Thirty-five years after Freedom Summer

...NICOLAUS MILLS iS the author of Like a Holy Crusade: Mississippi 1964—The Turning of the Civil Rights Movement in America...

...More than eighty thousand blacks cast protest votes and the media, intrigued by the idea of out-of-state white students coming to Mississippi, gave SNCC the kind of publicity it had not received for its earlier voter registration efforts...

...The students were the first wave of a task force of more than seven hundred volunteers that the predominantly black Council of Federated Organizations (COFO)—an alliance 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 the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)—had recruited to come to Mississippi for the summer...

...They were at first glance no different from the students one would expect to find on any college campus on a June afternoon...

...In Mississippi, where the Jackson ClarionLedger spoke for most of the state's whites in describing Freedom Summer as "an invasion," none of this was good news...

...Small wonder then that thirty-five years later we have such difficulty deciding how we should remember Freedom Summer...

...The three men were not the first civil rights victims in Mississippi, a state that between 1882 and 1952 had 534 reported lynchings...

...The letters the volunteers wrote home reflect the terror they felt, but despite that terror, they registered voters, started Freedom Schools, and built community centers...

...As MacArthur Cotton, a former Freedom Rider and one of SNCC's first Mississippi field secretaries observed, "We've got too much to lose if they come down DISSENT / Summer 1999 101 here and create a disturbance in two or three months, and they're gone...

...His response was to offer the MFDP two seats at the convention rather than deal with the issues they raised...

...Where the real dangers lay in Mississippi was now beyond question...

...The problem was that by the fall of 1964, the bitterness didn't just extend to the Democratic Party but to Freedom Summer itself...

...The way was now prepared for a SNCC that believed, "If we are to proceed toward true liberation, we must cut ourselves off from white people...

...He feared that the automation of cotton picking, the poor education of most Mississippi blacks, and the efforts of the White Citizens Councils to get blacks to leave the state could stop SNCC in its tracks...

...The bitterness made sense, especially after the events of Freedom Summer...

...The volunteers who gathered at Western College for Women seven months later had no sense of how reluctant many in SNCC were to have them come to Mississippi...

...This year the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg is honoring Freedom Summer and the unprecedented black-white alliance behind it with a conference and photo exhibit...

...Freedom Summer would not, however, end as its organizers hoped...

...For COFO and the MFDP, Johnson's backofthe-bus offer, as it was called, seemed like tokenism, and, after staging a sit-in, they left 102 DISSENT / Summer 1999 Atlantic City...

...At a meeting held in Waveland, Mississippi, in November, leader after leader argued that the time had come for SNCC to go it alone...

...The aim of Freedom Summer was to repeat the Freedom Vote experience on a wider level...

...In addition to the murders of Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman, there would be thirty-seven black church burnings, eighty beatings, and more than a thousand arrests of civil rights workers before the summer was over...

...There would never be another Freedom Summer...

...In 1964 uneasiness also surrounded Freedom Summer...

...On July 2, two days ahead of the July 4 deadline he had set, the president got the civil rights bill he wanted...

...It would be more than a year before whites were officially expelled from SNCC, but the thinking that had created the Mississippi Summer Project was over...

...Now these limited goals, along with SNCC chairman John Lewis's belief that "the Mississippi Summer Project is never going to end," were brushed aside...

...Within SNCC, which had been the driving force behind Freedom Summer as well as the dominant civil rights group in Mississippi, the failure of the Democratic Party to honor the MFDP's challenge was seen as proof that it did not pay to work with whites in any area...

...It was still possible, however, for the Freedom Summer volunteers and COFO staff to work in such an environment...

...The one bright spot in 1963 was SNCC's Freedom Vote campaign in which disenfranchised black voters cast symbolic votes for their candidates for governor and lieutenant governor: Aaron Henry, the president of the Mississippi NAACP, and Ed King, a white chaplain at historically black Tougaloo College...

...The realization for many was a shock, but it soon gave way to a greater shock...

...Most of all, by their very presence the Freedom Summer workers let the country see what Mississippi was like...

