MISSISSIPPI SUMMER-1964
Mills, Nicolaus
In the summer of 1964 July was "Hospitality Month" in Mississippi. But as the volunteers and staff of the Mississippi Summer Project began settling into the countryside, what they found waiting...
...Even in a town such as Greenwood, where COFO had its summer headquarters, numbers did not guarantee safety or allow for a quiet walk in the evening...
...Every home was well stocked with firearms...
...I have become so close to the family I am staying with—eleven people—that Mrs...
...Often the closeness could only be described in selfconscious terms...
...Can't you see, I've gone and got myself a white girl," the neighbors were laughingly told...
...Paul Cowan, The Making of an UnAmerican (New York: Viking Press, 1970), pp...
...UNLIKE BOB MOSES'S LETTER to the volunteers' parents, the Security Handbook was not written for public consumption...
...For the volunteers who kept working at it, there were, however, breakthroughs, and when these breakthroughs occurred, what followed was a closeness that deeply touched them— and the families they were staying with...
...A volunteer did not have to struggle for the right words when it came to writing about, "Kids that eat a bit of bread for breakfast, chicken necks for dinner...
...See Reel 39: Bob Moses, "Letter to Parents of All Summer Volunteers...
...The majority had come not as ideologues but as young men and women drawn by the need to be useful...
...The threat of suspended credit and foreclosure is a tremendous burden...
...Security Handbook...
...I have used it, and I have also quoted from unpublished material from the State Historical Society of Wisconsin...
...All doors must be locked...
...But even as the 1960s drew to a close there would be no sentimentalizing the volunteers' Mississippi experience...
...Then I strip down naked and stand in the bucket to wash...
...When getting out of a car at night, make sure the car's inside light is out...
...This article is taken from a forthcoming book, Mississippi Summer 1964...
...The feeling of security evaporates when we go downtown," a Laurel volunteer observed, and in Greenville Nancy Schieffelin found the same dependence emerging: "We eat in Negro restaurants, frequent only Negro joints...
...Nobody goin' to move in here...
...Klan headquarters issued an instruction sheet that said, "Each local unit must make a thorough study of the technique of harassing the enemy at little or no cost to themselves...
...Senator Stennis quoted in the Washington Post, June 25, 1964...
...The white man in the car is a threat...
...A volunteer could still be afraid, but he or she had to have a concrete sense of where the dangers lay...
...Everything we did this summer could have and should have been done by the Federal government," Frank Cieciorka bitterly noted...
...When I walk, I am always looking for cars and people: if Negro, they are my friends...
...The Jackson police force was doubled, two hundred shotguns were bought, tear gas masks were provided for every policeman, and detention compounds, which the mayor claimed could hold up to 25,000 prisoners, were set up...
...There is a certainty, when you are working in Mississippi, that it is important for you to be alive, and to be alive doing just what you are doing," a Radcliffe volunteer wrote...
...Nearly everyone black in Mississippi is at least a year in debt...
...I'm praying for you.'" Above all, the volunteers saw how close to the edge blacks lived in Mississippi...
...THE MOST REVEALING LETTERS OF ALL, however, were not those the volunteers wrote as sympathetic observers but those they wrote as outsiders immersed in the black life of Mississippi...
...But as the volunteers and staff of the Mississippi Summer Project began settling into the countryside, what they found waiting for them was, as one volunteer put it, a "magnolia jungle...
...The disappearance of Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman so quickly after their arrival in Mississippi more than justified these fears, but even if nothing had happened to the three men, the advice in the handbook made sense...
...It is difficult to avoid a touch of cynicism when you realize the government is putting so much effort into supporting unpopular regimes abroad that it had to leave the enforcement of the Constitution to college students in Mississippi...
...I told him to sit down...
...Help was also needed from the federal government, and in the same letter in which he tried to assure the volunteers' parents of COFO's commitment to "non-violence in all situations," he urged the parents to use whatever power they had to spur the FBI and Justice Department into action...
...They also had to accustom themselves to the poverty of the families they were staying with...
...In Jackson, the state capital, Mayor Allen Thompson turned the city into an armed fortress...
...In St...
