“There is no state with a record that approaches that of Mississippi in inhumanity, murder, brutality and racial hatred,” Roy Wilkins, the executive director of the NAACP, said in 1963. “It is absolutely at the bottom of the list.” By then, few Northerners needed convincing. What the trailblazing political scientist V.O. Key had observed several years earlier—Mississippi, he wrote, was “the last vestige of a dying and despairing civilization”—seemed hardly in contention.
Fifty years ago this week, nearly 1,000 white students and clergymen—most of them from Northern states—converged on Mississippi to drag the state into the 20th century, kicking and screaming. They called it Freedom Summer.
Commemorations marking the project’s 50th anniversary will almost certainly rehearse familiar themes: the idealism of the students, the raw courage of veteran civil rights workers, the tensions between black staff members and white volunteers.
Sentimentality has its place, but we risk losing sight of the hard-nosed political calculations that informed and drove the initiative. The architects of Freedom Summer were shrewd, pragmatic veterans of a brutal street fight. They didn’t need the help of 1,000 privileged, affluent white students—not, at least, to register voters. Nor were they asking for reinforcements. Rather, they wagered that if white students from prominent Northern families were arrested, beaten and illegally jailed—as they fully expected they would be—the federal government would finally recognize its responsibility to intervene in Mississippi. We remember Freedom Summer as a moment of wide-eyed idealism, but the campaign was born of a realistic assessment of the limits of the post-war political climate. It was in many ways a very cynical strategy. And it worked.
The origins of Freedom Summer lay in 1961, when field staff from three prominent civil rights groups—the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the NAACP—formed the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) to increase black political participation in Mississippi. From the start, the project enjoyed funding from Northern philanthropies; it also had the full backing of Attorney General Robert Kennedy, who hoped the new organization would divert student activists from direct action campaigns like lunch-counter sit-ins and Freedom Rides, which elicited violent backlash and caused considerable embarrassment for federal authorities. Only in retrospect did Kennedy come to realize that voter registration was just another kind of powder keg; as late as 1964, only 6 percent of eligible black voters were on the rolls in Mississippi, and local officials were hell-bent on ensuring that number didn’t grow.
By mid-1963, COFO’s field staff—who had devoted nearly two years to recruiting potential voters, preparing them for citizenship and literacy tests and escorting them to county registrar offices—were at an impasse. Organizers had created “beachheads” in key towns, acknowledged Bob Moses, the understated but quietly charismatic math teacher from New York who led SNCC’s voter registration efforts in the Magnolia State, but it was “not possible for us to register Negroes in Mississippi.” An endless barrage of violence, police intimidation and economic reprisal hindered their efforts. Even when workers could convince black residents to go down to their local courthouse, county officials often refused to enroll them.
They believed that the press “would respond to the beating of a Yale student as it simply would not do to the beating of a local Negro.”
Local black professionals and businessmen who worked with COFO saw their bank loans called early, auto and home insurance policies summarily canceled and clientele dried up. The police beat and jailed organizers without cause. When Herbert Lee, a black farmer with nine children and an active member of the Amite County NAACP, volunteered to help Moses register local residents, state representative E.H. Hurst shot and killed him in broad daylight. The county coroner cleared Hurst of wrongdoing. The only eyewitness to the shooting, Army veteran and businessman Louis Allen, dared tell his story to federal authorities. Two-and-a-half years later, he, too, was murdered. “There was no real reason to kill Louis,” Moses later recalled. “And they gunned him down on his front lawn. We were just defenseless; there was no way of bringing national attention. And it seemed to me like we were just sitting ducks.” The assassination of state NAACP chief Medgar Evers in mid-1963 reinforced the message: No one was safe.
That year, the Taconic Foundation—the coalition’s key financial booster—withdrew support, citing the impossibility of enrolling a meaningful number of black voters.
Exacerbating the problem was the anemic response from Washington. The Kennedy Justice Department remained stubbornly in the thrall offederalism, forever grasping at reasons why it couldn’t intervene to protect the constitutional liberties and lives of civil rights workers, when it should have been looking for reasons why it could. Even when the issue at hand was clearly federal—as when state officials violated a longstanding Supreme Court decision mandating the integration of interstate bus terminals—Robert Kennedy proved a reluctant enforcer of the law.
So in the fall of 1963, organizers adopted a new strategy. Rather than continue the futile effort to register new voters, they staged a parallel “Freedom Ballot” as a publicity stunt. Assisted by roughly 70 white students from Princeton, Stanford and Yale—most of whom were recruited by Allard Lowenstein, a high-octane liberal activist who later served a term in Congress representing New York—COFO helped 83,000 black Mississippians cast mock ballots for gubernatorial candidate Aaron Henry, a black pharmacist and NAACP leader from Clarksdale, and Ed King, a liberal white college chaplain who agreed to stand for lieutenant governor.
