by Ruth Rosen
The presence of white students, as SNCC activists had predicted, sparked the media’s interest in the South’s violent treatment of civil rights workers. By the end of Freedom Summer, civil rights workers had witnessed fifteen murders, four woundings, thirty-seven churches bombed or burned, and over one thousand arrests in Mississippi alone. Security precautions became elaborate—organizers carried two-way radios and dared not go out alone at night or even enter a downtown area in interracial groups.
The strong young leadership of black men like Bob Moses, James Foreman, Julian Bond, John Lewis, Andrew Young, and Stokely Carmichael provided models of courage and conviction. Just as impressive were the black women leaders, such as Ruby Doris Smith, who eventually ran SNCC’s Atlanta office, and Cynthia Washington, Septima Clark, Joyce Ladner, Frances Beale, Bernice Reagon, Ann Moody, Diane Nash, and Daisy Bates, who worked as project directors or staff members. Jo Ann Robinson, whose activism stretched back to the Montgomery bus boycott, and Ella Baker, advocate of participatory democracy, filled many young women with awe. Fannie Lou Hamer, the youngest of twenty children in her family, was picking cotton by age six, and had worked for eighteen years as a sharecropper before she helped orchestrate the attempt by Mississippi blacks to replace the all-white delegation to the Democratic convention with their own Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party in 1964. Famed for her powerful rendition of “This Little Light of Mine,” Hamer proved to be an inspired orator, leader, and singer. Upon meeting her, Mary King thought, “Everything about her suggested strength of character as well as physical stamina, and the more you knew her the more you felt her vitality, warmth, and spiritual strength.”13
In small communities across the South, white SNCC women observed the remarkable clout black women wielded in their churches and civic organizations. Dorothy Burlage was certain that these local black women who organized church meetings for civil rights work, helped with voter registration, and risked their lives by housing SNCC workers “inspired me to think that women could do anything.” Grassroots activists like Unita Blackwell, Annie Devine, and Winson Hudson sustained the movement even as they risked their lives. These black women became, as historian Sara Evans has observed, “substitute mother figures, new models of womanhood.”14
SNCC also provided a postgraduate education in social and political theory. During the first four years, debates about politics rippled through SNCC’s ranks, challenging all manner of intellectual complacency. Mary King and Casey Hayden spent endless nights poring over the works of Simone de Beauvoir and Doris Lessing before passing them on to their male comrades. By 1964, in the face of relentless violence, some had even begun to question the near-sacred conviction that the power of the movement and its path to success lay in Gandhian nonviolence. Debates between advocates of nonviolent direct action and those who wanted to concentrate on voter registration drew from different political or philosophical texts.
Within SNCC, personal life merged with movement culture. As Mary King put it, “Our political, emotional, and spiritual lives were inseparably bound to the movement. There was no line where the movement began and our personal lives left off. . . . In a sense I didn’t have a life of my own. The movement was too encompassing. . . . These goals were so close, yet they were so far. They grabbed me up, sucked me in, and took over. . . . Relationships were intense and bonds deep.” The community made daily life bearable. Jane Stembridge, another early white female staffer, noted, “When we had nothing, we had community. When our hands were empty, they were held.”15
These glory years did not last long. By 1964, SNCC had mushroomed into an organization of over 150 paid staff members spread across the South. Some activists thought that SNCC needed order and direction and that funds should be funneled through a centralized office structure in Atlanta. Others, including Bob Moses, Casey Hayden, and Mary King, urged SNCC to retain its decentralized organization, allowing local leadership to make their own monetary and policy decisions.16 Not insignificantly, a more centralized leadership and rationalized bureaucracy would have imperiled the informal leadership women had enjoyed in SNCC.