...Last summer I went to Mississippi to join the struggle for civil rights...
...Before 196 leaving Oxford, volunteer Jan Handke had written her parents, "My mind still stumbles on the realization that I'm actually going to Mississippi...
...I begged him to sit down...
...Women still call you Mr...
...The physical bravery their black hosts showed was what was most striking to the volunteers, and the context in which that bravery showed itself was driven home by the reaction to the disappearance of Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman...
...Zion Methodist Church in Neshoba County, which had been fire-bombed days earlier after its congregation said it could be used to house a summer Freedom School...
...The changes the volunteers went through were very much like those James Agee describes in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men when he goes from being a writer doing a story about Georgia sharecroppers to someone sharing their food and sleeping in their beds...
...But long before July, the hate campaign against the Summer Project was in full swing among the organizations whose members were likely to do the fire bombings...
...As to why we're going down, if anyone gave a simple answer, I'd be suspicious," said Sam Walker, a University of Michigan senior...
...neighbors file in and out to have a look at us," a Canton volunteer found, and in Batesville Geoff Cowan realized that, even with the best intentions, some feelings were too ingrained to be changed in a short time...
...Somehow or another, everything was all right after that...
...every time we drove up to a house at night, we sounded our horns to let the household know we were friends...
...Now such worries had to be assimilated...
...I saw other children today who bore the marks of the Negro in rural Mississippi...
...Er the volunteers, what followed was that the kind of lesson that could not be taught at Oxford was learned very quickly in Mississippi...
...Harper's, January 1967, p. 34...
...By mid-June there was not a corner of Mississippi that was safe, nor a court system in which a volunteer could expect a fair trial.' On arriving in Mississippi the first task the volunteers faced was adjusting to the conditions on which their survival depended...
...Above all, there was the anger...
...The bugs and dirt and heat of an America they had only read about were now theirs...
...In July the Klan's official Mississippi publication, the Klan Ledger, would warn, "We are not going to sit back and permit our rights and the rights of our posterity to be negotiated away by a group composed of atheistic priests, brain-washed black savages, and mongrelized money-worshippers, meeting with some stupid or cowardly politician...
...I n a letter to the parents of all the volunteers, Bob Moses, director of the Summer Project, pledged restraint...
...The best source of published letters from the volunteers is Elizabeth Sutherland's Letters from Mississippi...
...There are no old people's homes, no 197 hired nurses," Lisa Vogel sadly noted...
...Don Whitehead, Attack on Terror (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1970), p. 103...
...It instructed the volunteer to "Know all roads in and out of town...
...In Mississippi black voter registration would go from a 1964 low of 6.7 percent of those eligible to 62.2 percent by the start of the 1970s...
...He did, in great confusion...
...They mistook our arrogant assumption that we could show them how to transform Mississippi's institutions for a Machiavellian desire to control the movement...
...Sometimes you feel you're getting there when a woman tells you about her fears and tells how she lies to the white folks but secretly hates them," Cowan wrote...
...But there was nothing funny about the state of mind all this represented...
...and William McCord, Mississippi: The Long Hot Summer (New York: Norton, 1965), p. 48...
...The overkill in Jackson was symbolized by the purchase of an armored personnel carrier, outfitted with twelve-gauge steel walls and bullet-proof windows and quickly nicknamed the "Thompson tank...
...Talking to us, the woman could only say, `You're freedom...
...The volunteers also learned there were problems no amount of ingenuity could cover up...
...As John Lewis, chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) observed at the start of the summer, "Mississippi is the stronghold of the whole vicious system of segregation...
...But a white man never turns black in Mississippi...
...When we complained about their attitude, it became apparent that they could not imagine how deeply they had hurt us," Vicksburg volunteer Paul Cowan would write in his autobiographical The Making of an UnAmerican...
...Working there has given me a clarity about what I want to be learning in college that three years in Widener Library could not give...
...It's pitch black so we shine Mr...
...Governor Paul Johnson and the Mississippi State Legislature had taken the lead...
...I gave medical advice this week to a father whose son had an abscess on his chest," he reported...
...The volunteers' day-to-day survival rested on the ability of the black families they were staying with to protect them...