The stunt was a success. Freedom Ballot campaign garnered unprecedented attention from national media outlets, which mostly focused on the novelty of white Ivy League students trekking across the state to canvass for a black gubernatorial candidate. But it also proved that African Americans were eager to participate in the electoral system, which prompted Lowenstein and Moses to devise an even bolder scheme: They would bring 1,000 white students to Mississippi the following summer to help establish a new party organization—the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP)—and stage parallel federal elections. In the process, they would elect candidates for Congress and MFDP delegates to the Democratic National Convention, thereby setting the stage for a dramatic credentials fight that would draw further attention to the state’s lawlessness.
The new plan provoked sharp controversy, particularly among battle-tested SNCC workers who rejected the implication that they needed white students to save the movement. But with backing from local black activists, who were “very pragmatic,” as one SNCC coordinator observed, Moses’s plan carried the day.
The architects of Freedom Summer were under no illusions. They never imagined that the young summer volunteers would manage to register large numbers of voters, succeeding where veteran civil rights workers had failed. Rather, they believed that the press “would respond to the beating of a Yale student as it simply would not do to the beating of a local Negro,” as one SNCC leader later explained.
“These students bring the rest of the country with them,” Moses argued at the time. “They’re from good schools and their parents are influential.” James Forman, the executive director of SNCC, later acknowledged, “We were, in fact, trying to consciously recruit a counter power elite.” Putting young Ivy Leaguers in harm’s way wasn’t ideal, but it would provide exactly what the organizers desperately needed: national attention and federal intervention.
The goal, explained Moses in advance of the summer project, was to create a political crisis. “Only when metal has been brought to white heat can it be shaped and molded,” he said. John Lewis, the newly elected chairman of SNCC, predicted that if white students were placed in harm’s way, “the federal government will have to take over the state … out of this conflict, this division and chaos, will come something positive.”
There was solid precedent within the civil rights movement for this kind of thinking. After suffering a frustrating setback in Albany, Georgia, where local officials responded to protests with relative equanimity (thereby cutting off the publicity that was oxygen to the movement), Martin Luther King, Jr. and his associates selected Birmingham as their next target precisely because they knew that local officials would overreact. “Bombingham,” as the city was popularly known, did not disappoint. Dubbed “Project C” (for “conflict”), the Birmingham campaign crippled the city’s downtown business district with boycotts, sowed chaos and dysfunction by filling the jails to overcapacity (often with elementary and high school students), and triggered police violence that shocked the civilized world. The movement would steadfastly remain nonviolent, but it learned how to provoke violence from others for political means.
The movement would steadfastly remain nonviolent, but it learned how to provoke violence from others for political means.
These hardened political activists were members of the “Emmett Till generation.” Many of them remembered viewing, in 1955, a famous photograph of Till’s badly disfigured corpse in Jet magazine. They all understood the likelihood of extreme violence. As a white Mississippian and civil rights sympathizer observed several years earlier, “There’s open season on the Negroes now. They’ve got no protection, and any peckerwood who wants can go out and shoot himself one, and we’ll free him. Our situation will get worse and worse.”
In the summer of 1964, it got worse.
On June 14, the first wave of 250 volunteers arrived at the Western College for Women in Oxford, Ohio, for a week-long training session which covered topics as wide-ranging as how to minimize injury during a police beating and how to address longstanding patterns of racial deference when speaking with black residents. National reporters also converged on the scene to capture footage of the students as they attended lectures and workshops, essentially confirming the initial calculation that white students would draw disproportionate media attention. John Doar, the assistant attorney general for civil rights, bluntly informed the summer workers that “federal protection for you … can be assured only by the creation and employment of a federal police force … The creation of such a force, once taken, is not easily undone.” In other words, the students were on their own.
On June 21, as the first group of students arrived in Mississippi, a second group assembled for training in Oxford. One white student later remembered sitting in the college auditorium and hearing “an interruption … at a side entrance, three or four staff members had come in and were whispering agitatedly. One of them walked over to the stage and sprang up to whisper to Moses, who had bent on his knees to hear.” Moses had a pained look on his face. “Yesterday morning, three of our people left Meridian, Mississippi, to investigate a church-burning in Neshoba County,” he announced. “They haven’t come back, and we haven’t had any word from them.”
The three missing men were Andrew Goodman, a summer volunteer from New York who arrived in Mississippi just one day before disappearing, and two CORE staff members—Michael Schwerner, a Cornell graduate from New York, and James Chaney, a black native of Meridian. Within days, their faces would become hauntingly familiar to most Americans.