Racial tensions soon became tangled up in these thorny questions of structure. Some veteran SNCC workers, influenced by what they were learning of African liberation and by growing black separatist sentiments, felt invaded by an army of well-meaning, but basically naïve, white students from the North. Sexual excitement, as well as tensions, permeated the community. One southern longtime activist for example, recalled with pleasure and no regrets the loving sexual relations she had with both black and white SNCC organizers. Another organizer described how sleeping with black men was simply part of being a member of an interracial family. Yet another veteran organizer recalled how much she enjoyed the adventure of sleeping with different black men as she visited various projects in the Deep South.17 In many cases, the families of these southern women had severed emotional ties with them. But with male lovers, as one woman put it, they found the “comfort and release” that eased the tension and fear they experienced every day. As highly valued members of the SNCC community, they rarely sensed any disrespect from the black or white men with whom they worked.18
FREEDOM SUMMER
During Freedom Summer 1964, when northern college students came to register voters, the sudden appearance of four hundred northern white female volunteers pushed sexual tensions to the breaking point. Southern white female staffers habitually dressed plainly, without jewelry or makeup. But some of the northern women, who were not fully aware of the tense atmosphere in small southern towns, dressed quite provocatively. “Wittingly or unwittingly,” wrote Mary King, “a number of them found themselves attracted by the sexually explicit manner of certain black men in the local community and also on the SNCC staff. Many wore décolleté necklines and dangling earrings, not realizing that these would be provocative in Southern rural communities, and seemed sometimes to strike an incautious pose.”19
Most female volunteers were, in fact, serious and committed to hard work. Still, northern white women and local black men did seem like exotic creatures to each other. In some cases, sexual liaisons deepened into love affairs. In other cases, they used each other to taste “forbidden fruit.” For some northern white women, the aggressive attention of black men affirmed their sexual desirability for the first time. One woman commented that white men had always “found her too large, but black men assumed I was a sexual person and I needed that very badly.” Another recalled, “In terms of black men, one of the things I discovered . . . [was] that physically I was attractive to black men whereas I never had been attractive to white men.”20
Eager to prove their lack of racism, some adventuresome and anxious northern women made easy sexual targets. According to Mary King, “Any number of black men manipulated this anxiety.” For some black southern men, it was an unprecedented opportunity to violate the South’s most powerful taboo—interracial sex. As Staunton Lynd, a white director of the Freedom Schools that educated young black children, put it, “Every black SNCC worker with perhaps a few exceptions counted a notch on his gun to have slept with a white woman—as many as possible.”21
Some of these white northern women felt that black men treated them as just so many conquests. Others resented that they had to conduct their sexual liaisons in secret, lest black men lose face—or encounter danger—if caught sleeping with a white woman. Some women felt they had to pass a “sexual litmus test” before they were accepted into a project. Others complained of a no-win double standard that operated for female volunteers. “If you didn’t [have sex] you could count on being harassed. If you did, you ran the risk of being written off as a ‘bad girl’ and tossed off the project. This didn’t happen to the guys.”22
Sexual exploitation was not the only problem white female volunteers identified during Freedom Summer. In evaluating prospective volunteers, SNCC’s male recruiters viewed white women volunteers through conventional eyes. They categorically rejected women who said they wouldn’t
or couldn’t type. They regarded an attractive woman as a potential problem. They rejected one woman because she said she would be willing to sleep with a black man. No man was ever rejected for expressing similar desires for black women. (No man, of course, was ever asked.)23
Traditional ideals of womanhood also determined the assignments given to female volunteers. Whatever their job preferences, most women ended up as Freedom School teachers, clerical workers, or community center staff members. More men, in contrast, moved out into voter registration projects that took them into the black community. Common sense as well as sexual stereotyping informed these decisions. To place white women in interracial freedom projects in the Deep South violated every community convention and courted extreme danger. By confining women to schools, offices or classrooms, SNCC staffers could better protect the safety of female volunteers.
But such policies just replicated the conventions that so many of these volunteers hoped to escape. Few young women had signed up for Freedom Summer dreaming of typing or vacuuming. Yet their new lives often looked all too familiar. In the morning, as in any suburban community, men left to face the challenges and dangers of the outside world, while the women stayed inside tending the children, teaching students, or cleaning house. The moral drama of changing the world had brought them South, yet here they were, clerks, teachers, and housewives.24 Since voter registration workers risked greater danger, men’s work was more valued than clerical labor or teaching. When beatings and arrests took place, male recruits faced down danger and earned their manhood. “If we have no incidents, our egos suffer no end,” one young man wrote home.25
Black women, by their own accounts, experienced SNCC quite differently from white women volunteers. They had early on become leaders of major projects, highly valued within the SNCC community. Sexual exploitation was not what vexed them during Freedom Summer. Rather, it was the way black male staffers gravitated to young white female recruits. During the day, black women would work closely with black men, only to watch them turn to white women at night—behavior that would soon be scorned as “backsliding.” Black women, like their white female counterparts, also suffered from a double standard, but of a different nature—they found themselves attacked when they became involved with a white man.26
Cynthia Washington joined SNCC in 1963 and became a director of a freedom project in Mississippi, responsible for voter registration and community organization. “I remember discussions with various women about our treatment [by black male staffers] as one of the boys and its impact on us as women,” she has written.
We did the same work as men—organizing around voter registration and community issues in rural areas—usually with men. But when we finally got back to some town where we could relax and go out, the men went out with other women. Our skills and abilities were recognized and respected, but that seemed to place us in some category other than female. Some years later, I was told by a male SNCC worker that some of the project women had made him feel superfluous. I wish he had told me that at the time because the differences in the way women were treated certainly did add to the tensions between black and white women.27
Despite—or because of—all these sexual and racial tensions, Freedom Summer gave birth to an awareness of women’s subordination that would later attack stereotypes of both black and white women. But in 1964, neither the black nor the white women of SNCC could fully grasp how their situation exaggerated stereotypes of weak white women who needed protection and strong black women who needed none. While white women complained that they were being excessively protected, one black woman observed that “we became Amazons, less than and more than women at the same time.” Washington, for instance, was astonished by such complaints by white women. “I couldn’t understand what they wanted,” she explained.
