locations together with civil rights activists. Former sharecropper turned SNCC activist Fannie Lou Hamer, for example, traveled from the Mississippi Delta to speak to the conference. after the day’s meetings, she led conference participants in singing as they marched through Cleveland. In 1966, Cleveland welfare mothers, politicized by SDS, became a strong organizing center in the new National Welfare Rights Organization.42
In Newark, where Hayden lived for four years in what would become the longest-running project, ERAP organizers created the community union approach. Newark Community Union Project (NCUP) took on whatever protests and actions community members expressed an interest in pursuing. One SDS and NCUP member described the range of activities in 1965:
filing housing violation forms, demanding housing inspection, organizing rent strikes, demonstrations at a landlord’s house in the suburbs, testifying about housing conditions before the Human Rights Commission; a sit-in at the Mayor’s office to protest police and court mistreatment of a rent striker, large scale protest of police brutality through marches, pickets at the precinct level; testimony on general conditions before the Human Rights Commission, the Mayor, and other officials, before the War-on-Poverty agency, the Powell Committee investigating the War-on-Poverty; frequent visits “downtown,” often with no notice, to ask for assistance or information from a wide range of officials, demanding that their offices be open to the public; protest of particular welfare abuses.
NCUP, in ERAP’s greatest success, eventually took over the local federal anti-poverty program. Its motto, “Let the People Decide,” participatory democracy’s broad ideal of self-determination, became a rallying cry throughout SDS and the New Left more generally. Even SNCC watched the ERAP projects closely and increasingly adopted SDS’s rhetoric after the summer of 1964. SDS members, wanting to be like Bob Moses and other black activists in SNCC, had surpassed their models.43
While many ERAP projects disbanded as key organizers left to go back to school or to other work, the better-run projects did not fail—they helped politicize community members who continued to work, for example, in anti-poverty programs and welfare rights organizations. But ERAP did fail to attract widespread student attention, as the sit-ins, the Freedom Rides, and the later work of SNCC had done. Community organizing in the slums did not become the next wave of the revolution. In part, the effort lacked a concrete goal, like ending the segregation of public facilities and the franchise, which could be measured and publicized. The analysis behind ERAP’s arguments for community organizing was wrong. Poor people were not naturally allies. Like any other category of people, they had to learn to recognize their common concerns. A related problem was the fact that the issues organizers addressed were small locally—it was hard to see getting rid of roaches in an apartment building as part of the revolution—and overwhelming in the aggregate: How could organizers, whatever their race or resources, stop suburban flight?
But these difficulties actually increased organizers’ interest in living the revolution, in modeling the utopia to come in the midst of the struggle, in changing their own lives. SNCC workers, an SDS member argued, “managed to impress ERAP with the image of an organizer who never organized, who by his simple presence was the mystical medium for the spontaneous expression of the’people.’ “ “Organizing,” Hayden wrote in an “Open Letter to ERAP Supporters and New Organizers,” “can be a way of life … Students, “he urged, “should consider whether their own needs are satisfied by life in the universities.” As Michael Harrington argued in his New Republic appraisal of the “young radicals,” ERAP organizers “identify precisely with the lumpen, the powerless, the maimed, the poor, the criminal, the junkie. And there is a mystical element in this commitment which has nothing to do with politics.” Hayden did not deny that students worked to help both the poor and themselves: “Students and poor people make each other feel real … If poor people are in the Movement because they have nothing to gain in the status system, students are in it because in a sense they have gained too much … Working in poor communities is a concrete task in which the split between job and values can be healed.” The students would give the poor a sense of the possibilities of democracy and help ease their political and economic alienation. The poor in turn would teach the students the truth, “that their upbringing has been based on a framework of lies,” and help them heal their cultural and psychological alienation and find their innocence. At the margins, from the people already there, students would learn to separate from existing society and live “outside” its boundaries, in opposition to its values.44
The idea of letting the poor decide, envisioning the role of the student volunteer more as magical catalyst rather than as dedicated organizer, dominated SDS thinking about community work by 1965. If the urban poor and people on the margins more generally possessed superior morals and values, then why should SDS members to try to lead them anywhere? SNCC’s Bob Moses and Hayden, “anti-leaders,” in the scholar James Miller’s apt phrase, provided a model for leadership through commitment, through their very embodiment of poor rural or urban blacks’ own values, without any visible exercise of official authority at all. Living and expressing poor people’s estrangement from the system—acting poor—was now enough. Nothing made this clearer than the Hoboken “non-project” in which organizers simply moved into poor neighborhoods in this New Jersey city and got jobs as unskilled laborers. As one of its non-members described the effort at the 1965 SDS convention, “leaders mean organizations, organization means hierarchy, and hierarchy is undemocratic. It connotes bureaucracy and impersonality.” “Getting with the people” was the key to social change. Only personal relationships changed people’s values. “Alienation,” he emphasized, “the quality of human life produced by the bureaucratized society,” was the common problem everywhere. Young and alienated middle-class kids just needed to connect with the poor.45
