A Season to Remember

...They vanished, and their bodies—two white, one black—weren't found until August...

...Classes were held on the lawn in front of the smoldering ruins...

...Freedom Summer is worth the time just for the reminder of the bravery marking it—the young black activists who conceived it and led it and the Northern students who came and stayed after disappearances and bombings demonstrated the risks—and, above all, the even braver local black people who took the white kids into their homes, went to the courthouse in their Sunday best, and attended the schools and mass meetings—knowing full well that, when the summer was over, and the students went home, they would still be living in Mississippi...

...But in reality, of course, there weren't any black FBI agents at the time...

...The volunteers fanned out all over the state, talking to people in their homes...

...And he largely succeeds...

...President Lyndon Johnson even deployed 200 Marines at one point, before changing his mind and recalling them...

...Nevertheless, 17,000 blacks made the trip that summer...

...Project staff had hoped for about a thousand students...

...Thus, Freedom Summer was born—a joint project of SNCC and the Congress of Racial Equality, though SNCC ran it in four-fifths of the state...

...McAdam's book is full of such tales...

...But Doug McAdam has written a fine study...

...to come and serve as volunteers in the state of Mississippi?'" National attention they certainly got— more quickly than they had bargained for...

...There's only a taste of the exciting story of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party delegation that traveled to Atlantic City to challenge the credentials of the state's white Democrats and was cruelly crushed by President Johnson, aided and abetted by the then-unknown attorney general of Minnesota, Walter Mondale...

...he delivers on his promise to provide a retrospective account of Freedom Summer...

...They took interest in a project house which, Un-gar writes, "was found to include a Catholic nun, a former FBI agent, the son-in-law of a prominent Northern newspaper publisher, the daughter of a member of the Communist Party in a midwestern city, a reporter from a small newspaper in the West, and someone the investigators concluded was 'an oversexed Vassar girl.'" Some people originally investigated that summer would be under surveillance for years to come...

...Yes, the agents did start going after the Klan and enforcing the Civil Rights Act...

...Such results were recorded everywhere in Mississippi that summer, despite the constant violence so prominently featured in Mississippi Burning...

...He wants to tell the story of Freedom Summer and assess its impact on both the volunteers and American society as a whole...

...At the Freedom Schools, set up for reading, current events discussions, and leadership development, the volunteers were overwhelmed by the response...

...Too much of it is written in so-ciologese, but it is a sociological study...

...The many instances of delay, obstruction, and harassment of the applicants," he writes, "were duly recorded by the volunteers...

...It was simply the most important experience of my life," one volunteer told McAdam in 1985...

...nation's attention on Mississippi to force the Federal Government to intervene...

...a curious thing happened: The daily newspaper lists of those registering to vote were transformed from an effective means of social control into a vehicle for gaining prestige in the black community...

...The events of the summer effectively resocialized and radicalized the volunteers while the ties they established with other volunteers laid the groundwork for a nationwide activist network out of which the other major movements of the era—women's, antiwar, student—were to emerge...

...Center in Atlanta, he found, all neatly organized and catalogued, the original five-page forms filled out by the students applying to work on the Freedom Summer project—including about 300 filled out by people who applied, were accepted, and then did not go to Mississippi...

...The FBI dispatched teams of agents to interview every Klan member in the state and borrowed sailors from a nearby Navy base to search the swamp where the workers' car was found...

...It was really a problem to count the number of FBI agents who were there to protect the students...

...So then we said, 'Well, now, why don't we invite lots of whites...

...There had never been a shortage of "mysterious" deaths of Mississippi blacks-half a dozen already in 1964, two of them directly related to SNCC voter-registration work...

...The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee had been in residence since 1961, but its members met with violent resistance everywhere they turned...

...It was just that gross...

...In McComb, seventy-five people showed up for class the morning after a bomb leveled the church they had been using as a school...

...Once they persuaded someone to try to register, though, a trip to the courthouse was necessary, and, as McAdam points out, "This was a momentous and potentially dangerous act, a public challenge to the established order, and an invitation to violence or economic reprisals...

...And as for voter registration—a major SNCC project—only 6.7 per cent of the black population was signed up...

...The inequities uncovered over the course of the summer helped to dramatize the need for legislation and therefore to generate momentum on behalf of the 1965 Voting Rights Act...

...Get Len Holt's The Summer That Didn't End or Elizabeth Sutherland's Letters from Mississippi or Sally Belfrage's Freedom Summer or Anne Moody's Coming of Age in Mississippi or, if you prefer fiction, but fiction that's true to history, Alice Walker's Meridian...

...In the course of research for the earlier book, McAdam happened upon a social scientist's dream: At the Martin Luther King Jr...

...There was as much chance of the new Civil Rights Act being enforced by local police and sheriffs' departments as there was that local school officials would suddenly decide to desegregate in compliance with the ten-year-old Supreme Court decision...

...Despite strenuous efforts by blacks, white Mississippi had managed for years to hold off change...

...It really set me on a course in my life that I'm still on...

...SNCC decided it needed to focus the Linda Rocawich is the associate editor of The Progressive...

...This book is their story...

...He also follows the volunteers into the present, and many of those tales are less uplifting...

...Wherever those white volunteers went, FBI agents followed," said SNCC's Lawrence Guyot...

