The Best Were There
Horowitz, Rochelle
LETTERS FROM Mississippi, edited by Elizabeth Sutherland. New York: McGraw-Hill. 232 pp. $4.95. This book consists of letters written by Civil Rights volunteers, mostly students, who went...
...They all look like the Snopes family to me...
...from local economic conditions to police harassment...
...If there is need for a refutation of the White Citizens Councils' charge that the students were beatniks, perverts, and Communists, this book is it...
...The feel...
...Canton: We are constantly on display when we are at home: neighbors file in to have a look at us...
...I cannot describe the fears, the tensions, the uncertainties of living here...
...There can be no doubt, after reading the letters, that the best of America's youth went to Mississippi last summer...
...I really cannot tell you how repulsed I am by this state, nor how fervently I think something has to be done down here...
...This book consists of letters written by Civil Rights volunteers, mostly students, who went to Mississippi during the summer and wrote home...
...if white, I am frightened and walk faster...
...ing of security evaporates when we go downtown...
...When I walk I am always looking at cars and people: if Negro, they are my friends...
...The letters do not minimize the difficulties of organizing local Negroes, nor do they ignore the contradictory attitudes that greeted the volunteers...
...Avoiding almost all the pitfalls and temptations that such writing presents, the letters are honest, concise, wellwritten and rarely maudlin...
...Elizabeth Sutherland, a SNCC staff worker, has clone a fine job of editing...
...When driving and a car ap proaches, I am always asking 'black, white?' and from Laurel: We feel safe here surrounded by the Negro community...
...Ruleville: Last night we met two of her neighbors [an elderly Negro lady the volunteers were living with] .. . I felt that at any moment they would be willing to say 'Ma-am' to me, if I should raise my voice...
...One feels butterflies in the stomach at the first report of the disappearance of Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney, and later exultant at the precinct meetings of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party...
...How can I create an honest relationship after years of lies...
...There is no sliding over the unpleasant aspects of the Summer project—the Negro-white staff conflict, for instance, or the loneliness of the Northern white intellectual in Mississippi, or the frustration of being assigned to first one project, then another...
...Most prove the students were brave, honest, intelligent, idealistic, and prudent...
...Some letters are pompous, some minimize the victory at Atlantic City too much, others are too imitative of Negro jive...
...For example, a letter from Greenwood: I really cannot describe how sick I think this state is...
...When we go walking with the widows one of them invariably greets each passerby with 'have you seen my girls yet?' All in all the letters describe life in Mississippi—from the volunteers' first enthusiastic response at a church meeting to their later distaste for pie-intheskyism...
Vol. 12 • July 1965 • No. 3
