http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/07/02/AR2010070202276.html\
By Jonathan Yardley
Sunday, July 4, 2010
FREEDOM SUMMER
The Savage Season That Made Mississippi Burn and Made America a Democracy
By Bruce Watson
Viking. 369 pp. $27.95
It was known as the "long, hot summer," the place being Mississippi
and the time being 1964. That the phrase came from the work of the
state's most famous and distinguished native son, William Faulkner,
was not without irony since Faulkner, who had died two years earlier,
had urged his fellow Mississippians to be calm and decent in the face
of the bigotry, discrimination and violence that were tearing them
apart. The summer was long and hot not merely because summer in
Mississippi is always long and hot but because the leadership of the
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee had chosen to subject the
state to what Bruce Watson calls "a racial firestorm."
It came in the form of the Mississippi Summer Project, better known
as Freedom Summer. For the most part outrages committed by whites
against blacks in Mississippi went unnoticed elsewhere, but SNCC was
determined to change that. Watson, whose useful, thorough chronicle
of this unjustly forgotten time is marred by an occasional lapse into
overheated prose, describes SNCC's strategy as follows:
"What if, instead of Mississippi's black folk struggling in
isolation, hundreds of college students from all across the country
poured into the state? Wouldn't America pay attention then? And what
if, along with [voter] registration drives, these volunteers staffed
Freedom Schools, teaching black kids subjects their 'separate but
equal' schools would never teach? Black history. Black literature.
The root causes of poverty. What if, in the spirit of America's new
Peace Corps, this 'domestic Peace Corps' set up Freedom Houses all
over Mississippi, with libraries, day cares, and evening classes in
literacy and voting rights? And what if, at the culmination of the
summer, delegates from a new Freedom Party went to the Democratic
National Convention to claim, beneath the spotlight of network news,
that they, not Mississippi's all-white delegation, were the rightful
representatives from the Magnolia State?"
John Lewis, who then was 24 years old and chairman of SNCC, put it
this way: "Before the Negro people get the right to vote, there will
have to be a massive confrontation, and it will probably come this
summer. . . . We are going to Mississippi full force." Actually, the
"force" was rather small -- a few hundred college students and other
young people -- but so far as white Mississippi was concerned it was
an invading army. Mississippi in the 1960s "was a mean and snarling
state, run by tight-lipped politicians, bigoted sheriffs, and cops
'not playing with' anyone who crossed them." One notable
Mississippian, Walker Percy, wrote: "During the past ten years,
Mississippi as a society reached a condition which can only be
described, in an analogous but exact sense of the word, as insane."
White-on-black violence was pandemic. The case that caught the
world's attention had occurred in 1955, when a black teenager from
Chicago named Emmett Till "flirted with a white woman" and was
brutally murdered; his killers were let off with an official wink.
Faulkner wrote in despair: "If we in America have reached that point
in our desperate culture when we must murder children, no matter for
what reason or what color, we don't deserve to survive, and probably
won't." But if anything, the violence ramped up, Watson writes:
"Within four years, ten more Mississippi blacks were murdered by
whites; no guilty verdicts were rendered. The reign of terror also
revived lynching. In the tiny town of Poplarville, Mack Parker,
accused of rape, was dragged from jail and later found in chains,
drifting in a logjam on the Pearl River."
In the year of Freedom Summer, a book called "Mississippi: The Closed
Society" was published by an uncommonly forthright and courageous
professor of history at the University of Mississippi named James
Silver. In it he said, among many other things, that the state was
"as near to approximating a police state as anything we have yet seen
in America," and the police were both solely and wholly there to
uphold the racial status quo. Black Mississippians were vilified,
denied the most fundamental rights of American citizens, clubbed and
shot, disfigured and murdered. A place of at times heart-breaking
natural beauty, Mississippi was in reality a hell hole.
This was what the young people from California and New England and
other such places found when they began to arrive in June 1964.
Watson focuses on four of them, three of whom are white: Chris
Williams from Massachusetts, Fred Winn from California, and Fran
O'Brien, also a Californian. The fourth, Muriel Tillinghast, was a
bit older, a native of the District of Columbia and a recent graduate
of Howard University. All were put to the test in various ways --
O'Brien's was the most violent and debasing -- but all came away with
their convictions reinforced and deepened. All also were profoundly
and lastingly impressed by the quiet courage and innate decency of
even the poorest and most desperate black Mississippians whom they
met and with whom they lived. It was a learning experience on both
sides: The whites discovered the humanity and individuality of people
who previously had been little more than a vague blur, while the
blacks for the first time were in the company of whites who treated
them with respect and admiration.
Whites -- not just in Mississippi but throughout the South --
referred to those who came from other places to work for civil rights
as "outside agitators." Watson has found a lovely comment on this by
a confident, outspoken Mississippi African American named Robert
Miles, who welcomed a group of young volunteers as follows: "Y'all
gonna hear a lot of different stories from white folks about what
these people are and why they're down here. White folks are gonna
tell you they're agitators. You know what an agitator is? An agitator
is the piece in the center of a washing machine to get dirt out.
Well, that's what these people are here for. They're here to get dirt out."
Things never got dirtier than on the night of June 21, when three
young men -- two white outsiders and a native black Mississippian --
were arrested in Neshoba County, then released and not seen again
until August, when their bodies were found buried under a dam in the
same county. Their names were Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner and
James Chaney. It took years for the full truth to come out -- they
were murdered by the Ku Klux Klan, with the complicity and approval
of Sheriff Lawrence Rainey and his deputy, Cecil Price -- but the
case immediately woke the nation to the brutal facts about the closed
society in Mississippi. Like the murders of four schoolgirls in
Birmingham the previous year, this case created martyrs whose deaths
awakened a complacent nation.
Though Watson's penchant for overripe prose, as in the passage quoted
at length in the third paragraph of this review, is matched by his
occasional ventures into hagiography -- his portrait of Bob Moses,
the SNCC leader, borders on hero worship -- he recreates the texture
of that terrible yet rewarding summer with impressive verisimilitude.
This means that at times the book is painful reading because
Mississippi was a painful place in those days, and Watson does not
shrink from even the worst details. As one who at the time was only a
few years older than the student volunteers, I watched the summer
unfold from afar, in horror and macabre fascination. I have never
been able to forget it and am perpetually astonished at how few of my
contemporaries remember it and how little younger people seem to know
about it. It is a wild exaggeration to say, as Watson's melodramatic
subtitle does, that Freedom Summer "Made America a Democracy," but it
certainly was important, and it deserves to be honored.
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