...there were, in fact, six counties which had not one black voter though blacks outnumbered whites in each of them...

...Their experiences during the Freedom Vote campaign," writes Mc-Adam, "convinced the SNCC high command that nothing attracted the media quite like scenes of white college kids helping 'the downtrodden Negroes of Mississippi.' " The white students also attracted Federal officials...

...Preliminary checks of criminal and credit records caused further investigation of about half...

...Doug McAdam, a sociologist whose last work focused on the development of black insurgency from 1930 to 1970, now turns his attention to these volunteers, almost all of them white...

...the real one has to have been white...

...He quotes a letter one volunteer wrote home: "In Panola County now, the Negro citizens look with pride at their names in the Panolian\ they point out the names of friends and neighbors and hurry to the courthouse to be enlisted on the honor roll...

...But the nation turned to Mississippi when the white civil-rights workers disappeared in June...

...Agents tried to predict whether people were violence-prone or had "selfish motives," whatever those are...

...It's ironic, then, that the whole thing started not with the often-naive idealism evidenced by the volunteers applying to come, but in an act of cynicism by SNCC leaders...

...They took the oath and got badges, but they weren't assigned to new jobs...

...In Jackson, the new special agent in charge opened files on the summer volunteers...

...Rumors circulated for years that something like this really happened in a case involving the fire-bombing of a black family's home...

...Besides national attention, voter registration was the most important of SNCC's goals...

...A thousand young people trooped south to help with voter registration and teach in freedom schools...

...So Freedom Summer isn't the perfect round-trip ticket back to Mississippi in 1964, but Doug McAdam never claims to be offering one...

...In late June, as everyone knows, volunteer Andrew Goodman had been in Mississippi less than twenty-four hours when he drove off in a station wagon with SNCC staff members James Chaney and Michael Schwerner to investigate the bombing of a church near Philadelphia...

...You certainly won't find it in Mississippi Burning, either...

...Go to the library, instead...

...The case led to a permanent Federal presence, in the form of a new FBI field office in Jackson, which investigated civil-rights complaints and soon turned to ruthless efforts to infiltrate the Klan and create internal confusion and suspicion...

...No arrests were made, and no one in Washington took notice...

...In fact, if there is one accurate aspect to the Hollywood version of the murders of Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman—a story recently foisted on us in unrecognizable form as a film called Mississippi Burning—is that the FBI behaved like vigilantes on the loose...

...In the fall of 1963, they had invited a hundred white students from Stanford and Yale to come down for a week to help register blacks to vote in a symbolic Freedom Vote coinciding with the November election, and the event had been wildly successful...

...He wants to understand why they came, what happened to them while there, and what became of them...

...Historically, the publication of such lists had been enough to deter all but the most courageous, or craziest, blacks from trying to register to vote...

...With the help of an enormous bribe—rumor has it as high as $40,000—the FBI did find an informant to lead them to the bodies and secured convictions of at least some of the killers...

...As it became clear after a few days that local officials were doing nothing to find them, Attorney General Robert Kennedy sent in the FBI, claiming Federal jurisdiction of the case as a kidnapping...

...That sort of assessment, McAdam says, is commonplace...

...In Mississippi Burning, even the black FBI agent, who puts in only a fleeting appearance, gets to play a rogue: Essentially, he kidnaps and threatens to castrate a Klansman to scare him into talking...

...And, since the book concentrates on the experiences of the volunteers, much else that was going on at the same time is not here—the FBI investigations, for instance...

...He believes those two months marked the critical turning point not only for the volunteers but also for the New Left...

...All in all, its's an astonishing piece of research...

...When Kennedy ordered him to integrate the Bureau, he made a few of his black personal servants, chauffeurs, and office boys special agents...

...They wanted, remember, national attention and Federal intervention...

...For that, SNCC needed to capture the attention of the national media...

...Before Kennedy became Attorney General, J. Edgar Hoover was often heard to say, "As long as I am Director, there will never be a Negro special agent of the FBI...

...They also started investigating the civil-rights workers, including the Freedom Summer volunteers, according to Sanford J. Ungar's thoroughgoing 1976 study FBI...

...He mailed out questionnaires to them all and conducted personal interviews with eighty—forty from each group...

...Supplemented by his wide reading of earlier accounts of the project and energetic rummaging in the various archives where these letter-writing, paper-collecting young people deposited their leavings, it makes for a marvelous narrative of the Freedom Summer experience...

...The effect on the black community was important, too...

...Freedom Summer's significance, he writes, "lies both in the events of the summer and the cultural and political consequences that flowed from it...

...Through a variety of means, McAdam managed to locate 556 of the 959 people whose applications he had—382 project participants and 174 who withdrew before summer began...

...In many towns, McAdam relates, "Newspaper editors did their share for the old order by printing daily lists of those attempting to register, thereby making the names of the registrants available to anyone who might be inclined to take offense at such a brazen act of defiance...

...As is usually the case with vigilantes, the FBI in Mississippi proved to be more problem than solution...

...Instead, more than 3,000 turned out...

...Troubled personal lives often come with serious political activism...

...Only 1,600 of the completed applications were accepted by state registrars, but McAdam claims they made a major contribution to democratization of voting in the South...