Eyes on the Prize

by Juan Williams

  The Freedom Vote had proved an effective consciousness-raising tool, but it was only the beginning. “Eventually, black people were going to be electing people to office—black people to office,” said Bob Moses. “But it wasn’t a thought in their mind at that time. So what you had to do was … use the voter registration drive as a way of preparing them for what was coming next … the actual election of people to these offices.”

  On the heels of this successful project, COFO decided to launch an even more ambitious voting rights project the following summer. Inviting hundreds of students from across the nation to participate, SNCC workers planned a massive registration drive throughout Mississippi. Some SNCC staffers opposed the idea; arguing that bringing in so many white outsiders would only undermine the power of the local blacks. But some black Mississippians felt differently. Fannie Lou Hamer, a sharecropper on a cotton plantation who had become deeply involved in the Freedom Vote, heartily endorsed the idea of inviting energetic, idealistic young people back to Mississippi. “The people, by and large, wanted the students to come back …,” remembers SNCC’s Bob Moses, “so we were at loggerheads … and I guess what I felt was that … there were larger things happening in the country, there was the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Mississippi was reacting to that, and we were feeling the backlash … growing in Mississippi against gains [for blacks] that were made nationally but which were not having any immediate effect in Mississippi … burning churches, murder … I felt in that context I had to step in … between the staff and the people we were working with. And so that’s how the decision was made to actually invite the students down for the summer of ‘64.”

  The project became known as “Freedom Summer.” Unlike the Freedom Vote of the previous fall and winter, the new project sought to educate and register black voters for the real elections of 1964—a presidential election year. In February 1964, Bob Moses went to Stanford University to recruit students for Freedom Summer. Its goals, he told them, were to expand black voter registration in the state; to organize a legally constituted “Freedom Democratic Party” that would challenge the whites-only Mississippi Democratic party; to establish “freedom schools” to teach reading and math to black children in a state where there was no mandatory attendance law and black children more often worked in the fields than went to school; and finally, to open community centers where indigent blacks could obtain legal and medical assistance.

  Civil rights activists looked forward to the summer with great anticipation. “Nineteen-sixty-four could really be the year for Mississippi,” said John Lewis, the national chairman of SNCC. “Before the Negro people get the right to vote, there will have to be a massive confrontation … We are going to Mississippi in force.” The segregationists, however, were also preparing. “This is it,” said Jackson mayor Allen Thompson. “They are not bluffing, and we are not bluffing. We are going to be ready for them … They won’t have a chance.”

  The mayor expanded the city’s police force from 200 to more than 300 officers. He purchased 250 shotguns and a 13,000-pound armored personnel carrier called “Thompson’s tank,” which had steel walls and bulletproof windshields. He had oversized paddy wagons built, brought in two-and-a-half-ton searchlight trucks, and arranged to use the fairgrounds as a makeshift prison. The state legislature approved a request from the governor to hire 700 additional state highway patrolmen. The lawmakers also made it a felony to distribute flyers calling for boycotts and made it illegal to operate a school without a county government permit, outlawing the planned freedom schools.

  The state seemed to be girding for war, and indeed the Jackson newspapers viewed the upcoming Freedom Summer project as an “invasion.” Charles J. Brenner of the National States Rights Party wrote to SNCC’s James Forman, “You are right about one thing. This is going to be a long, hot summer. But the ‘heat’ will be applied to the race-mixing trash by the decent people … When your Communist-oriented goons get to Mississippi, I hope they get their just dues …”

  Forman, executive director of SNCC, went to Oxford, Ohio, where the students selected for the summer project were attending a week-long orientation session at Western College for Women. Three-quarters of the 800 students were white, and about 300 of them were women. Their average age was twenty-one. Each volunteer was required to bring $500 for bail, plus enough cash to cover living expenses, any medical bills they might incur, and transportation home at the end of the summer. Most came from well-off families and were the sons and daughters of professional people. Most hailed from the Northeast, the largest contingent coming from New York State.

  Forman warned the volunteers, “I may be killed. You may be killed. The whole staff may go.” R. Jess Brown, a black lawyer from Mississippi, told the students, “If you’re riding down somewhere, and a cop stops you and starts to put you under arrest, even though you haven’t committed any crime, go to jail. Mississippi is not the place to start conducting constitutional law classes for the policemen, many of whom don’t have a fifth-grade education.”

  FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover, on a visit to Mississippi, made it clear that he did not intend to use his agency to “wet-nurse” the students in Mississippi. The FBI, he argued, was an investigative organization, not a protection force. Hoover did not plan to intercede between the COFO people and those who might try to thwart them.

  On Saturday, June 20, the first wave of recruits—200 of them—left for Mississippi from Oxford, Ohio. The next day, three civil rights workers, including one of the summer volunteers, were reported missing. The volunteer was Andrew Goodman, a twenty-year-old Queens College student from New York City. He had arrived in the town of Meridian with twenty-four-year-old Michael Schwerner, a white man from Brooklyn, New York, who with his wife Rita had established the Meridian CORE office in January, and CORE worker James Chaney, twenty-one, a black Mississippian. On Sunday the three young men had driven to the town of Lawndale to investigate the burning of a black church there. Around 3 P.M. their blue Ford station wagon was stopped by Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price near the town of Philadelphia, Mississippi. The three were taken to jail in connection with speeding charges, but were released later that night.