This kind of romanticism—the idea that the outsider, either the organizer or the local poor person, was more real, more authentic than other people— hurt SDS’s experiment in community organizing. There were organizational problems as well. With most of the leaders committed to community action buried deep in the day-to-day work of the projects in Chicago, Cleveland, and Newark, few people were left to push the effort nationally, coordinate ERAP efforts with the growing numbers of campus chapters, and raise much needed funding. Leaders working in the SDS national office often had other priorities or left their posts to go into community work. And ERAP’s model of participa-tory democracy had its flaws too. A 1965 ERAP recruiting pamphlet quoted “one man in Newark” without irony: “Freedom is an endless meeting.” Even the most dedicated organizers—and Hayden, who made money writing and left Newark for other political activities like his December 1965 trip to North Vietnam, was no exception—could not take the stress of living the movement all the time.46
But no organization could overcome the problems that grew out of the idea that organizing was a way of life that blessed its followers with authenticity and outsider status. “By going into the slum, they are doing penance for the sins of affluence,” Harrington insisted. “By sharing the life of those who are so impoverished that they are uncorrupted, values are affirmed.” These young radicals believed, Harrington argued, that it was “honest and moral and anti-hypocritical to be on the margin of society whether the community organization works or not. Indeed, there is a fear of’success,’ a suspicion that it would mean the integration of the oppressed into the corruption of the oppressors.” Young radicals needed to consider, he suggested, whether this privileging of innocence and authenticity, this emphasis on the experience of organizing over the results, mattered much to the people they were trying to organize.47
Insiders who wanted out and outsiders who wanted in might share an alienation from modern American life, but they did not always share a vision of the good life. ERAP organizers understood their successes as small accomplishments—free school lunches, the slowing of traffic through some poor neighborhoods, the restoration of benefits to some welfare recipients, fewer rats and roaches and more working appliances in a scattering of slum apartments, more places for the kids to play, and a couple of community organizations—in a context in which the goal was the revolutionary transformation of American society. But many poor people, ERAP organizers complained, were more concerned about exactly these kinds of changes and about eliminating their poverty than they were about building a piece of a radical movement. Local people wanted into the very middle-class lives of consumption and economic security that ERAP organizers were fleeing.
What if the organizers’ search for a meaningful life, the agency and expression of the poor, and the advancement of left politics were not all the same project? What if poor people discovered their agency and chose to work within “the system” and against the radicals of SDS? Or decided they did not want to be active in politics at all? Romanticism helped camouflage any potential contradictions. ERAP called its recruiting pamphlet for the summer of 1965 a movement of many voices. Interviews with community people who worked with eRAP projects led readers into a description of the organization, its methods and goals, and its project sites. As in a sing-along, all the voices came together to evoke a momentary sense of unity.48
Still, even as volunteers’ romanticism made it difficult to think strategically about the projects, ERAP organizing may have been hurt even more by the fact that this romanticism was limited by the absence of any nationally popular movement celebrating the culture of the urban poor. In 1964 and 1965, there was no “ghetto revival” to circulate a romance of poor urban Americans in image and song. There were no singers reviving their authentic and charming traditions at concerts and benefits that raised funds and awareness of their plight. Most of all, there was no innocence. ERAP activists certainly presented the poor as oppressed by others and thus not to be blamed for their deprivation. The problem was that there was nothing in it for the audience, for the liberals who might be urged to give money to ERAP or to volunteer to make copies or type. There was no way for people, except the ERAP volunteers, to find their authenticity. And there was no way for people, including the volunteers, to find their innocence. Americans were exploited in cities that were the very centers of liberal power, the places where people turned out for SNCC Freedom Singers benefits. Sure, SDS activists were brash, contemptuous of older, left ist organizations and ongoing urban relief projects, and often sure with the bravado of youth that they were the smartest people— except the poor—around. But all of these faults applied to SNCC field secretaries too. It was just easier in 1964 for a white liberal to go to a concert, buy SNCC’s record, or even volunteer to work for SNCC. Success, Hayden wrote from Newark, depended upon “a climate of fresh opinion in the North, a willingness to support popular movements for change here,” like the willingness of people outside the South to support change there. But there was nothing like the folk music revival to generate a romantic and even sentimental view of the urban poor equivalent to the image of the folk.49
