http://www.projo.com/books/content/BOOK-FREEDOM-SUMMER_07-11-10_5TJ1A0P_v12.43ff25c.html
July 11, 2010
By Luther Spoehr
In the summer of 1964, the state of Mississippi found itself in the
glare of history's headlights. Seven hundred college students,
organized by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, entered
America's most "closed society" to set up "Freedom Schools" and
register black voters. They were greeted by night riders, gunfire,
dynamite, arson and murder.
Ignoring the intensifying drumbeat of the Vietnam War, most of the
country had settled in to listen to the Beatles and the Beach Boys,
watch reruns of "Bonanza" and "The Beverly Hillbillies," and wait for
the Republican and Democratic conventions. But its attention turned
southward after the June 21 disappearance of Michael Schwerner, James
Chaney and Andrew Goodman, near Philadelphia, Miss.
Their bodies were found six weeks later, buried beneath an earthen
dam. Their colleagues carried on, enduring threats, intimidation and
beatings, and increasingly turned their energies to setting up the
Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, an integrated organization that
would challenge the right of Mississippi's all-white delegation to be
seated at the Democrats' Atlantic City convention.
Bruce Watson, author of books on Sacco and Vanzetti and the 1912
"Bread and Roses" strike in Lawrence, Mass., tells this story
energetically and sometimes eloquently. It's been told many times;
the best renditions, like John Dittmer's aptly-titled "Local People,"
emphasize how much the civil rights movement grew "from the bottom
up." Watson offers no new theoretical insights, but like Dittmer he
highlights the role of foot soldiers in freedom's army. Compared to
leaders such as Martin Luther King (only peripherally involved in
Mississippi), or Bob Moses (who shunned the spotlight), or Fannie Lou
Hamer (the MFDP's impassioned, fearless advocate), volunteers Muriel
Tillinghast, Chris Williams, Fran O'Brien and Fred Bright Winn are
unknown. Watson interviewed them (and many others), and by telling
their stories shows the individual and collective impact of "ordinary people."
Ultimately, Watson argues, "they had not been heroes that honorific
was still reserved for the locals. Nor were they crusaders many had
gone before them. They had merely gone to Mississippi when few others
dared to go. As witnesses, as spotlights, they had lent their
youthful energy to the struggles of the downtrodden and neglected."
Perhaps there are degrees of heroism. But putting labels aside,
Watson's narrative reminds us that Freedom Summer was an important catalyst.
Because of it, Fannie Lou Hamer sat before the Democratic Credentials
Committee and demanded poignantly, "Is this America? The land of the
free and the home of the brave? Where we have to sleep with our
telephones off of the hooks because our lives be threatened daily?
Because we want to live as decent human beings in America?" Because
of it, Congress passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Philadelphia,
Miss., elected a black mayor. And, SNCC icon John Lewis insists,
America could elect Barack Obama.
"The arc of the moral universe is long," Martin Luther King said,
"but it bends toward justice." Bruce Watson's riveting book shows how
young men and women sweated and sacrificed to bend it.
--
Luther Spoehr ( Luther_Spoehr@Brown.edu) teaches about the history of
the 1960s, among other things, at Brown University.
--
FREEDOM SUMMER: The Savage Season That Made Mississippi Burn and Made
America a Democracy,
by Bruce Watson.
Viking. 369 pages. $27.95.
.
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