  Exactly what happened next is not known. But when the men failed to telephone Freedom Summer headquarters, the staff knew they were in trouble. All workers were required to call in at regular intervals, and if they had not done so within fifteen minutes of the appointed time, the project’s Jackson office was notified. From there, someone would immediately telephone the local police as well as the FBI and the Justice Department.

  Sheriff Lawrence Rainey dismissed the men’s disappearance. “If they’re missing,” he said, “they’re just hid somewhere trying to get a lot of publicity out of it, I figure.”

  The national press now focused its attention on the events in Mississippi. President Johnson met with the parents of Schwerner and Goodman at the White House, but according to the New York Times he “did not say what [they] and the parents of other students going to Mississippi that summer wanted to hear—that the federal government would undertake protection of all the students … [To do so] would hark all the way back to federal occupation of the South during Reconstruction days, or so officials fear.”

  Rita Schwerner, wife of the missing Mickey Schwerner, flew to Meridian from Ohio, where she had been training volunteers. “It’s tragic,” she said, “that white northerners have to be caught up into the machinery of injustice and indifference in the South before the American people register concern. I personally suspect that if Mr. Chaney, who is a [black] native Mississippian, had been alone at the time of the disappearance, that this case, like so many others, … would have gone completely unnoticed.”

  The president sent 200 unarmed sailors to Mississippi to help search for the missing men. They dragged swamps and cut through high grass throughout the countryside. FBI agents also joined in the hunt.

  Although the young men’s disappearance cast a cloud of fear over Freedom Summer, only a handf
ul of students decided to quit the project. Said one volunteer to a reporter, “Their disappearance, although it might have been calculated to try and drive people out of the state, had just the opposite effect on me and everyone else. Whenever an incident like this happens … everyone reacts the same way. They become more and more determined to stay in this state and fight the evil system that people have to live under here.” His words reflected the SNCC philosophy: When beaten down, get right up again; when intimidated, carry on in the face of fear.

  Even as the nation’s papers carried daily reports on the search for Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner, racially motivated violence continued in Mississippi. A black church in the town of Clinton was burned after a white minister taught a Bible class there. Four whites shot at a car carrying Freedom Summer volunteers. Police in Columbus arrested seven workers for distributing information on voter registration. Meanwhile, the sailors and federal agents searching for the three missing men found the bodies of other blacks long missing in the state. The discoveries caused no public outcry, even though the nation was collectively wringing its hands over the missing whites. When bodies were found, recalls Dave Dennis, head of CORE’s workers in Mississippi, “as soon as it was determined that they were not the three workers, then those deaths were forgotten.”

  On July 2, 1964, President Lyndon Johnson signed into law the Civil Rights Act initiated by John Kennedy in 1963. But in the Mississippi Delta, the signing meant little to blacks struggling to survive.

  Within a week of the disappearances, President Johnson won a major victory in the Senate. Republican senator Everett Dirksen of Illinois agreed to support cloture and thereby end a filibuster against the 1964 Civil Rights Act begun by Southern segregationists. As Dirksen said, quoting Victor Hugo, “Stronger than all the armies is an idea whose time has come.” Johnson’s political maneuvering had secured passage of the controversial bill without substantial alterations; he signed it into law on July 2, 1964. But its relevance to the lives of black Mississippians, and to the field workers living with them, seemed slight.

  About a thousand volunteers were now working throughout the state, setting up freedom schools and canvassing door to door in an attempt to register voters for the new Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. All summer long doctors came from around the country, most notably the Northeast, to provide free basic health care to blacks in “freedom clinics.” Lawyers from such organizations as the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the National Lawyers Guild, and the American Jewish Committee, aided by law students, worked in legal clinics in an effort to secure basic rights for local blacks.

  The establishment of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) proved to be the most compelling aspect of Freedom Summer to the nation at large. SNCC’s goal in forming the MFDP—an official, legally constituted political party—was to challenge the hegemony of Mississippi’s regular Democratic party, which in practice excluded blacks from membership.

  By the end of August, 80,000 blacks had joined the MFDP, although in the process more than a thousand people were arrested over three months. In August, Freedom Summer volunteers began to recruit whites for the party, convincing twenty of them in Biloxi to sign MFDP registration forms.

  In addition, blacks of all ages flocked to the freedom schools for lessons in traditional academic subjects and in black history, which many were discovering for the first time. The schools rang with music and laughter, despite the fact that teaching in them was an offense punishable by six months in prison.

  Segregationists in Mississippi watched the mostly upper-middle-class white volunteers with disdain. “They were met with a feeling of some curiosity, but mostly resentment,” recalls William Simmons, spokesman for the white Citizens’ Council. “They fanned out across the state, made a great to-do of breaking up our customs, of flaunting [sic] social practices that had been respected by people here over the years. That was the time of the hippies just coming, and many had on hippie uniforms and conducted themselves in hippie ways … The arrogance they showed in wanting to reform the whole state … created resentment. So to say they were not warmly received and welcomed is perhaps an understatement.”