...On Sunday, June 21, as the first of two orientation sessions was coming to an end, word came that three Freedom Summer workers, Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman, who had left for Mississippi early Saturday morning, were missing...

...The Freedom Vote campaign was run with the aid of white college students recruited to come to Mississippi and proved an enormous success...

...Most difficult of all, we have to ask how it is that since the great black-white coalitions of the 1960s came apart, racial progress—in jobs, where only 52 percent of black men have full-time, year-round work, and public education, where nearly 70 percent of black students now attend schools with predominantly minority enrollment—has slowed to a crawl...

...It was a challenge Lyndon Johnson feared...

...But within SNCC it was also a strategy that was the source of much resentment...

...Neither the media nor the public would ignore their deaths...

...Central to COFO's planning was sending delegates from the integrated Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) it had helped form to the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City to challenge the seating of the all-white official Mississippi Democratic Party...

...The leader and moving force behind Freedom Summer was Bob Moses, a Harvard-educated New York City school teacher who had been trying to register black voters in Mississippi ever since he came to the small town of McComb in July 1961...

...To honor it in depth, we have to ask questions that are still painful...

...At a November 1963 SNCC meeting in Greenville, Mississippi, he argued, "We're not going to get people registered the way things are," and then added, "The one thing we can do for the country that no one else can do is be above the race issue...

...The idea that Mississippi's blacks were apathetic about voting or schooling was shot, as thousands risked their lives to do both...

...Only as their training session went on did they begin to grasp the depth of the racial tensions they brought with them...

...THIRTY-FIVE years ago this summer, a group of college students—most of them white, most of them Northerners, most of them middle class—began gathering at Western College for Women in Oxford, Ohio...

...In June Bob Moses had told the volunteers, "If we can go and come back alive, then that is something...

...If you can go into Negro homes and just sit and talk, that will be a huge job...

...Three decades later we are uneasy about exactly what lessons it teaches...

...But they were also not the usual victims...

...But around the country very little is being done to recall the summer of 1964...

...But in this case appearances were deceiving...

...The young black organizers that Bob Moses had recruited saw themselves suddenly taking a back seat to white college students who had no real knowledge of Mississippi and who would only be there for a short time...

...By the time the summer was over, it was the civil rights movement's version of the South that prevailed in the country as a whole...

...Moses quickly became a legend for his courage and his organizational genius, but by 1963, despite the inroads he and the small group of young black SNCC workers he recruited had made, their voter registration efforts were stalled...

...They were convinced that if arch-segregationist Mississippi could be cracked, the rest of the South would follow...

...After signing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, he had been told by his aide Bill Moyers, "I think we just delivered the South to the Republican Party for a long time to come...

...OB MOSES did not doubt that such dangers were real, but he also believed that time was not on SNCC's side...

...Johnson worried that he could lose the entire South if the white Mississippi delegation were forced to share power with the MFDP...

...They would instead show how prophetic Bob Moses had been when he told summer volunteers, "When you come south, you bring with you the concern of the country—because the people of the country don't identify with Negroes...

...Two of them, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, were white...

...Mississippi Freedom Summer would show, COFO believed, that the segregationist laws keeping more than 90 percent of Mississippi's eligible blacks from voting could be successfully challenged...

...Reporters began questioning Mississippi officials as they never had before, and Lyndon Johnson, still in the first year of his presidency, sent Allen Dulles, former Central Intelligence Agency chief, to investigate...

...Johnson also began pressing Congress to pass the civil rights bill that had been before it ever since it was submitted by John Kennedy in 1963...

...But it was also not grounds for retreat...

...Mass arrests of civil rights workers by Mississippi law enforcement officials had pushed SNCC's ability to raise bail money to the breaking point, and the Justice Department was of little help in providing SNCC with protection...

...We have to balance the way Freedom Summer opened up the Deep South, speeded passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and set the stage for the Voting Rights Act of 1965 against the schisms it led to within SNCC and ultimately the entire civil rights movement...