So what happened as a result of Mississippi’s Freedom Summer? Did the invasion of the visiting folk singers turn the situation around? Were the African-American citizens of Mississippi finally able to vote? Did the ten weeks of activism make a positive difference? The last three answers are no and no and yes. Freedom Summer did not result in thousands of new voters being registered. The numbers of registered voters remained about the same at the end of the summer as it had been when the invasion began.1 However, the summer did call international attention to the conditions in the American South and had a great deal to do with the eventual breakdown of the system. Before the summer of 1964 the national media had paid little attention to the suffering of African Americans in the Deep South. After that, it could not be ignored.
What grew out of the summer’s actions? Many of the benefits were educational. A system of some thirty to forty Freedom Schools was established to teach such forbidden subjects as basic literacy, math, black history, and constitutional rights. Held in private homes, churches, and outdoors, the schools enrolled both children and adults and operated on progressive principles that vastly influenced the educational reform movement of the sixties. Fifty Freedom Libraries were established across the state, providing books and lessons in literacy to citizens who’d never had libraries in their communities before. As was the case with the schools, the libraries were set up wherever they could be put: in private homes, churches, and abandoned houses.2
Other benefits were more political. One of the major goals of Freedom Summer had been to establish a Democratic Party that actually represented the people—all of them. The summer had been planned to culminate at the time of the Democratic convention, where the activists planned to attempt to get an alternative delegation recognized and seated. In this effort to give people control over their own lives and destinies, Bob Moses led in the creation of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP). He saw the alternative party as necessary because the regular Mississippi Democratic Party was segregated and had a history of violent racism. The goal was to get the MFDP recognized as the legitimate Democratic party in the state. That goal was never reached because Lyndon Johnson, afraid of losing the support of southerners during his reelection campaign, refused to seat the delegation at the 1964 Democratic convention.3 The COFO continued to build the party, though, and finally the Democratic Party was integrated and African Americans began winning elections in the state.
Ironically, racial tensions had caused the creation of an integrated force to bring racial justice to Mississippi. Those same tensions destroyed that force. The popular view among some African-American activists was that only media attention had caused positive changes and the media paid attention only because white people had become involved. Not until the bodies of Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner were found did the FBI take an interest in the rampant crime against African Americans in the state. When they searched the waters for the white activists’ bodies, the Feds found the corpses of eight murdered black men.4 The question raised by the black community was simple and important: Why hadn’t the FBI come to investigate any of those deaths before young white men were being killed? Why had the government ignored those murders? Did they value white supremacists votes more than black peoples’ lives?
These questions led to others that divided the civil rights movement like barbecued ribs. Ignoring the leadership of Bob Moses, the young black activists demanded to know why white people were leading a movement to help change the lives of black people. Why weren’t African Americans leading it? And why were these white people advocating Ghandian nonviolence when blacks were being brutally murdered by the white power structure? No, there was no need for white leadership, a segment of the African-American population said. What was needed was for blacks to lead their own causes, to be responsible for their own destinies, to develop their own personal and political power, instead of borrowing it from white leaders. No, Ghandian nonviolence was not for them; it was a nice theory, but it did not work against people so committed to a way of life that had never existed anywhere but in their diseased minds that they were willing to kill to protect it. What was needed was access to guns to fight back against white killers. From now on, they declared, the work would continue but it would be led and carried out by black people.
The white activists, forced out of the civil rights movement by this first flourishing of black power, moved on to other causes. So did many of the African Americans. Bob Moses, who had done so much to build this movement, left it, declaring that he had become too strong, too central to the movement, so that people who were capable of standing up by themselves continued to lean on him, to use him as a crutch. If the movement was to flourish, he believed, he would have to leave it. Gitlin reports that Moses then began a long and strange journey that eventually took him out of direct political activism altogether. Going by his middle name, Parris, instead of his last, Moses turned his attention to the war in Vietnam. He temporarily dropped his surname, using only his middle name and began participating in the campaign against the Vietnam War. Getting more deeply into anti-war activities, he left SNCC and journeyed to Africa. There he decided that African Americans must win their full freedom without the help and leadership of whites. He cut ties with the white activists he had recruited and the ones who had followed them into the fray. Upon his return to the United States, he went back to graduate school at Harvard, earning a master’s in the philosophy of math. When his daughter told him that her high school in Cambridge did not have an algebra teacher, he filled the gap, beginning a teaching career that occupied the rest of his working life.5