...Then suddenly the tone of the letter changes, and what emerges is how much the volunteer has been changed by his time in Mississippi...
...I cannot describe the fears, the tensions, the uncertainties of living here," wrote a Greenwood volunteer...
...They might come from the "best schools" in the country, but in Mississippi they were the enemy and there was no place they could hide...
...We take this bucket out in the backyard and fill it with water warmed over a fire...
...In the spring they had doubled the number of state highway patrolmen, then passed laws that allowed highway patrol officers to make arrests within the limits of a city and to act as policemen, even without a request from local officials...
...The Negroes are our security...
...That doesn't disappear when they start to talk about fear...
...Without planning to, they became politicized, and by the end of the summer, they discovered there was no settling back into a routine of dates, exams, and football games...
...For me, the gesture has already become one of kinship It means a lot...
...There are still the long silences and the incomprehensible phrases...
...Part of it is the American dream, you know, and part is shame...
...For Sally Belfrage, staying with the Amos family in Greenwood, it was necessary to use her authority to deny her authority...
...But Moses knew that by itself such caution would not be enough to protect the volunteers...
...One day has passed in Shaw, and the other America is opening itself up before my naive, middle-class eyes," a new arrival noted...
...The most moving passages in the volunteers' letters are invariably descriptions of the children they encountered...
...Typical is the July 4th letter of a Hattiesburg volunteer...
...One had to acknowledge then that, for all it achieved, the Summer Project still needed a completion...
...What the volunteers found in Mississippi was a life far worse and a federal government far more tolerant of injustice than they had imagined...
...it means I'm with you...
...We're constantly on display when we're at the house...
...We were constantly reminded that we were in Mississippi," Stephen Bingham wrote...
...These were scenes that shook the volunteers to the core, and when they described them, they did so in a language in which even the clinical was moving...
...Their continuing belief in the ethic of the early 1960s and the distinction so many of them drew between it and the counterculture of the late 1960s would, they discovered, be a liability...
...They came, as a result of their own trials, to appreciate the courage and self-discipline it took for blacks to survive in Mississippi day by day...
...Sweat covers my skin and cakes brown in my joints—wrist, elbow, knee, neck...
...From July on, however, their letters are not only filled with bitterness about the system but with doubts about their ability to be equal to the people they had come to help...
...As the volunteers settled into their summer routines, they began, however, to adopt a caution they had not anticipated...
...Alone in the North, cut off from one another and from a civil rights movement that, in the words of SNCC chairman John Lewis, would be increasingly "black controlled, dominated, and led," the volunteers were never again to make a collective impact...
...At the same time the volunteers also came to appreciate the less spectacular courage blacks took in risking jobs that could be terminated at the whim of an employer...
...We are," he promised, "specifically avoiding any demonstrations for integrated facilities, as we do not feel the state is ready to permit such activity at this time...
...President Johnson responded to the disappearance of Schwerner, Goodman, and Chaney by sending sailors from the nearby Navy Air Station in Meridian to help search for them...
...6 Sally Belfrage, Freedom Summer (New York: Viking Press, 1965), p. 75...
...When it was determined that they were only local Negroes, not any of the three civil rights workers, all interest in them ceased...
...Unable to persuade Mr...
...I have begun, finally, to feel deep inside me the horrible double existence Negroes have to lead . . . the strategies they must learn to survive without either going crazy or being physically maimed—or destroyed...
...The volunteers had to learn to react in ways that even the COFO staff, with all its fears, had not anticipated...
...The nation would remember the Kennedy men as "the best and the brightest" and celebrate the Mercury astronauts for having "the right stuff...
...I've been to hundreds of houses I could kick down with my feet and a small hammer...
...One new law provided for massive quarantining (house arrest) "where there is imminent danger to public safety...
...At times the gratitude blacks showed could be overwhelming...
...We, in turn, saw their quick, wounded assertion of authority as brutish rejections of the selves we so desperately wanted them to use.' In a summer that began with the disappearance of Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman and before its end would include more than a thousand arrests and thirty-seven church burnings, the readiness of the volunteers to spend three months in Mississippi and in the process mount voter registration drives and establish Freedom Schools for 2,500 students was, however, no small accomplishment...