As far as I could see, being a project director wasn’t much fun. I didn’t realize then that having my own project made a lot of difference in how I was perceived and treated. And I did not see what I was doing as exceptional. . . . It seemed to many of us that white women were demanding a chance to be independent while we needed help and assistance which was not always forthcoming. We definitely started from opposite ends of the spectrum.28
Whatever the problems, most white women viewed Freedom Summer as a transformative experience. During that summer, a network of friendships between northern and southern women had been created, one that would last through the years of the antiwar movement and the New Left. Equally important, SNCC’s emphasis on community, the redemption of the powerless, and the promotion of self-determination would provide much of the structural and ideological foundation for a new feminist movement. Through Freedom Summer, a number of women also gained an awareness of the kind of sexual exploitation and discrimination they would soon encounter in the movement culture of the New Left.29
In November 1964, SNCC held a retreat in Waveland, Mississippi, to deal with its simmering staff resentments and conflicts. Word went out that staffers should draft position papers on questions dividing SNCC. “It was here,” Casey Hayden remembered, “that the many threads of SNCC started to unravel, separately.” Crucial to that unraveling was the growth of black separatism. That August, black activists in Mississippi had suffered a humiliating defeat at the Democratic presidential nominating convention in Atlanta. Their alternate slate of delegates from the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party arrived with high hopes of challenging the all-white Mississippi delegation. But after days of internecine fights and compromises, the national party leadership humiliated the Freedom Democratic Party by offering it only two token convention votes, and no recognition. Fannie Lou Hamer refused the insulting compromise. For many blacks, young and old, it was a profound disappointment that underscored the growing belief that they could not trust whites to advance their cause.
“We were facing, most of all, the question of what to do next,” Casey Hayden wrote, “and SNCC was just as divided as other civil rights organizations.”30 After she wrote a position paper on how to improve communication, Mary King decided to write another one that addressed the future impact of a hierarchical, bureaucratic structure within SNCC. For quite some time, a number of women in SNCC had been discussing women’s position in the organization. As King later explained, “Slowly and perhaps inevitably, self-determination was coming to mean not only politics but also literally self. For both Casey and me, this translated into our growing conviction that we had an obligation to find ways to communicate our deepening sense of political definition which included the political identification of ourselves as women.” Although neither King nor Hayden felt personally marginalized, they were keenly aware of the experiences of others.
But once at the typewriter, King found herself blocked by self-doubt. “The issue was enormous. I was afraid. . . . My heart was palpitating and I was shaking as I typed it. My fear of a joking response was making me unsteady in my resolve.” King drafted the paper, a list of grievances particularly concerning discrimination against SNCC women, to which Hayden added analysis and commentary.31 Modestly titled “SNCC Position Paper, Nov. 1964,” this historic statement prefigured many of the ideas, complaints, and analyses that would shape the women’s liberation movement. Among its grievances, the major one may have been the unquestioned nature of informal male authority within the organization. Men dominated all the committees, farmed out most of the clerical work to women, and expected them to take the minutes at all meetings. They cited several examples of discrimination, which were hardly earth-shattering crimes. They studiously avoided the feminist language they had learned from de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex because “within the framework of the civil rights movement and the field of human rights and civil liberties at the time . . . women’s rights had no meaning and indeed did not exist.” Instead, they self-consciously chose to rely on the movement’s own rhetoric of race relations and relied on “clear-cut analogies between whites’ treatment of blacks and men’s treatment of women.”
A small g
roup of these women prepared the paper in secret and presented it anonymously. They had reason to fear derision. In King’s words, the “reaction to the anonymous position paper was one of crushing criticism. . . . People quickly figured out who had written the memo. Some mocked and taunted us.” Other women, including black women, didn’t feel they had experienced any sex discrimination. Hayden later wrote, “Whether women held leadership positions didn’t matter in actuality prior to this time, since the participatory, town-hall style, consensus-forming nature of SNCC’s operation meant that being on the Executive Committee or a project director didn’t carry much weight anyway.” Still, the paper—with specific but relatively mild complaints—was a ringing indictment of movement men’s insensitivity toward their female comrades.32
The most famous response to the position paper came from Stokely Carmichael, whose words—“The only position for women in SNCC is prone”—would become infamous, providing shocking evidence of men’s disrespectful treatment of women within the movement. At first, Carmichael evidently meant it as an inside joke, a reference to all the sexual adventures that took place during Freedom Summer. After a day of exhausting confrontations and debates, a group of SNCC staffers had “gravitated toward the pier with a gallon of wine.” (Casey Hayden remembered some marijuana as well.)
According to Mary King, “Under a bright, cloudless sky, we talked and laughed among ourselves as we walked to the bay seeking humor to salve the hurts of the day.” Carmichael’s monologues supplied some of the evening’s entertainment. Born in Trinidad, educated at New York City’s Bronx High School of Science and then at Howard University, the articulate, handsome, and gregarious Carmichael was gifted with a quick wit and “the ability to joke like a professional stand-up comedian.” King remembered that