http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/19/books/19book.html
By DWIGHT GARNER
Published: July 18, 2010
The comedian Dick Gregory used to joke bitterly during the civil
rights era, that you could always spot a white moderate in
Mississippi. He was the "cat who wants to lynch you from a low tree."
Few in Mississippi got to hear Gregory's crack. When it came to race
issues the state operated under a virtual media lockdown in the early
1960s. When James Baldwin was a guest on "Today," NBC stations in
Mississippi cut to an old movie. When Thurgood Marshall, then an
N.A.A.C.P. lawyer, appeared on TV, a notice flashed: "Cable
Difficulty." Mississippi's ABC affiliates didn't want to air
"Bewitched," a new sitcom. Marriage between man and witch? Surely
that was code for interracial sex, for the coming mongrelization.
Mississippi pretended its race problems didn't exist. But as Bruce
Watson makes plain in his taut and involving new book, "Freedom
Summer," the rest of America in 1964 was beginning to have trouble
looking away from Mississippi. Ten years after Brown v. Board of
Education and nine years after Rosa Parks refused to move to the back
of the bus, the state hadn't budged. Nina Simone was recording a new
single most people in the state wouldn't get to hear either:
"Mississippi Goddam."
Blacks in Mississippi were almost entirely disenfranchised. Poll
taxes, literacy tests and other sorts of "legalistic voodoo," Mr.
Watson writes, kept them out of voting booths. Counties in which
blacks outnumbered whites had not a single black registered voter.
The words of a United States senator from Mississippi, Theodore G.
Bilbo, spoken in 1946, still hung heavily in the air: "I am calling
upon every red-blooded American who believes in the superiority and
integrity of the white race to get out and see" that no blacks vote.
"The best time to do it," he added ominously, "is the night before."
Mr. Watson's book derives its power at its best, it is the literary
equivalent of a hot light bulb dangling from a low ceiling from its
narrow focus. "Freedom Summer" is about the more than 700 college
students who, in the summer of 1964, under the supervision of the
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, risked their lives to
travel to Mississippi to register black voters and open schools. It
was a summer, Mr. Watson writes, that "brought out the best in
America" but "the worst in Mississippi."
The story of these months has been told before, but rarely this
viscerally. "Freedom Summer" opens with these students, many if not
most from places like Yale and Oberlin and Harvard and Berkeley,
arriving in Ohio in June 1964 to study with coordinating-committee
members before heading south. What they learned made some flee. They
were taught how to take a beating. A security handbook read, "No one
should go anywhere alone, but certainly not in an automobile and
certainly not at night."
Organizers cherry-picked the students they wanted. Any student with a
"John Brown complex" was out. So was anyone who expressed an interest
in interracial sex. Those who made the cut, the author writes, made
up "a group portrait of American idealism."
Many Americans remember the names Andrew Goodman, James Cheney and
Michael Schwerner, the three young volunteers who vanished that
summer, their bodies later found buried under a dam. What many forget
is that these three men disappeared on the very first day of the
Mississippi Summer Project, what Mr. Watson calls Freedom Summer.
Their abduction, examined in detail by Mr. Watson, terrified the
other volunteers.
Much more was to come. Some 35 black churches were burned in
Mississippi that summer, and five dozen homes and safe houses were
bombed. Volunteers were beaten, harassed by the police, arrested on
fraudulent charges. Shotguns were fired into the houses where they
slept. Pickup trucks filled with armed men followed volunteers around.
"Freedom Summer" bristles with fine details. One volunteer's father
told his son, "If the Klan gets a hold of you, yell 'My father is a
Mason!' " (Masonic code prevented one member from harming another's
family.) Mr. Watson writes about the celebrities who made brave
appearances in Mississippi that summer Sidney Poitier, Shirley
MacLaine, Harry Belafonte and Pete Seeger among them but also notes
those who were no-shows: the Staples Singers, Tom Paxton and Peter,
Paul and Mary. Among the young volunteers that summer were Barney
Frank, Susan Brownmiller and Harold Ickes.
Mr. Watson, whose previous books include "Sacco and Vanzetti: The
Men, the Murders, and the Judgment of Mankind," writes well about
Mississippi's culture in the 1960s and puts its residents' racial
views in careful historical context. It was a state "driven to its
knees" during the Civil War and still wary of the North. He notes the
"fears instilled by grandparents, fears of Yankees, carpetbaggers,
and a war that had never really ended." And he considers how
impossibly far the state has come in terms of racial issues in the
decades since.
"Freedom Summer" occasionally loses its footing. Clichés, like kudzu,
crawl in. (Mississippi was a "powder keg," and so on.) The prose
sometimes overheats and boils over into movie trailer hyperbole. Mr.
Watson mistakenly refers to Rabbi Arthur Lelyveld, who fought for
civil rights and was in Mississippi that summer, as Joseph Lelyveld.
(Arthur Lelyveld's son, Joseph Lelyveld, is a former executive editor
of The New York Times.) But Mr. Watson's narrative aim is mostly
vinegary and true.
The summer of 1964 in Mississippi was in some ways a failure for the
volunteers. They didn't register as many voters as they had hoped.
Their plans to unseat Mississippi's all-white delegation at the 1964
Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City came to naught. But
their actions had permanent resonance, bringing the nation's full
attention to Mississippi's second-class citizens. "If it hadn't been
for the veterans of Freedom Summer," Representative John Lewis of
Georgia says in this book, "there would be no Barack Obama."
It's hard to finish "Freedom Summer" without a comment by the
historian Howard Zinn ringing in your ears. To be with Student
Nonviolent Coordinating Committee members during the civil rights era
"walking a picket line in the rain in Hattiesburg, Miss. ... to see
them jabbed by electric prod poles and flung into paddy wagons in
Selma, Ala., or link arms and sing at the close of a church meeting
in the Delta" was, Mr. Zinn wrote, "to feel the presence of greatness."
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