SNCC- The New Abolitionists

by Howard Zinn

  With the Mississippi Summer Project about to begin, and the three still missing, COFO asked that the Federal government send marshals to protect Negroes and whites engaged in civil rights activity. Attorney General Kennedy, Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach, and Assistant Attorney General Burke Marshall all pleaded a lack of constitutional authority under the American federal system. This prompted a group of distinguished law professors, headed by Professor Mark Howe of the Harvard Law School, to issue a statement reprimanding the Attorney General, and pointing to the government’s powers in Sections 332 and 333, Title 10 of the U.S. Code. But no protection came.

  In mid-August the bodies of the three young men were found, bullet holes in their chests, buried in a hastily-dug grave near Philadelphia, Mississippi. The body of James Chaney was mutilated by a beating so terrible that the pathologist who examined him said he had only seen such damage in high-velocity accidents such as airplane crashes.

  Meanwhile, the Mississippi Summer Project had begun, an operation like nothing in the nation’s history. Through the spring of 1964, college students from all over the country were being interviewed by SNCC and CORE. Seven hundred of them showed up at Oxford, Ohio, for an orientation session organized by the National Council of Churches. There, young veterans of the Black Belt tried to give them realistic pictures of the dangers they faced. They were taught how to protect themselves from injury without responding violently. They talked passionately about their own fears, their indecision, their dreams. Then they climbed into buses and cars and headed south.

  The volunteers were mostly white, northern, middle-class. The staff people—mainly SNCC, some CORE, a few SCLC—were generally Negro, Southern, sent by lower-class parents to Negro colleges, from which they darted off into the movement. Together, in clusters, they fanned out across Mississippi: to “easy” Northern towns like Holly Springs; to “tough” little cities in the Delta, like Clarksdale, Greenwood, Vicksburg, Indianola; to places on the Gulf Coast like Biloxi and Natchez; and to dozens of other spots throughout the state.

  They lived, by ones and twos, in a room or a corner of a room, with a Negro family which had made the offering, most likely, at a mass meeting in the church, on a night when the “collection” was not of dimes and quarters, but of beds. Some flopped on cots, or on the floor, in a dilapidated, rented “Freedom House.” By day they went out canvassing, door-to-door, in the Negro neighborhood, tramping through the mud and dust of unpaved streets, talking to fearful, friendly, curious people about registering to vote, or about sending their children to something called “freedom school.”

  The nerve center for all the summer activity was a long, narrow, store-front office, COFO headquarters in Jackson, where somehow, through a confusion of telephones, typewriters, and people moving in and out, contact was maintained with the projects throughout the state. Shifts of volunteers, twenty-four hours a day, manned the “WATS line” (Wide Area Telephone Service, a costly system which allowed unlimited long distance phone calls all over the state). On July 8, not an untypical day, a digest of the WATS line report read as follows:

  MCCOMB: SNCC Freedom House bombed; two injured.

  HATTIESBURG: The Rev. Robert Beech of the National Council of Churches arrested on false pretense charge after allegedly overdrawing his bank account $70. Bail set at $2000.

  RULEVILLE: Volunteer bodily ejected from county circuit clerk’s office for accompanying local woman to voter registration.

  COLUMBUS: Three volunteers arrested on trespass charges after stopping at a gas station for a soft drink.

  CLARKSDALE: Bomb threat.

  HATTIESBURG: Bottle thrown at picnic by passing car.

  HOLLY SPRINGS: Civil rights worker arrested. Reckless driving.

  CLARKSDALE: Police chief in LaFayette tells Negro cafes not to serve volunteers.

  VICKSBURG: Bomb threat.

  Multiplying this day by seventy (the approximate number of days of the summer project) would give at least a capsule picture of some of the difficulties.