SDS needed Bob Dylan to do more than stop by their December 1963 New York meeting and channel Woody Guthrie: “Ah don’ know what yew all are talkin’ about … but it sounds like yew want somthin’ to happen, and if that’s what yew want that’s what Ah want.” They needed him to write a song about police brutality in Newark. They needed the welfare mothers in Cleveland to sing in meetings. They needed their own Freedom Singers. Without a popular romance of the outsider broad enough to encompass the urban poor, what would make people who were not poor, in Hayden’s words, “transcend their pettiness to commit themselves to great purposes?” What would make them want to change? 50
Black and White Together: The Mississippi Summer Project
With a good deal more cynicism and self-consciousness, SNCC too worked to turn white middle-class college students’ attraction to outsiders into activism. SNCC benefited greatly from white romanticism in the mid-sixties. In 1963 and 1964, the organization used the folk music revival’s image of southern blacks as “the folk” to spread stories of its southern projects and to raise the money and supporters it needed to spread direct action and community organizing throughout the Deep South. Favorable articles about the organization appeared in Harper’s, the New York Times, and other national publications. The historian Howard Zinn called SNCC workers “the new abolitionists.” Fund-raising soared. The number of paid staff grew from a little more than twenty in early 1963 to more than sixty-five in the spring of 1964. That year, the organization put this romanticism to work to recruit volunteers for its 1964 Mississippi Summer Project. Mailings and press releases called the project “a massive Peace Corps operation in Mississippi.” Freedom Singers concerts, Friends of SNCC groups, and college newspapers spread the word about SNCC’s ambitious plan to bring hundreds of white college students from outside the region into the state most actively and violently resisting integration. SNCC’s summer project offered middle-class white volunteers a potent mix of political action, missionary work, and exotic travel.51
Some white volunteers, of course, were already working in the South before the summer project. In 1959, the NSA hired former member Constance Curry to direct its Southern Students Human Relations Project from an office in Atlanta. White students attended the meeting in 1960 from which SNCC emerged, and Casey Cason, Dinky Romilly, Dottie Miller, Mary King, and other white volunteers worked with SNCC as early as 1960. When the Southern Conference Educational Fund (SCEF) volunteered in 1961 to pay the salary of an activist to organize white southerners in support of civil rights, Atlanta college student Bob Zellner became SNCC’s first white field secretary. Zellner quickly found this work impossible. Being a member of SNCC, he wrote in a report to the SCEF in 1962, left him “estranged from other southern white students.” “How do you relate,” he asked, “to the white southern moderate or liberal and at the same time relate to a group of people who are as militant and as activist” as SNCC field secretaries? Zellner ended up organizing alongside African American SNCC workers in black southern communities. In 1962, the Albany project in southwest Georgia became the first SNCC community organizing effort to actively recruit white volunteers to work with African Americans. Bill Hansen also worked in the field. Forman advocated the continuation of this new experiment in organizing. The success of white field workers there, he asserted, “opened the doors to the use of white people in other areas.” 52
SNCC activists argued a great deal about the wisdom of using whites in the movement. Staff members, who were mostly black until 1964, worried about the deep effects of bringing so many whites into a movement mainly run by African Americans. Rural southern blacks might go to the courthouse to register with a white volunteer simply because they had long ago learned that survival depended upon doing what white people asked. Too many local black people would not be able to compete with college students in terms of skills. How would locals learn to run offices, manage projects, and teach and speak and plan surrounded by talented and well-intentioned but not always sensitive young whites? The gender of volunteers also presented a problem. White women would endanger black men with their very presence.53
In favor of the summer project, SNCC people argued that white Americans would pay attention to Mississippi if white college students too faced racist sheriff s, Klansmen, and members of the Citizens’ Councils there. If enough white kids came, the press would follow them. And if a white student got killed, the national newspapers and television news programs would investigate and report on the murder. There were possible long-term benefits as well. Giving a large group of young volunteers exposure to direct action and community organizing over the summer might transform their ideas about what they could do in their hometowns and on their campuses in the fall. The summer project was one possible answer to the question SNCC workers often asked: How could they share the experience of poor rural southern blacks with other Americans? How could they “make a fat rich country” care? The risks of using white volunteers were high, but there was no denying that the potential payoff was huge.54
White volunteers joined the movement out of shifting and unequal measures of commitment to social justice and an attraction to black folk. Ralph Allen, a white SNCC activist in jail in 1963 in Americus, Georgia, a small town near Albany, explained to a local white girl who had sent him a taunting letter why he joined the movement:
It’s no heaven on earth I left … Depends on what you mean by heaven. If you mean a place where everyone has so much money they have no sensitivity—no love, no sympathy, and no hopes beyond their own little narrow worlds … But to me the conceited, loud, self-centered All-American free white and twenty-one college boy stinks. I know. I was one. But something happened to make me human.