  Attorney Joseph Rauh

  Throughout the summer, Bob Moses and the MFDP geared up to challenge the state’s regular Democratic party. Their prime target was the August Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, where the party would nominate Lyndon Baines Johnson as its presidential candidate. After the Freedom Vote the previous November, Moses and SNCC, with the help of advisers Ella Baker and Bayard Rustin, had begun asking the Democratic leadership in other states to back them if they contested the legitimacy of the all-white Mississippi delegation to the convention. In February 1964, SNCC held a meeting in Atlanta to draw up plans for the confrontation with the Mississippi Democrats. Almost immediately, the California Democratic Council (a liberal faction within the state party) approved a resolution calling for MFDP delegates, rather than those from the regular party, to represent Mississippi at the national convention. At a meeting of liberal Democrats in Washington, Bob Moses convinced Joseph Rauh, head of the D.C. Democratic Party, vice president of the Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), and general counsel to the United Auto Workers, to work with the group. Rauh promised that “if there’s anybody at the Democratic convention challenging the seating of the outlaw Mississippi Democrats, I’ll make sure that the challengers are seated.”

  In April, SNCC opened a Washington office for the MFDP, and in Mississippi the party held its inaugural rally in Jackson, attended by 200 delegates from across the state. Despite the widespread black participation in the Freedom Vote, the contest with the well-established Mississippi Democratic party was going to be a mammoth undertaking. President Johnson backed the regular Democrats to avoid losing their political support.

  In June, the names of Fannie Lou Hamer and three other MFDP candidates were on the ballot for the Mississippi Democratic primary as delegates to be sent to Atlantic City. All four lost, but the fledgling party had at least demonstrated to Democratic leaders in other states that the MFDP was a functioning political party, ready for battle. In June, the ADA approved a resolution calling for “rejection of the racist Mississippi Democratic delegation” and favoring the acceptance of the “integrated Freedom Democratic Party.” Then the Democrats in both Michigan and New York endorsed the MFDP’s delegation to the Atlantic City convention.

  In late June, the white leaders of the Mississippi Democrats gave ammunition to the MFDP by adopting a platform opposing civil rights and explicitly rejecting the platform of the national party. Earlier that month, the national organization had ruled that all convention delegates would be required to make a pledge of party loyalty. Now the Old Boys in Mississippi were thumbing their noses at the party’s national leaders and making it difficult for the president to continue to back them. But Johnson believed he had little choice. The delegations from five other Southern states were threatening to walk out of the convention if the Mississippi segregationists were not seated.

  Johnson instructed Senator Hubert Humphrey, a liberal Minnesota Democrat and long-time ally of the civil rights movement, to defuse the MFDP challenge quietly. Humphrey faced no easy task. The Democratic party delegates from nine states had now pledged their support to the upstart MFDP, and twenty-five Democratic congressmen were also backing the newcomers. The press posed an additional problem. The MFDP challenge threatened to steal the headlines at the convention, since President Johnson’s nomination was expected to be routine and undramatic. Complicating Humphrey’s assignment was the fact that LBJ had already privately promised Mississippi governor Paul Johnson that the MFDP would not be seated at the convention, and that if the all-white Mississippi delegation refused to swear its party loyalty in Atlantic City, at least three of the delegates would be seated anyway.

  On August 4, just eighteen days before the start of the Democratic National Convention, the bodies of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner were discovered in an earth
en dam on a farm a few miles from the town of Philadelphia, Mississippi. Acting on a tip from an informant reportedly paid $30,000, the FBI had obtained a search warrant and used a bulldozer to rip into the base of the recently built structure. The three young men had been killed with .38-caliber bullets, and the skull of Chaney, the one black victim, had been fractured in a savage beating. The national press corps descended on the state.

  Mississippi segregationists were unrepentant. “When people leave any section of the country and go into another section looking for trouble,” said Congressman Arthur Winstead, “they usually find it.”

  As the families and compatriots of the victims mourned their deaths, the parents of the men expressed their wish that the three be buried side by side. That, however, was forbidden by Mississippi’s segregation laws. James Chaney was buried alone in a segregated cemetery.

  Rev. Edward King and Aaron Henry, the two MFDP delegates the Johnson administration selected to represent the group as delegates-at-large.

  It wasn’t until December that the FBI made any arrests in connection with the killings. Taken into custody were twenty-one white Mississippians, including Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price, the man who had stopped the three workers for speeding shortly before their disappearance. Although charges against the men were subsequently dropped in state court, six of the accused were later sent to jail for violating federal civil rights laws.

  With the national news media focusing on events in Mississippi just before the convention’s start, President Johnson worried that delegates from other states would be swayed to support the MFDP. In an attempt to stave off that possibility, he privately warned his party that a chaotic Democratic convention might ultimately benefit the campaign of the conservative Republican nominee, Senator Barry Goldwater.