  But there was more to the summer. There were the seven hundred student volunteers, being toughened and educated in a way that no book-learning could accomplish. Also, several hundred Northern professional people—doctors, nurses, lawyers, ministers, teachers—spent time in Mississippi, a break from the pattern of summer vacations on the seashore or in the mountains. The doctors and nurses were part of a new phenomenon which seemed to grow up overnight, called the Medical Committee for Human Rights. It brought to Mississippi what Dr. Jack Geiger of Harvard University called a “sympathetic medical presence.” As for the ministers, they were everywhere: on picket lines, in Freedom Houses, at mass meetings.

  The lawyers formed an efficient corps such as had never been seen before in the civil rights troubles of this decade: they moved like basketball players from one trouble spot to another, getting people out of jail almost as fast as police put them in (perhaps the shadow of the Philadelphia Three lent urgency to their pace). William Kunstler, one of the legal mainstays of the movement these past five years, wrote after the summer about the changes wrought in those who go South:

  The transformation does not come overnight. I can still recall with shame my earnest recommendation to a brother attorney during the Freedom Rider trials that he not address our clients at a mass meeting. “A lawyer must remain aloof,” I told him.… Three years later, I realized that I was playing a fool’s game and that my advice was worse than worthless. No member of a great social movement can remain untouched by the forces that drive it.… The law did not change in Mississippi last summer, but the lawyers who journeyed there did.

  The Mississippi Summer had an effect impossible to calculate on young Negroes in the State. Thousands of them wore SNCC buttons through the summer (one fifteen-year-old girl in Clarksdale was expelled from school in the fall because her button was “too big,” the school authorities said; with the aid of a Radcliffe girl who had befriended her in the summer she got a scholarship to go to high school in Massachusetts). Around SNCC’s summer office in Greenwood, and at all the other headquarters in the state, Negro youngsters gathered, following staff members like Pied Pipers through the streets. Freedom Schools sprang up like wildflowers all over Mississippi, until 2000 were attending over thirty schools. SNCC’s Charlie Cobb had pursued the idea with quiet persistence as plans were being made for the 1964 summer, and Staughton Lynd, a young Yale historian, became administrator for the schools. At the Oxford orientation, Lynd warned the youngsters who were slated to be Freedom School teachers:

  You’ll arrive in Ruleville, in the Delta. It will be 100 degrees, and you’ll be sweaty and dirty. You won’t be able to bathe often or sleep well or eat good food. The first day of school, there may be four teachers and three students. And the local Negro minister will phone to say you can’t use his church basement after all, because his life has been threatened. And the curriculum we’ve drawn up—Negro history and American government—may be something you know only a little about yourself. Well, you’ll knock on doors all day in the hot sun to find students. You’ll meet on someone’s lawn under a tree. You’ll tear up the curriculum and teach what you know.

  And that is how it was. By orthodox educational standards, the teachers were unqualified, the students were backward, and it was hard to point to concrete results. But nine-year-old Negro children sounded out French words whose English equivalents they had not yet discovered, and one group of youngsters struggled to understand Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce. They learned about Frederick Douglass, wrote letters to the local editor about segregation, and discussed the meaning of civil disobedience. Some wrote short stories about their lives, and others wrote poems.

  The object of the Freedom School was not to cram a prescribed amount of factual material into young minds, but to give them that first look into new worlds which would, some day if not immediately, lead them to books and people and ideas not found in the everyday lives of Mississippi Negroes. They
didn’t always succeed, but even their failures were warmed by the affection that sprang up everywhere between teachers and students—both aware that they talked with one another inside a common cradle of concern.

  One afternoon in Jackson, a visiting folk singer brought the students of a Freedom School out into the sun-baked street back of the church, formed them into a huge circle, and taught them an Israeli dance chant imploring the heavens for rain to help the harvest. Older Negroes passed by, sat on porches, listened to their children utter strange words and dance this strange dance. The young ones seemed to understand; they were beginning, for the first time in their lives, to reach beyond their street, beyond their state, to join in some universal plea.