“If I didn’t have my [black] friends, I would be very much alone,” Allen continued. “And I don’t want to eat in anyone’s restaurant alone, to go to nobody’s movie alone, to swim in nobody’s pool alone. You dig?” Joining southern blacks in their fight turned the insider Allen into an outsider too.55
Danny Lyon, a white photographer who worked with SNCC from 1962 to 1964, explained his reasons for joining and staying in the movement in a letter to his parents after they sent him an underlined copy of a New York Times interview with Bayard Rustin. There, the long-term civil rights activist and organizer of the March on Washington argued that “many white students working with Negro students in the South could perform a more useful function if they returned home to agitate among the white people.” Lyon’s parents wanted him to heed this advice. He wished he could leave, he suggested in his reply. He would “rather be making money or generally enjoying myself which is the main thing I do not get to do in the South.” He stayed in the movement, he insisted, because to leave would be “regarded as traitorous; or anyway a kind of retreat morally.” “In many ways, I think the things I do here are good for me, to use a poor term,” he pleaded. “I have responsibility, in my work here, which frankly I hate. Somehow, because of the movement and the conditions of the country, I feel forced to face that responsibility. In the particular form, it means doing some SNCC pamphlets instead of riding and photographing motorcycles … None of us want to be here,” he continued. “Forman would like to be writing, John [Lewis] wants to go to Africa, and they all really want to leave, but can’t of course. The system remains, segregation has not yet fallen.” 56
Other white SNCC workers took Rustin’s critique to heart and tried to develop civil rights projects in white southern communities. White SNCC field worker Sam Shirah took up the question of white participation directly. Whites in the movement, he argued, were “crippled by guilt,” and these feelings of alienation made them romanticize “blackness” as the opposite of all that was wrong in their lives. White romanticism could provide a way into “true integration,” but only if white activists moved from loving blacks into accepting whites. Shirah called whites’ need to come to terms with their own race “white nationalism” to suggest its similarity to black nationalism. Whites in SNCC, Shirah suggested, should recruit white students to work in white communities. In the spring of 1964, Shirah, Ed Hamlett, Constance Curry, and other white southerners working in the civil rights movement created the Southern Student Organizing Committee to recruit white students to this new kind of organizing work. Veterans of civil rights work in the South, these organizers understood how the blacks they worked with in SNCC and other organizations might like and trust them personally and yet feel that strategically, African Americans needed to organize themselves. The historic, structural weight of white supremacy was just too great, and the newer burden of some liberal whites’ romanticization of rural blacks seemed, in this context, just too much to bear.57
When SNCC leader Bob Moses, Allard Lowenstein, a former president of the NSA, and other SNCC leaders began discussing the possibility of a summer organizing season in Mississippi, the idea of recruiting whites emerged as a divisive issue. Moses and Lowenstein had pioneered the use of white student volunteers, many from Stanford and Yale, in the small Freedom Vote experiments held in the fall of 1963, mock elections designed to prove that blacks in Mississippi wanted the franchise. White students, they found, were not only easy to recruit, they brought the national media to Mississippi and made federal officials, from FBI agents to Justice Department officials, work harder to prevent violent attacks. Based on this experience, they envisioned expanding the project the next summer. Volunteers would continue the effort to register black voters, but they would also build a set of parallel, democratic institutions: a new state Democratic Party, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), new Freedom Schools offering classes on everything from African American history to adult literacy, and community centers to house recreation and meeting facilities, libraries, and daycare centers. White volunteers, SNCC activists, and local blacks working together would bring the massive media attention and federal intervention necessary to break white segregationists’ hold on the state Lowenstein called “A Foreign Country in Our Midst.” 58
At a June 10, 1964, Atlanta staff meeting called to discuss the presence of guns in the Freedom House in Greenwood, Mississippi, staff members talked again about violence and the pending arrival of white volunteers. Everyone in the room understood the dangers local blacks faced in working with SNCC. Just that January, Louis Allen, a Mississippi black planning to testify against Herbert Lee’s murderer, had been shot at his home after he had asked for federal protection. Prathia Hall eloquently argued that no one could “be rational about death.” SNCC should “just bring the reality of our situation to the nation. Bring our bloodshed on to the white house door. If we die here it’s the whole society which has pulled the trigger.” Ruby Doris responded, “We know that the summer project was conceived with the idea that there would be bloodshed, but what does it mean to say that violence will be brought to the doorstep of the white house. No one in Birmingham rose after the shootings and bombings.” 59
