COMMENTARY

Idealism of ‘Freedom Summer’ shines on even in cynical age

6/15/2014

Today the phrase “Freedom Summer” has a romantic tint, colored in idealism, shaded in glory: a noble moment of grandeur when blacks and whites from Mississippi and beyond united in a brave effort to fight segregation and register blacks to vote.

But a half-century ago, the effort known formally as the Mississippi Summer Project was both audacious and dangerous. Three civil-rights workers were ambushed, kidnapped, and killed. Another died in a car crash. Scores of Freedom Summer volunteers were beaten. Three dozen churches were bombed or burned. The granite walls of resistance were only barely penetrated. And when the summer ended, the progress that we today regard as inevitable still seemed impossible.

But 50 summers on, we now recognize that this was one of the signature episodes in America’s long story of racial strife and racial reconciliation.

It was a movement that was multifaith and multiracial but not really multigenerational. It was a youth campaign with almost no equal, except perhaps the flood of anti-war college students into New Hampshire for Eugene McCarthy’s presidential effort four years later — and there the principal obstacle was frigid temperatures and the only danger was icy stares.

This month, the anniversary of the movement’s start will bring forth a flood of testimonials but almost no reappraisals — for the effort was so pure in its purpose, so righteous in its goals, so wholesome in its intentions that, even in our contemporary culture of criticism, hardly anyone can condemn this mobilization of idealism.

As for the three who were abducted and then murdered, they are rightly remembered as martyrs to a sacred cause, and they are often remembered, surnames only, as if their names were the tolling of a bell: Chaney, Goodman, Schwerner.

The summer project was born out of despair, even desperation. Mississippi was an isolated backwater of the Deep South, a world unto its own, determined to remain that way, to retain its ancient outlook, folkways, and viewpoints, and to resist the most tentative movements toward integration.

Listen to the testimony of Dorie Ann Ladner, born in Hattiesburg, drawn into the civil-rights movement by the murder of Emmitt Till, expelled from Jackson State College for her activism, and instrumental in Freedom Summer:

“This was a very important part of our history because blacks were being killed, segregation was at its highest peak, we could not get public utilities, we could not try on clothes in stores, our education was very poor,” she said in a conversation this spring. “We were not treated like human beings.”

This sense of hopelessness led her to support bringing outsiders to the state. “We thought that college students from outside would bring along their parents, and their parents would bring along congressmen, and congressmen would bring along the federal government,” she said.

Not all the outsiders were white. Some were like Charlie Cobb, born in Washington and reared in Springfield, Mass., but with roots in Mississippi. He was field secretary for the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee at the time. This is his testimony, rendered on the phone this spring:

“Freedom Summer focused for the first time the attention of the nation on Mississippi. The idea was to bring the nation’s children — mostly white, mostly middle-class, or upper-middle-class children, many from politically connected families — to Mississippi and, as a result, the nation did look at Mississippi. That experience not only changed the students. It also changed the nation.”

The mastermind of the effort was Robert Parris Moses, almost always known as Bob, then as now a figure of great probity and perspective. Bloodied but determined to change both Mississippi and the nation, he was at once combative and comforting, particularly after the three abductees were found buried six weeks after their disappearance. Today, at age 79, he believes the effects of Freedom Summer were profound:

“It’s pretty clear now that it was absolutely critical, part of an earthquake. The March on Washington, Birmingham, Selma, and Montgomery — they were mobilizing efforts around specific targets. The Mississippi theater was the only place where the whole state was the target.”

And it had vast impact, eroding Dixiecrat control of the Democratic Party, itself buttressed by a one-party system in Mississippi that gave it outsized power on Capitol Hill and outsized influence on civil rights. Its power in Washington hobbled Washington’s ability to exercise power in Mississippi. Then came the formation of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. The group mounted a challenge to the state’s all-white delegation at the Democratic National Convention that summer in Atlantic City, N.J. That, too, was a Bob Moses movement.

“All the social, political, cultural and economic factors in Mississippi were for decades controlled only by Mississippi,” Mr. Moses said. “The rest of the country had nothing to say about it. And that meant institutionalizing black inferiority and white supremacy in the state and across the South — until then.”

The phrase “Summer of Love” is customarily applied to the Haight-Ashbury section of San Francisco in 1967 though somehow it seems more appropriate to the more enduring activities of Mississippi Summer.

But these were not summer soldiers and sunshine patriots — the phrase comes from Thomas Paine and an earlier American struggle for liberty — and their efforts did not end in 1964. Still, the summer of ’64 — in many ways more important than the summer of ’42, a time (and a movie) celebrated in American folklore — was a sunshine moment.

The Mississippi project was inspired in part by two white men, Allard Lowenstein, who later led the “Dump Johnson” movement and served in Congress, and Robert Spike, executive director of the National Council of Churches’ Commission on Religion and Race, both credited by Mr. Moses for mobilizing student and church forces.

Later, interracial strife would bloom inside SNCC and new voices of black separatism such as Stokely Carmichael would emerge. Within two years, Mr. Carmichael, later known as Kwame Ture, would replace John Lewis, a storied civil-rights activist and now a Democratic congressman, at the top of the organization. Mr. Carmichael died in 1998.

But that summer — tumultuous, thrilling, tragic — a bunch of largely white students led by a largely black organization helped change Mississippi, and the country beyond. Mississippi Summer was a summertime moment for us all.

David M. Shribman is executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Contact him at: dshribman@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1890.