  A University of Chicago graduate student taught in Vicksburg:

  It was hard. Youngsters hung around the school, slept there. Every morning, they were like corpses on the floor. To start class, you had to clean them out. The school was cramped, noisy. We used role-playing a lot. Kids would portray three generations of Negro families, and we learned history that way. We sat in a circle rather than the usual classroom format, to stress the equality of teacher and student. I read to them from Thomas Wolfe’s You Can’t Go Home Again and from Martin Luther King’s I Have a Dream, then had them write speeches as if they were Senators urging passage of the civil rights bill. I tried to extend the idea of oppression beyond race. If you pick on a small kid with glasses—I asked—and beat him up, aren’t you acting the same as these white supremacists?

  One teacher spent a whole hour with his students discussing the meaning of the word “skeptical.” He urged them not to accept everything he said. “Check up on me! Be skeptical.” He was talking to youngsters whose high school classroom was wired so that at the flick of a switch the principal could listen in on any class in the school.

  A slim blonde girl from Skidmore taught French to teenagers. “I try to do the whole class in French, use pantomime a lot. … I soon realized these kids had never had contact with a white person before. Maybe that’s the greatest thing about this whole experience. If nothing else is accomplished, it’s been a meeting, for both student and teacher.”

  There was spasmodic harassment of the Freedom Schools. One day, the blonde Skidmore girl was picked up by police and held for several hours. Violence spluttered around the COFO office in Jackson one ugly Saturday night; a dance hall where teachers and students were spending the evening was sprayed with bullets by a passing car, and a Negro boy was wounded.

  In the rural areas, the danger was greater. A church used as a Freedom School in the little town of Gluckstadt was burned to the ground (when the teachers arrived on the scene, fifteen youngsters were waiting under a tree for class to begin). Still, two white girls lived alone in a hilltop house out in the country, thirty miles from Canton, without a telephone, and held a Freedom School there. And in McComb, so dangerous that the Justice Department pleaded with the Mississippi Project not to send anyone there, a Freedom School was attended regularly by a hundred children.

  The Freedom Schools challenged not only Mississippi but the nation. There was, to begin with, the provocative suggestion that an entire school system can be created in any community outside the official order, and critical of its suppositions. The Schools raised serious questions about the role of education in society: Can teachers bypass the artificial sieve of certification and examination, and meet students on the basis of a common attraction to an exciting social goal? Is it possible to declare that the aim of education is to find solutions for poverty, for injustice, for racial and national hatred, and to turn all educational efforts into a national striving for these solutions?

  And while the youngsters were going to Freedom Schools, their parents were participating in another kind of experiment: the formation of a new political party outside the official party apparatus of Mississippi, a phenomenon which was soon to draw national attention, called the Freedom Democratic Party.

  The start had been made in the fall of 1963, when Aaron Henry and Ed King ran for Governor and Lieutenant Governor on the “Freedom Ballot” and polled 80,000 votes outside the official polling booths. That had proved that Negroes wanted to vote. And so, the idea grew: if it was such painful work adding, one by one, to the 20,000 or so Negroes officially registered, why not bypass the whole Mississippi machinery and set up a new party, open to all, with no rigamarole? And why not send Freedom Democratic Party delegates from Mississippi to the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City in August, 1964, to claim those seats traditionally held by white Mississippians who kept Negroes out of the Party machinery?

  All through July and August summer volunteers joined regular SNCC, CORE, and SCLC staff people to canvass the Negro communities of Mississippi for “Freedom Registrations,” in churches, on porches, along country roads. To register, a person only had to fill out a form with nine simple questions about age, residence, and citizenship. As the deadline of August 24 approached, the registrations pouring into the COFO office in Jackson reached 60,000. In August, conventions were held, first on the county level, and then in congressional districts, to elect delegates to the FDP state convention in Jackson.

  On the eve of the state convention, Joseph L. Rauh, labor attorney, counsel for the Americans for Democratic Action, and member of the Credentials Committee of the Democratic Party, arrived in Jackson. He had agreed to argue the case before the Credentials Committee at the Democratic Party Convention in Atlantic City, to seat representatives from the Freedom Democratic Party rather than the regular Mississippi delegation.