Talk of the summer project turned the group’s attention to the question of white volunteers. Charles McLaurin wondered how SNCC could go into white communities with the idea of nonviolence. Mendy Samstein, one of at least two white staff members present, reminded the group that Ed Hamlett was “developing programs with about 25 southern whites.” That project was proving very difficult to establish because, as Samstein reminded them, “when whites hit McComb they were immediately beaten.” McLaurin replied, “When whites come down they rush into the Negro community. That’s why they’re beaten. Whites should develop within the white, not the Negro, community.” 60
The Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) officially ran the 1964 Mississippi Summer Project, or “Freedom Summer,” as a way to share resources and coordinate work with groups like CORE, also active in the state. But in its style and organization, the summer project belonged to SNCC. The mostly black veteran organizers of SNCC and other members of COFO and the local black people working with the mostly white summer volunteers put on display a version of an integrated world, a vision that overlapped substantially with white middle-class folk romanticism and SDS’s coalition of the alienated. The summer project also strengthened SNCC’s reputation for militant action, an image languishing as the Freedom Riders gave way to federal-government-approved voter registration efforts. SNCC was daring enough to taunt the segregationists and call on the government to make an unambiguous stand on the side of integration. “The Federal Government must take action,” Moses wrote about the upcoming project in January 1964, “even if it means the imposition of federal troops or the occupation of a town or particular locality.” Raising the issue of federal protection before any volunteers even arrived, Moses hoped “this is not asking too much of our country.” SNCC president John Lewis, speaking at a rally in California recruiting participants and support, warned that the summer project would “saturate” Mississippi with volunteers, creating a context in which “the Federal Government will have to take over the state.” Civil rights workers might provoke violence, he conceded, but “out of this conflict, this division and chaos, will come something positive.” All this publicity increased the SNCC “mystique,” drawing in more middle-class white supporters.61
For white students at elite northern and western universities and colleges, rural Mississippi seemed like a foreign land. In his reports to the NSA and speeches on campuses, Lowenstein described the state as literally an alien place where “you can’t picket, you can’t vote, you can’t boycott effectively, can’t mount mass protest of any kind, and can’t reach the mass media.” But the chance to leave their safe middle-class lives far behind and to make a difference working with rural poor black people attracted rather than dissuaded potential volunteers. Romanticism and a sense of social justice were often inseparable. Many volunteers left home hoping to find the real, the “authentic,” black folk down south, and to become real themselves. Sally Belfrage described the not always conscious motivations that led her and other white volunteers to Mississippi: “I go where the view is a different one, my responsibility somewhat less oppressive, my guilt less evident. In the backside of America,” Belfrage confessed, “there is little danger of discerning a face at all, much less my own. It is a pilgrimage to a foreign country; traveling there, I can leave my guilt behind and atone for someone else’s.” Many potential volunteers wrote on their applications that they must act in what some called the “Civil Rights Revolution,” which they understood as both a key moment in two centuries of American history and an event that was occurring in the South in particular rather than the entire country. Some candidates wanted to help people from “inadequate cultural backgrounds” and Americans who did not share their privileges. For Samuel Kipnis, a student at Reed College, the folk music revival was key. On his application, he listed his ability to play “American Folk Guitar”—he had taken “extensive lessons from Reverend Gary Davis, a Negro blind street singer from North Carolina”—as one of the skills that made him a desirable candidate. In reference to another candidate, an interviewer jotted on an application: “Has Car. Also has guitar.” Paul Cowan, another white volunteer, gave Pete Seeger part of the credit for his decision to go south. Another applicant claimed he had “suffered the rebukes of James Baldwin and the laments of Peter Seeger” long enough. “The time for empathy without action is long past. I am impatient and will act now.” 62
This Congress of Racial Equality brochure recruited participants for the 1964 Mississippi Summer Project. Ellin Freedom Summer Photograph Collection, McCain Library and Archives, The University of Southern Mississippi.