...Friends their own age now seemed naive, and like the young World War I veterans of Ernest Hemingway's short stories, the volunteers felt alienated when they tried to talk about their experiences...
...Safety, as Geoff Cowan discovered, could never be assumed...
...The father thanked me and kissed my hand...
...Know locations of sanctuaries and safe homes in the county...
...The only clue was the station wagon they had been driving when they went to inspect the ruins of the Mt...
...The aim of the Summer Project was to challenge the segregationist policies of the most openly racist state in the nation...
...it means good luck...
...Paul, I talked to twenty college students, their bland white faces in a circle around me," a Minnesota volunteer wrote...
...We are asking all parents to use their influence in the coming weeks to pressure President Johnson and Attorney General Kennedy into a commitment to protect workers before violence occurs, instead of waiting until the worst has happened before they offer their help," Moses wrote.' 195 For the volunteers, the new reality was epitomized by the Security Handbook they received before leaving Oxford...
...The volunteers in turn were often startlingly oblivious to the way their complaints—say of a misspelled press release— could cause the COFO staff pain, and for many of them the attention they received from the media seemed only natural in light of the fact that they had chosen to come South...
...Mississippi was, however, in no mood to accept a Second Reconstruction—especially one led by the Council of Confederated Organizations (COFO), a coalition made up of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and most important of all, SNCC, which had been doing voter registration in Mississippi since 1961...
...Middle-class college students, who could afford to take the summer off and pay their transportation and living expenses, the volunteers saw their commitment to the Summer Project as a way of legitimizing the comforts they had known since childhood...
...If the day-today lives of those it was designed to help were to change, a Third Reconstruction—in which the aim was nothing less than the economic transformation of black America—was required.' The author was involved in the civil rights movement in Alabama in 1965 and in Mississippi in 1966...
...Like the Boy Scout Handbook, COFO's handbook was above all concerned with practical advice...
...ACQUIRING A NEW SENSE OF DEPENDENCE and vulnerability was not, however, the only crucial adjustment the volunteers had to make...
...it means I'm fine...
...See C. Vann Woodward, "What Happened to the Civil Rights Movement...
...THE CHANGES THE SUMMER PROJECT produced were not confined to the South...
...In Gulfport a volunteer noted: "Fifty times a day people come up to us and thank us and tell us what we're doing is so fine, so good...
...They had a green light to do as they pleased...
...Another law made it a felony to circulate pamphlets that encouraged boycotts, and still another law made it a crime to operate a school without permission of the county clerk...
...It begins, "Every time I talk to people, I hear about things which bring tears to my eyes...
...It takes coming down here to grasp all this, no matter how many books we've read," is a constant refrain...
...it means howdy...
...Even over the course of the summer, there would be severe tensions between the Northern volunteers and COFO staff...
...Like Bosco poured into milk, much of my experience is still sitting on the surface of my mind...
...In anticipation of the civil rights "invasion," Mississippi had been whipped into a state of frenzy...
...If we can crack Mississippi, we will likely be able to crack the system in the rest of the country...
...The neighbors of the family Irene Paull was staying with were astonished to find her washing the dishes after dinner, but much to Paull's relief, the woman she was staying with found no need to defend what Paull was doing...
...39-40...
...H. finally paid me a great compliment," a Holmes County volunteer wrote her mother...
...They were not being metaphoric when they wrote, "The poverty and sorrow of the neighborhoods doesn't leave you...
...They saw that living on the black side of town meant living in neighborhoods "carefully marked by the abrupt ending of pavement, phone lines, electric lights, sewers...
...If violence erupts," Mississippi Senator John Stennis declared, "the blood will be on the hands of those who formed and led this invasion into a state where they were not welcome nor invited.'" Fr those who would be committing the violence, the meaning of such disclaimers was clear...
...When driving and a car approaches, I am always asking: black...
...Sally Belfrage's family became furious when COFO asked that her room be given to a married couple, who needed the privacy it afforded...
...In Berkeley, California, student leader Mario Savio would draw on his Mississippi experiences in leading the Free Speech Movement...