As federal authorities poured into Mississippi to search for Chaney, Schwerner and Goodman, the Ku Klux Klan and its allies placed on full display the brute inhumanity of Jim Crow. John Dittmer, a leading historian of the Mississippi freedom movement, assessed the summer of 1964 as “the most violent since Reconstruction: thirty-five shooting incidents and sixty-five homes and other buildings burned or bombed, including thirty-five churches. One thousand movement people were arrested, and eighty activists suffered beatings.”
White Mississippians had played their part to script. As it turned out, so did white Northern elites.
On July 6, Rep. Don Edwards of California arrived in McComb, Mississippi, determined to show solidarity by spending the evening in a “freedom house”—one of the integrated group homes occupied by those workers who were not assigned to lodge with local black families. An alarmed official at the Justice Department begged Edwards to stay away, warning, as a volunteer later recalled, “that there might be serious violence in McComb, that he was in a dangerous situation.” The congressman replied sharply that if the department was concerned about violence, it should provide federal protection to the civil rights workers. For Edwards, the issue was deeply personal: His son was a summer volunteer.
Not every parent was an elected official, but many were prominent in their communities. They engaged quickly and effectively in support of their children, just as the program’s architects had hoped they would. In several Northern states, they formed ad hoc organizations that ultimately banded under the umbrella of the Parents Mississippi Emergency Committee. “Proud as we are of our sons and daughters, we are nevertheless concerned about their safety and the safety of the citizens of Mississippi with whom they are working,” explained the organizers.
From the start, the parents deluged members of Congress with urgent telegrams and letters asking that federal marshals be deployed to protect the civil rights workers. They staged events that raised tens of thousands of dollars for (much necessary) bail funds; one rally in White Plains filled an 1,100-seat high school auditorium to capacity and collected $18,000 in just one night. The parents actively worked their neighborhoods, churches, synagogues and social and professional networks to create a groundswell of support. They also developed protocols for immediately informing their congressmen (who in turn would call the Justice Department) when their children were arrested, to ensure that Mississippi law enforcement officials understood that they were being watched.
At first, some of the parents went out of their way to define narrow goals. “We are not a civil rights group ourselves,” the mother of one summer volunteer explained to a suburban New York newspaper in late June. “Our concern is the safety of the children.” But by mid-summer, their tone had changed. July found organizers closing the Parents Mississippi Emergency Committee newsletter with the signoff, “Yours in freedom.” By August, they broadened their remit to include full-throated advocacy on behalf of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, which was setting the stage for a credentials challenge at the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City.
Congressmen from both parties exchanged frequent letters with parents and their supporters. When one of his constituents was arrested and beaten by Mississippi police, Rep. Robert Barry, a Republican from New York, told Robert Kennedy that such actions “violated the very meaning of democracy” and demanded that the federal government “protect the rights of all.” His Democratic colleague, Rep. Ogden Reid, accompanied the parents of Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman to the Justice Department to plead for an aggressive search for their sons. In New Jersey, Rep. Frank Thompson proved a steady supporter of the families, as did Connecticut congressman Bernard Grabowski.
In July and August, Democratic Senators Abraham Ribicoff (Conn.), Harrison Williams (N.J.) and Joe Clark (Penn.) joined Republicans Clifford Case (N.J.), Jacob Javits (N.Y.) and Kenneth Keating (N.Y.) in demanding that federal law enforcement agents be sent to protect students from their home states. Keating took every opportunity to share with inquiring constituents a telegram he sent to Attorney General Robert Kennedy (who would unseat him several months later) suggesting that armed marshals be deployed to safeguard the freedom workers.
By no means was this position a matter of consensus. Days after the Neshoba three disappeared in June 1964, a Washington Post editorial called it “simply impossible” for the federal government to protect the students Mississippi. The paper condescendingly challenged the students to “ask themselves with some humility what actions, however fastidiously legal, they are entitled to take that could inflame passions and explode sparks in the political tinderbox of this menacing summer.”
But among a large swath of the Northern electorate, the summer project managed to move the bar with surprising speed. For every voice like the Washington Post, another lent support to the Mississippi freedom workers. Northern members of Congress found that their very recent votes in favor of the Civil Rights Act (which Lyndon Johnson signed into law on July 2) no longer sufficed in the eyes of many voters. They were now expected to go the extra step.
With every passing day, events in Mississippi became a source of increased discomfort and embarrassment for the Johnson administration. When federal agents dragged the Mississippi River in search of the Neshoba three, they inadvertently happened across the corpses of two black men—“one cut in half and without a head,” a summer volunteer noted at the time. “Negroes disappear down here every week and are never heard about.” A third black victim was found in the Big Black River; he wore a CORE T-shirt. By August 4, when federal agents exhumed the bodies of the Neshoba three from beneath an earthen dam, the world had learned that Mississippi’s waterways were a longstanding dumping ground for the victims of Jim Crow violence.