By late spring, as a result of SNCC’s and Lowenstein’s efforts, about 1,200 students had formally applied to participate in the project. Between 650 and 900 nonprofessionals—people who were not the lawyers, clergymen, politicians, and folk singers that also worked in the state that summer—actually went to Mississippi. Most of these summer volunteers were the kind of people Lowenstein and Lewis helped recruit, white college students from outside the region.63
On the ground, at the training sessions in Oxford, Ohio, and working in Mississippi, SNCC leader Bob Moses with his quiet words, shy manner, and sharecropper style became an important focus of white volunteers’ romanticism. “Don’t come to Mississippi this summer to save the Mississippi Negro,” Moses told one training class. “Only come if you understand, really understand, that his freedom and yours are one.” The volunteers, he insisted, were working for themselves as much as for local blacks. “He is a careful thinker, expresses himself with great economy and honesty, and with every word one is amazed at the amount of caring in the man,” one volunteer wrote home. “He is more or less the Jesus of the whole project, not because he asks to be, but because of everyone’s reaction to him.” Another described his style of leadership: “He was not in the least dynamic, but he forced you by what he said and by his manner of saying it, to want to partake of him, to come to him. He was not in any way outgoing, yet when he spoke you felt close to him.” Everyone mentioned his overalls.64
Pete Seeger meets with students in a Freedom School class at Mount Zion Baptist Church in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, on August 4, 1964. Randall Freedom Summer Photograph Collection, McCain Library and Archives, The University of Southern Mississippi.
Many volunteers adopted the modest goals Moses described during their training. “He said,” one volunteer wrote home, “that the mere fact of spending the summer in Negro homes would be an important victory” and that “our connections back home will give the project more protection, and bring the Justice Dept. into Mississippi in a bigger way.” “Maybe we’re not going to get very many people registered this summer,” a journalist and illustrator present at the training camp in Oxford recalled Moses saying to the volunteers. “Maybe, even, we’re not going to get very many people into the Freedom Schools. Maybe all we’re going to do is live through the summer. In Mississippi, that will be so much!” For many summer volunteers, Moses brought the romance of the activist as outsider to life.65
Volunteers fell in love with Fannie Lou Hamer too, present in Oxford at their training. Her story quickly circulated among the volunteers: how she had been rendered homeless and unemployed for the simple act of trying to register to vote and how, jailed for her civil rights work, she had endured a savage beating. “To watch her limp around here, encouraging the prayer sessions in which we all remember Senator Eastland and Governor Johnson and all the brutal people they sanction, is almost too much to take,” one volunteer wrote. “But it’s also a never-failing source of courage and determination.” In Oxford and later in Mississippi, many white volunteers found the depth and strength of many southern blacks’ Christian faith a source of wonder and awe.66
At training in Oxford, African American historian Vincent Harding gave these young white volunteers a way to think about what drew them: “Are you going as’In’ members of society to pull the’Outs’ in with you? Or are we all’Outs’?” In going to Mississippi, summer volunteers joined what SNCC, SDS, and other New Left leaders envisioned as the coalition of outsiders that would change America. Even after the danger became painfully concrete, most white volunteers chose to remain on the side of the “Outs.” Word of the murders of three activists—white CORE worker Michael Schwerner, black CORE worker James Chaney, and white summer project volunteer Andrew Goodman—in Neshoba County, Mississippi, reached many volunteers before they arrived.67