...our presence adds much to the load," Robert Feinglass observed, and in Shaw a volunteer reported, "Many of the homes we are staying in were shot up when the people went down to register during the past two years...
...That your room," an angry Mrs...
...In Batesville it was a similar story...
...I have to remind myself constantly of the danger, lest I make what could prove a fatal slip," volunteer Mike Clurman confessed...
...For many local citizens our coming was a religious event...
...Another person was fired from his job yesterday because two of us were staying with him...
...Even if they were not personally the victims of violence, there was always someone they knew who was...
...Amos told Belfrage...
...A half dozen scantily feathered chickens scratched in the dirt...
...201...
...Study the county map...
...I was passionate, and 200 later I thought, how comic and grim, how can the Mississippi Delta exist for these kids except as a fairy tale, because getting into one reality means cancelling out the other reality...
...and Reel 2: "Statement by John Lewis," Staff Meeting, February 1965...
...all shades drawn...
...In the context of invasion frenzy, it became possible for Mississippi officials to claim that any violence that occurred was not their responsibility but the invaders...
...But in the isolation of rural Mississippi, it was hard to be reassured by such concern or even by the president's dramatic July 2nd signing of the Civil Rights Act...
...As Clark Gardener, a volunteer staying in Carthage, observed, "Someone said at Oxford at the orientation session that once you are in Mississippi, everything outside it seems unreal— there is a lot of truth in it.'" It was necessary for the volunteers to understand that, although they had come to Mississippi to help, once they left the North they had also become dependents...
...THEN, AS NOW, THERE WAS NO WAY the volunteers, who never totaled as many as a thousand, could influence opinion by their weight of numbers...
...Several had distended stomachs," a volunteer angrily wrote, before breaking off his account to ask, "Is America really the land that greets its visitors with 'Send me your tired, your poor, your helpless masses . . . '?" Often the volunteers, most of whom had come South out of sympathy rather than political ideology, did not realize how radicalized they had become...
...Notes Internal memos, publications, and statements by SNCC staff and volunteers are taken from SNCC Papers (microfilm...
...198 Kids that don't have clothes to go to school in...
...The very old people, crippled and often mentally deranged, are home, wearily struggling to maintain themselves...
...Even in periods of calm there was, the volunteers came to realize, no way a Mississippi black could avoid paying a price for being black...
...We feel safe here surrounded by the Negro community...
...BUT THERE WAS ALSO A CLOSENESS that could be more natural and that showed up in daily routines and the possessiveness black families cam to feel toward the volunteers staying with them...
...The toughest problem, as volunteer Gene Nelson, a Yale student, noted, was "figuring out ways of being worth it...
...They saw that, if you were poor and black, social services were virtually nonexistent...
...Some barriers were not always possible to cross...
...This fall I am engaged in another phase of the same struggle, this time in Berkeley," Savio would tell a campus audience during a sit-in...
...The cockroaches draw patterns across the floor and table and make a live patchwork on the bed...
...Sometimes when we pass by, the children cheer," a Batesville volunteer reported...
...Geoff Cowan, quoted in Paul and Geoff Cowan, "And Three Letters from Mississippi," Esquire, September 1964, p. 106...
...The COFO organizers felt their leadership threatened by the volunteers, who at times seemed to take over rather than integrate themselves into a project, and they resented the fact that, despite the years COFO had been in Mississippi, the volunteers were the ones the media focused on...
...Mario Savio, "An End to History," in Massimo Teodori, ed., The New Left (Indianapolis: Bobbs Merrill, 1969), p. 159...
...This was not easy at first, especially for the volunteer who did not feel personally endangered...
...he wouldn't...
...But for most of the volunteers their next political involvement would come as they blended into the antiwar movement or committed themselves to local poverty issues...
...One had a protruding navel the size of the stone he held in his hand...
...Yes, freedom...
...if white, I am frightened and walk faster...
...Take heed, atheists and mongrels, we will not travel your path to Leninist Hall, but we will buy YOU a ticket to the Eternal if you insist...
...Often they seemed annoyed when we proposed new ways to register voters or to establish Freedom Schools...
...With the passage of the Civil Rights Bill of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the South would, as a result of the pressure the Summer Project helped generate, never again be the same...