For years, activists had banged on the door from the outside. But the brutal lawlessness on display in Mississippi—and the relentless engagement of the Freedom Summer families, their neighbors, colleagues and supporters—created a popular imperative leading into Atlantic City. Northern Democratic delegations faced increasing grassroots pressure to support the MFDP’s convention challenge.For a few weeks, the impossible seemed within reach: The Democratic Party might just invite the movement inside.
Arriving in Atlantic City in advance of the convention’s opening on August 24, the MFDP delegation, duly elected by more than 80,000 black and white Mississippians, was preparing to make its case before the credentials committee.
They enjoyed full support from a cross-sector of the liberal establishment. Joe Rauh, chief counsel to the United Auto Workers (UAW) union, served as the delegation’s head lawyer. Democratic conventionsin Oregon, Michigan and New York called on the party to recognize the MFDP as the official Mississippi state delegation, as did 25 Democratic congressmen, who asserted that “elementary justice” was at stake.
In advance of the credentials committee fight, activists paraded up and down the boardwalk, holding large signs that bore the faces of Chaney, Schwerner and Goodman. Momentum seemed very much on the side of the angels, so much so that one MFDP official later acknowledged, “It never occurred to us that our delegation would be turned down.”
Lyndon Johnson had a different idea. Through the good offices of Hubert Humphrey—who was led to understand that his vice presidential nomination depended on it—LBJ and his associates worked with brute force to shut down the MFDP challenge. FBI agents bugged the MFDP’s office and tapped its phones; they even posed as NBC reporters (with the full collusion of the network), staging press “interviews” to learn which delegates supported the Freedom Democrats; the White House then used carrot-and-stick measures to walk back pro-MFDP delegates. Johnson called on UAW chief Walter Reuther, who in turn put the screws to union delegates and even to his general counsel, Joe Rauh. Ultimately, the minority report never made it out of committee.
The regular Mississippi delegates were hardly grateful for the president’s intervention. In an ironic twist, they walked out of the convention when presented with a demand that they sign a loyalty oath to the national ticket. In November, Barry Goldwater became the first Republican since Reconstruction to carry Mississippi in a presidential election—setting off the slow unwinding of the Democrats’ long advantage in the South.
The students and activists behind Freedom Summer, meanwhile, left the convention determined to burn down the Democratic Party. “For many people,” one SNCC worker later reflected, “Atlantic City was the end of innocence.” Moses called it a “watershed in the movement because until then the idea had been that you were working more or less within the Democratic Party.” No longer would that be so.
Although many civil rights activists turned inward and began a steady march away from integrationist politics, a core group of white students—angered and disillusioned by the hypocrisy they witnessed that summer in Atlantic City—returned to campus and became standard bearers in the student and anti-war movements. Like Freedom Summer veteran Mario Savio—who told fellow undergraduates: “Last summer I went to Mississippi to join the struggle there for civil rights. This fall I am engaged in another phase of the same struggle, this time in Berkeley”—they were determined to knock down the foundations of a liberal establishment that failed them so miserably that summer.
There is no discounting the “freedom high” that so many volunteers and staff members genuinely felt in those heady days of mid-June, 1964. Interviewed years later, many participants still viewed it as “a kind of historic movement,” “inspirational,” “the highest possible experience I’ll ever have.” But the project’s guiding strategy, and its remarkable success in creating an inexorable political crisis, speaks to the political savvy and hard-headed realism of its founders.
Some would call it cold-blooded. Though Moses rejected the chargethat COFO planned “to get some people killed so the federal government will move into Mississippi,” he also maintained that “no privileged group in history has ever given up anything without some kind of blood sacrifice.” And sacrifice they did.
The MFDP failed to gain recognition at Atlantic City, but Freedom Summer fundamentally changed the rules of engagement. Throughout the balance of LBJ’s presidency, the Justice Department proved more assertive in prosecuting civil rights violations in the South. The administration was partly emboldened by new federal powers conferred by the Civil Rights Act (and later, the Voting Rights Act), but it was also responsive to the public’s increasing demand for racial justice. Likewise, the extreme censure that Mississippi earned in 1964 proved a cautionary tale for many of the business-minded, middle-class Southerners who once formed the backbone of the white supremacist movement. Massive resistance threatened to exact a severe toll on the region. The crisis of 1964 made many white community leaders less inclined to fight the desegregation of public accommodations, schools and—eventually—voter rolls. The cost of intransigence had simply grown too high.
Our popular culture celebrates the realpolitik of young Hill and White House staffers. But today’s operatives don’t hold a candle to the 20-something leaders of Freedom Summer and the battle-tested activists of Mississippi, who, every bit as well as Lyndon Johnson, understood power and knew how to use it.