Just as Moses had predicted, the press followed white volunteers to Mississippi. As Julius Lester satirized the coverage, local feature stories on Freedom Summer followed a standard formula: “Blop-blop is a blue-eyed blond from Diamond Junction-on-the-Hudson, New York. She’s a twenty-year-old junior at Radcliff e majoring in Oriental metaphysics and its relationship to quantum theory … This summer she’s living with a Negro family in Fatback, Mississippi” National papers like the New York Times sometimes did better, but Lester’s critique captured a tone present in some of their coverage as well. “Ten wide-eyed white girls” were in Ruleville, Mississippi, the Times reported, “to teach freedom to Mississippi Negroes.” Katherine Logan, “a brunette in a blue dress, blinked in the bright sun.’I really don’t know what to expect,’ she said.” However much these articles exposed the brutally violent oppression at the heart of the Deep South racial order, they did not do it by promoting a vision of racial equality. They did it by telling a morality tale of America’s white best and brightest giving up their summers to save poor innocent black folks. Many newspapers and magazines covered the summer project the way turn-of-the-century newspapers covered foreign mission work.68
Despite these articles, many white volunteers worked to fit in both with the black SNCC field workers who led their projects and with local blacks, and they made their metamorphosis, their transformation into outsiders, clear in their bodies, gestures, and speech as well as in their letters home. On dusty roads and hot porches, they fell in love with the black people they tried to organize and the community members who housed them. As staff member Charles Sherrod described SNCC’s community organizing work, “There is always a’mama,’ … a militant woman in the community, outspoken, understanding, and willing to catch hell, having already caught her share.” Summer project volunteers connected with these “mamas.” “I have become so close to the family I am staying with—eleven people,” one volunteer wrote her mom back home, “that Mrs. H. finally paid me a great compliment,” introducing the volunteer as her “adopted daughter.” “Such love oozes from this house I can’t begin to explain.” Another wrote home in deep admiration for the old black man who had taken them in. “He must be 75 years old, but he’s tough, still working, and willing to undergo danger,” and he baked “wonderful bread” too. They also greatly admired the people who tried to register to vote and came to the Freedom Schools.69
The relationships white volunteers formed with African Americans in Mississippi led many to compare their experiences there with their lives back home. Some admitted that the only black people they had ever really known before had been servants. Others described civil rights work in northern cities on issues like housing, trash collection in black neighborhoods, and hiring discrimination and admitted “the existence of oppressive systems in the North.” One volunteer wondered “why Southern Negroes seem to be less suspicious of our intentions than would Harlem Negroes.” Another felt that “this is so different from the North where there is the intense, bitter hatred which makes working in Harlem or Roxbury or Philadelphia so heartbreaking because there is this invisible wall.” “Mississippi is just a start,” one volunteer commented, sounding like she had read some SDS pamphlets. “This whole country needs changing so that everyone can live a life in which he is able to realize his full capacities as a human being.” Volunteers wanted to be like the full-time SNCC workers who directed their projects and “stand out against the background of a lazy-dead-end society.” They wanted to be like the community people who demonstrated such courage. They had found their models.70
In their identification with southern blacks, many summer volunteers adopted “the SNCC uniform,” the jeans and overalls worn by SNCC field secretaries. Few middle-class kids in America, white or black, wore jeans then; those were mostly for “greasers” and gang members, brash working-class kids, and farmers and other agricultural workers. In many of the photos of the sitins and Freedom Rides, for example, only the young segregationists attacking the civil rights activists wear jeans. By 1963, however, middle-class black activists in SNCC had changed their dress in deference to the poor southern blacks that they were working with and trying to organize. And in the summer of 1964, some male and female white volunteers copied them. One volunteer wrote home from Greenwood, Mississippi, that “two snicks just got married … in a little chapel on the ground floor of the office … All, including the bride, wore jeans.” 71
Jacob Blum, Mississippi Summer Project volunteer, hangs a voter registration sign in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, in the summer of 1964. Freedom Summer Photograph Collection, McCain Library and Archives, The University of Southern Mississippi.