...I was embarrassed and didn't know what to do, so I kissed his hand...
...Whatever small bit we did for Mississippi this summer, Mississippi did ten times as much for us...
...The volunteers' early letters home are filled with talk about the tension they feel and their measured routines...
...white...
...For a young medical student in Meridian, it was necessary to learn when not to be professional...
...The volunteers of most use to COFO were those who realized their whole way of thinking had to be changed...
...She was introducing me to one of her Negro women friends and said, 'This is Nancy, my adopted daughter...
...See Klan Ledger in Elizabeth Sutherland, ed., Letters from Mississippi (New York: McGraw Hill, 1965), p. 119...
...Those who had signed up for the Summer Project were marked men and women...
...It was no small task for the volunteers to make sure the kindness they received did not lapse into the deference toward whites that they were struggling to overcome...
...We can go nowhere alone or at night," wrote Jacques Calma, a volunteer isolated in the countryside...
...Living with a black family in the black section of town meant experiencing the same problems it did, and many of the volunteers were able to describe these problems with sympathy and insight...
...These include letters from Jan Handke, Clark Gardener, Stephen Bingham, Nancy Schieffelin, Mike Clurman, Jacques Calma, Lisa Vogel, Robert Feinglass, Eugene Nelson, Howard Zinn, and Frank Cieciorka...
...They learned they could get by without conveniences they had always relied on...
...The burned station wagon was found near the Bogue Chitto Swamp, miles from the road the three men would have taken to return home, and the message it conveyed was unmistakable...
...Irene Paull, "I Got Myself a White Girl...
...Amos to sit down while she was eating, Belfrage realized that "in some extraordinary paradox he would not think of us as equals until I ordered him to...
...Understanding these new rules of survival required the volunteers to lose the middle-class assurance they brought with them...
...As one volunteer grimly noted, "It is significant that while the Federal government and others were searching for the three missing bodies, they found two bodies . . . whose torsos were severed in half...
...I have had to force myself to follow the rigid safety precautions which have been carefully conceived for our protection...
...Geoff instead of Geoff, and old men offer their chairs...
...He dispatched Allen Dulles, former director of the Central Intelligence Agency, to meet with Mississippi Governor Paul Johnson in Jackson...
...Legislation was passed permitting cities and counties to borrow policemen from each other, and the kinds of activities COFO could be expected to engage in were specifically banned...
...The overhead light in the car must be disconnected...
...That was too troubling...
...Clark's truck lights on the bucket...
...Not only would segregation in public facilities end, there would be an equally dramatic turnaround in voter registration...
...Twenty-four hours after arriving in Mississippi from their Oxford, Ohio, training session, three Summer Project workers—student volunteer Andrew Goodman, CORE veteran Michael Schwerner, and Mississippi-born James Chaney—disappeared...
...THE LETTERS THE VOLUNTEERS WROTE as the summer came to an end show how profoundly they were affected...
...As the summer approached, the Klan began holding open rallies, and new organizations, such as the Association for the Preservation of the White Race, grew so rapidly that they ceased being marginal...
...Most of all, people would stop saying the Deep South couldn't be organized...
...That is the way you take a bath around here," a Mileston volunteer reported...
...Although most of the volunteers would leave Mississippi by the end of August, Mississippi would not leave them...
...it means we're all in this together...
...What was impossible to ignore was that this advice was designed to prevent the reader of this handbook from being murdered...
...Local officials were only too glad to follow these leads...
...Partly as a tactic and partly as a reflex, COFO workers constantly wave hello to all of Batesville's Negroes and the Negroes respond in kind," Cowan found...
...The advice it offered was a reflection of COFO's deepest fears about the summer...
...I watched an old man hobble with a cane to a tub of suds under a tree in his yard and help his crippled wife wash the clothes...
...It hasn't sunk down, much less been assimilated into my other nineteen years of experience...
...199 Such personal triumphs were not enough to give the Summer Project the immediate political success COFO wanted in voter registration, nor would the memory of them be enough to prevent the civil rights movement from dividing along racial lines later on...
Vol. 34 • April 1987 • No. 2