  Sitting in a crowded little cubicle at the COFO office in Jackson, Rauh and Bob Moses went over final plans for the challenge. For Rauh to convince the Credentials Committee, it was important that the Freedom Democratic Party follow all regular procedures and show up as a strong and well-organized group, and he asked Moses anxiously: “How will the Convention be tomorrow?” Moses, with his characteristic tendency to understatement, just nodded his head slightly.

  Next day, the State Convention of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party gave Rauh his answer. It was a beautifully-organized, crowded, singing assembly of laborers, farmers, housewives, from the farthest corners of Mississippi, and made the political process seem healthy for the first time in the state’s history. It was probably as close to a grass roots political convention as this country has ever seen. Most delegates were Negroes, but there were a few whites: one was Edwin King, Mississippi-born white minister at Tougaloo College; another was a husky former fisherman from the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Ella Baker gave the keynote address, a passionate promise that, whether recognized at Atlantic City or not, the Freedom Democratic Party would grow to be a powerful political arm of the movement in Mississippi. With Dr. Aaron Henry of Clarksdale presiding, a slate of delegates was chosen to the National Democratic Convention, and a state chairman of the Party was elected: Lawrence Guyot, a veteran field secretary of SNCC. (Guyot never made it to Atlantic City, because the city of Hattiesburg decided to put him in jail, exactly at this time, on an old disorderly conduct charge arising from a demonstration.)

  In Atlantic City, the presence of the Freedom Democratic Party contributed just that streak of honesty and moral concern which is customarily absent at national political conventions in the United States. Here was an issue so clear in its implications for American democracy that it shoved aside for a few days, in newspapers and on television screens all over the nation, the usual shenanigans surrounding the selection of candidates and adoption of a platform. The Democratic Party now could decide to recognize as delegates from Mississippi the all-white regular group, elected by machinery which had excluded Negroes all along the line. Or it could recognize the mostly black delegation, painstakingly chosen in meetings up and down the Mississippi countryside, and backed now by the physical presence of a thousand black Mississippians just arrived in Atlantic City.

  Joseph Rauh argued the case before the Credentials Committee (of which he was a member) cogently,
eloquently; he had worked very, very hard on this and it was clear that he was personally involved. He summoned Mississippi Negroes to testify before the Committee: Mrs. Hamer and others delivered moving accounts of their experiences trying to register, and of the iron-clad exclusion of Negroes from the regular Democratic Party of Mississippi. Martin Luther King and James Farmer also testified.

  Rauh and the Freedom Democratic Party did not expect to get a majority vote of the Credentials Committee to seat the FDP delegates, but the hope was to get the eleven votes needed for a minority report, because then it would be possible to present that report for approval on the floor of the Convention.

  The behind-the-scenes politics of the next few days was frantic. Lyndon Johnson, eyeing the coming presidential election, did not want to alienate Southern votes by favoring the Freedom Democratic Party. Through Hubert Humphrey, who wanted to be Vice President, Johnson began making compromise offers to the FDP in the hope that acceptance would avoid a fight on the convention floor. The FDP was willing to compromise on the terms laid down by Congress-woman Edith Green of Oregon, who along with Rauh formed the hard core of its support on the Credentials Committee. She had proposed that all members of the two rival delegations who would swear loyalty to the national ticket in the presidential elections be seated, with the votes divided among them. However, just when the FDP had succeeded in lining up enough members of the Credentials Committee behind this proposal to assure that it would go out onto the floor, the Administration offered a much weaker compromise: two seats at large (not as representatives of Mississippi) for Aaron Henry and Ed King, and a willingness to seat every member of the white Mississippi delegation who was willing to support the national ticket in the election. This offer fragmented the solidity of the Credentials Committee minority, which was lining up behind the Green proposal.