"We had sneakers...they had guns": Freedom Summer-Fifty Years Ago



In June 1964, the Mississippi Summer Project  was launched to attempt to register African Americans in Mississippi, which historically excluded most blacks from voting. 

Southern states had effectively disfranchised most African Americans and many poor whites in the period from 1890 to 1910 by passing state constitutions, amendments and other laws that imposed burdens on voter registration: charging poll taxes, requiring literacy tests administered subjectively by white registrars, making residency requirements more difficult, as well as record keeping to document required items. They maintained this exclusion from politics into the 1960s.

 Most means survived US Supreme Court challenges and, if overruled, states had quickly developed new ways to exclude blacks, such as use of grandfather clauses and white primaries. In some cases, would-be voters were harassed economically, as well as by physical assault. Lynchings had been high at the turn of the century and continued for years.

Blacks attempting to register to vote in Mississippi meant faced terror and intimidation. It meant braving routine violence perpetrated by police, sheriffs and others in Mississippi. It’s not surprising that Mississippi had the lowest percent of African Americans registered to vote in the country. In 1962 only 6.7% of eligible black voters were registered.

The Mississippi Project aka Freedom Summer was organized by the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO), a coalition of the Mississippi branches of Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), CORE (Congress of Racial Equality), NAACP and SCLC (Southern Christian Leadership Conference). The leadership and financing came from SNCC. Robert Parris Moses, SNCC Field Secretary and Co-director of COFO, directed the project.

Well over 1,000 out-of-state volunteers participated in Freedom Summer alongside thousands of black Mississippians. Most of the volunteers were young, most of them from the North, 90 percent were white, and many were Jewish. During the ten weeks of Freedom Summer, a number of other organizations provided support for the COFO Summer Project. More than 100 volunteer doctors, nurses, psychologists, medical students and other medical professionals from the Medical Committee for Human Rights (MCHR) provided emergency care for volunteers and local activists, taught health education classes, and advocated improvements in Mississippi's segregated health system.

 Volunteer lawyers from the NAACP Legal Defense Fund Inc ("Ink Fund"), National Lawyers Guild, Lawyer's Constitutional Defense Committee (LCDC) an arm of the ACLU, and the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law (LCCR) provided free legal services — handling arrests, freedom of speech, voter registration and other matters.

Many of Mississippi's white residents deeply resented the outsiders and any attempt to change their society. Locals routinely harassed volunteers. Newspapers called them "unshaven and unwashed trash." Their presence in local black communities sparked drive-by shootings, Molotov cocktails, and constant harassment. State and local governments, the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission (which was tax-supported and spied on citizens), police, the White Citizens' Council, and the Ku Klux Klan used murder, arrests, beatings, arson, spying, firing, evictions, and other forms of intimidation and harassment to oppose the project and prevent blacks from registering to vote or achieving social equality.

Over the course of the ten-week project:

·         four civil rights workers were killed (one in a head-on collision)

·         at least three Mississippi blacks were murdered because of their support for the civil rights movement

·         four people were critically wounded

·         80 Freedom Summer workers were beaten

·         1,062 people were arrested (out-of-state volunteers and locals)

·         37 churches were bombed or burned

·         30 Black homes or businesses were bombed or burned

Volunteers were attacked almost as soon as the campaign started. On June 21, 1964, James Chaney (a black CORE activist from Mississippi), CORE organizer Michael Schwerner, and summer volunteer Andrew Goodman (both of whom were Jews from New York) were arrested by Cecil Price, a Neshoba County deputy sheriff. Price was a member of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. They were held in jail until after nightfall, then released. They drove away into an ambush on the road by Klansmen, who abducted and killed them. Goodman and Schwerner were shot at point-blank range. Chaney was chased, beaten mercilessly, and shot three times. They were later found to have been buried in an earthen dam. The disappearance of the three men the night of their release from jail was reported on TV and on newspaper front pages, shocking the nation. It drew massive media attention to Freedom Summer and to "the closed society" of Mississippi.

For the next seven weeks, FBI agents and sailors from a nearby naval airbase searched for the bodies, wading into swamps, and hacking through underbrush. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover went to Mississippi on July 10 to open the first FBI branch office there.

 Throughout the search, Mississippi newspapers and word of mouth perpetuated the common belief that the disappearance was "a hoax" designed to draw publicity. The search of rivers and swamps turned up the bodies of eight other black men. Herbert Oarsby, a 14-year old youth, was found wearing a CORE T-shirt. Henry Hezekiah Dee and Charles Eddie Moore had been expelled from Alcorn A&M for participating in civil rights protests. The other five men were never identified. On August 4, 1964, the bodies of Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman were found buried beneath an earthen dam.

In Mississippi, controversy raged over the three murders. Mississippi state and local officials did not indict anyone. The FBI continued to investigate. Agents infiltrated the KKK and paid informers to reveal secrets of their "klaverns". In the fall of 1964, informants told the FBI about the murders of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner. On December 4, the FBI arrested 19 men as suspects.  

All were freed on a technicality, starting a three-year battle to bring them to justice. In October 1967, the men, including the Klan's Imperial Wizard Samuel Bowers, who had allegedly ordered the murders, went on trial in the federal courthouse in Meridian. Seven were ultimately convicted for federal crimes related to the murders. All were sentenced to 3–10 years, but none served more than six years. This marked the first time since Reconstruction that white men had been convicted of civil rights violations against blacks in Mississippi.

Freedom Summer did not succeed in getting many voters registered, but it had a significant effect on the course of the Civil Rights Movement. It helped break down the decades of isolation and repression that had supported the Jim Crow system. Before Freedom Summer, the national news media had paid little attention to the persecution of black voters in the Deep South and the dangers endured by black civil rights workers. The events that summer had captured national attention (as had the mass protests and demonstrations in previous years). Some black activists felt the media had reacted only because northern white students were killed and felt embittered. Almost all the volunteers have recounted believing that summer was one of the defining periods of their lives.

"We had sneakers...they had guns." That how illustrator and journalist Tracy Sugarman described his experiences covering the voting registration efforts during the 1964 "Freedom Summer." As we remember those who lived it and died for it, the struggle for freedom continues... today.

Posted in: Andrew Goodman,COFO,Culture,Freedom Summer,James Chaney,Michael Schwerner,Mississippi Summer Project,Politics,Robert Moses,SCLC,SNCC,The Emerald Quill