The summer volunteers also copied SNCC veterans’ speech, a ready combination of rural vernacular and urban slang, and their use of music. By the end of the summer, they were “reckoning” about possible actions and “digging” the “freedom high” and singing the songs. They had started singing in the Ohio training sessions. They sang as they taught in Freedom Schools. And they sang as they canvassed for the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. In a black-and-white snapshot, Heather Booth holds her guitar up high, like many folksingers, as she prepares to play for Fannie Lou Hamer. From Ruleville, Mississippi, Booth wrote her brother back home that summer about the deep fear that sometimes kept her up at night and how the words of a song could help: “’We are not afraid. Oh Lord, deep in my heart, I do believe, We Shall Overcome Someday’ and then I think I began to truly understand what the words meant. Anyone who comes down here and is not afraid I think must be crazy as well as dangerous to this project … But the type of fear that they mean when they, when we, sing’we are not afraid’ is the type that immobilizes,” she continued. “The songs help to dissipate the fear. Some of the words in the songs do not hold real meaning on their own, others become rather monotonous—but when they are sung in unison, or sung silently by oneself, they take on new meaning beyond words or rhythm.” 72
One volunteer wrote home, “And so clothes cease to be a real concern.’Image’ ceases to be a real concern. If it ever was. In spite of the National Council of Churches’ advice, we crap on the clean, antiseptic, acceptable, decent middle-class’image.’ “ (The National Council of Churches had helped pay for the summer project training and sent ministers to Oxford, Ohio, and to Mississippi.) “It is that decency that we want to change, to’overcome,’ “ this volunteer argued. “It is that decency which shuts these’niggers’ in their board shacks with their middle-class television antennas rising above tarpaper roofs. So crap on your middle class, on your decency, mister Churches man. Get out of your god-damned new rented car. Get out of your pressed, proper clothes. Get out of your inoff ensive, shit-eating smile and crew-cut. Come join us who are sleeping on the floor … Come with us and walk, not ride, the dusty streets of north Gulfport.” Outsiders, they learned in Mississippi, were better than other Americans. Many white volunteers, in turn, used this love for black outsiders to transform themselves.73
This kind of thinking, however, created another problem. If Mississippi black people, outsiders in modern America, were better than whites, then what were the volunteers in Mississippi to do? “There is some strong ambivalence which goes with this work,” one volunteer wrote. “I sometimes fear that I am only helping to integrate some beautiful people into modern white society with all its depersonalization.” “Let’s all escape and be like the white man” seemed to many volunteers, as the summer wore on, as it had increasingly seemed to some full-time SNCC workers over the last two years, more another form of oppression than a cure.74
Segregationists thought of white summer volunteers as “nigger lovers” and “white niggers.” Black civil rights workers, as SNCC and COFO records of debates about the white summer volunteers make clear, thought of them both as a resource and as a problem. For black activists, white volunteers’ identification could be a compliment as well as a burden. Being cast in the role of the black outsider was not equality. White workers might talk about how black people fighting segregation in Mississippi, with their courage to face death, seemed so free despite the discrimination and violence they faced. But what if black SNCC activists and black locals did not feel free? What if whites’ romanticism was another form of oppression? The tensions between the mostly black SNCC field secretaries and the mostly white volunteers simmered beneath the surface of summer project activities. “But we didn’t have to come, did we,” Belfrage wrote, trying to explain the contradictory feelings white volunteers experienced. “We could have stayed at home and gone to the beach, or earned the money we so badly needed for next semester at old Northern White. And here we are: We Came. Among all the millions who could have realized their responsibility to this revolution, we alone came … Don’t we earn some recognition, if not praise? I want to be your friend, you black idiot was the contradiction everywhere evident.” Being called on to make the white kids feel okay about their own racial identities was for black workers yet another burden to bear—like too little money and too much heat and the white men in the pickup truck without plates circling the Freedom House for the fourth time, something else that was always there.75
In October 1964, the SNCC staff met in Waveland, Mississippi, to plan for the future. By many measures, Freedom Summer was a success. Almost fift een hundred people—college students, lawyers, doctors, ministers, and an assortment of famous folksingers—had come to the state to work for freedom. SNCC, pushed by Forman, Betty Gorman (who helped organize Friends of SNCC groups outside the South), and other Atlanta office people, had finally developed a wide fund-raising base in the North. Amidst all the articles about the summer project, SNCC ran advertisements in the New York Times and Washington Post urging people to wire politicians and send money. At the staff meeting, the number of paid workers (always in SNCC a very loose designation) increased sharply as members voted to add eighty-five new people, mostly middle-class young people, many of them white, from outside the South who had volunteered during the summer and then stayed, to the SNCC staff. SNCC was growing. SNCC was famous. SNCC was the leading edge of the southern civil rights movement. And the southern civil rights movement, in turn, was the leading edge of the New Left, the work making radical politics visible and broadly viable for the first time since the Red baiting of the early 1950s.76
SNCC’s successes, not its failures, exposed the limits of using white romanticism. What if what some people needed to soothe their psychological and cultural alienation was not what other people needed to stop their political and economic oppression? What if black activists did not want to be non-violent saints? What if poor black southerners did not want to be other people’s definition of authenticity?
It was a romance, and yet it was true. In SDS’s ERAP projects and even more strongly in SNCC’s Mississippi Summer Project, white middle-class young people and poor people, self-determination, rebellion, and authenticity all came together. The outsiders—people seeking political and economic self-determination— who wanted in came together with the insiders—people seeking cultural self-determination and individual self-expression—who wanted out, and for a moment it looked like white middle-class young people might turn their love for outsiders into a new left politics.
