Freedom Summer

by Bruce W. Watson

  A thousand miles south, Fannie Lee Chaney had taken to pacing outside her home in Meridian. Each night she walked until the sky lightened, circling the house, wearing a path in the grass, humming “Rock of Ages” or some other spiritual. Each evening after work, she cleaned obsessively, mop-ping the kitchen floor three or four times, washing the dishes, drying them, washing them again. She refused to let twelve-year-old Ben go down the street to play ball. One evening she got a call from a young woman who told of recently giving birth to “J. E.’s” daughter. Skeptical, she had mother and child take a taxi to her house. One look at the baby, and Fannie Lee Chaney knew she was a grandmother. She took the baby in her arms, wishing she could do the same with her own son.

  And still there was no trace of the men. Mississippi’s raw, rugged land could not have been better suited for hiding a body. Murky rivers gave up nothing to the grappling hook. Swamps kept their secrets behind protruding trees, beneath black waters. Tangled vineroot defied anyone to tear through it. No trace. The FBI lab in New Orleans examined items from the burned station wagon—dirt and debris, keys, a charred wristwatch stopped at 12:45—but found “no evidence of human remains.” The latest lead, a grave along the Chunky River south of Neshoba County, turned out to contain a dead horse. With hope disappearing, America’s obsession with Mississippi was turning to other concerns—to the mounting crisis in Vietnam, to the upcoming Republican National Convention, to the topless swimsuit craze. No longer in the media spotlight, some in Mississippi again felt the impunity of “the good ol’ days” when what happened in Mississippi stayed there. And the effort to stop Freedom Summer, to drive the “invaders” out, to preserve “our way of life,” exploded with a vengeance.

  Cops tired of arresting volunteers on any pretense and releasing them on $100 bail began upping the bail. Reckless driving—$250. Speeding—$400. Trespassing—$500. Trespassing and public profanity—$1,000. Ordinary citizens lashed out. In Hattiesburg, several black kids went to an inn whose “Whites Only” sign had been taken down. The owner’s wife pulled a gun. In the Delta, a volunteer was not just told to leave the courthouse but grabbed by the neck and thrown out. In Jackson, a white man parked his pickup, got out, decked a Negro with a sucker punch, and drove off. Such incidents—more violent, more frequent, more frightening—were happening all over Mississippi. That made the silence from McComb especially terrifying.

  By Tuesday, July 7, SNCC again had a “beachhead” in Mississippi’s deep Deep South. During the holiday weekend, five volunteers and two SNCC staffers had crammed into a beat-up sedan and set out from Jackson. Rolling south beneath puffy blue skies, the integrated car attracted little attention along the newly opened stretch of Interstate 55. But when the interstate ended and the sedan began snaking down two-lane roads, a highway patrol car pulled behind. As if one was towing the other, the two vehicles drove on past vines and thickets that grew denser with each mile. SNCC staffers must have felt a clammy sense of dread as they passed the sign reading “Pike County.” McComb (pop. 12,020) was the toughest of Mississippi’s “tough towns,” but because Bob Moses wanted SNCC to “share the terror” of local blacks, a Freedom House was to open on the black side of town.

  With the highway patrol in its rearview mirror, the sedan drove slowly into McComb. Given what they had heard of the place, volunteers might have expected to see some redneck backwater out of Tobacco Road. Instead they saw well-kept drugstores and five-and-dimes, pink azaleas bursting from planters on covered sidewalks, and a billboard picture of a beauty queen beneath the words “Home of Miss Mississippi.” McComb was a “railroad town.” Freights rumbled through several times a day, hundreds of men worked for one railroad or another, and twice daily, the City of New Orleans stopped at the old station, taking passengers to or from Chicago. Trains were the only sign of life on a baking Sunday afternoon as SNCC veterans reacquainted themselves with the town they had fled three years earlier. There in back alleys stood the “Colored Only” entrances to restaurants. There were the city hall steps where a mob had beaten several SNCCs in 1961. And there behind them was the highway patrolman, his red light flashing.

  Pulling the SNCC car over, the patrolmen took all seven men in for questioning. But to their surprise, they were not beaten, nor arrested. Released, they drove across the railroad tracks and pulled up at a small, tumbledown house in a neighborhood of small, tumbledown houses. No angry whites greeted them. No pickups circled. That evening as the new arrivals ate at a Negro café, two cops entered, walked to the back, glared at one white man, then walked out. The following day, SNCC staff, accompanied by one of the four touring congressmen, met with McComb’s mayor and the Pike County sheriff. The sheriff even promised police protection for the Freedom House. SNCC sent back word to Jackson: “Morale is building.” Bob Moses, however, was not fooled. On Tuesday evening, he visited the Freedom House and begged all those he had just sent there to leave. Something was going to happen, Moses said. Curtis Hayes, whose determination to work in his hometown had convinced Moses to open the house, refused to go. Others said they would depart the next morning. Moses left, and all went to sleep.

  The usual incoming distress calls lit up the WATS line in Jackson that Tuesday evening, but at 1:30 a.m., the phone stopped ringing. For the next two hours, the office was eerily quiet. Then the phone rang again. A scratchy voice was on the line. From McComb. “Have just had a bombing . . . wait a minute . . .” Endless moments passed before the man said he would call back. The full report finally came on one of the new CB radios COFO was installing in offices throughout the state.

  With a blast heard all over McComb, eight sticks of dynamite had blown in the front of the Freedom House. Curtis Hayes had been sleeping near the front window. The explosion knocked him across the room, knocked him unconscious. He woke up head pounding, ears ringing, arms, legs, and face laced with cuts. Crawling through the wreckage, Hayes met another staffer. “See that, motherfucker,” the man said. “I told you we should get the hell outta here.” A volunteer from Oregon had suffered a concussion. Others sleeping in the house were unhurt. Back in Jackson, staffers worried they had moved into McComb too soon, but another call suggested that the bomb had only strengthened spirits: “Bomb was placed between car and end of house at front of house at left, facing street. Damage on left side. Whole left side completely smashed in—can drive a car thru. Middle, all windows smashed, walls falling down from top. Shattered windows two houses across the street and next door. We are going ahead in the community. Everyone determined. Mass meeting tonight.”

  During the second week of July 1964, while children across America relished their freedom from classrooms, three dozen schools opened in Mississippi. Classes met in converted shacks and church basements, beneath trees and on open lawns. Teachers had few textbooks and little training. Attendance was entirely voluntary. There would be no lectures and no tests, no principals, no homework. Yet the lessons would change the lives of nearly every teacher and every student. These were the Freedom Schools.

  Freedom Schools had an unusual legacy. In the fall of 1961, McComb high school student Brenda Travis was suspended for her role in a sit-in, leading one hundred fellow students to walk out in protest. When the hundred were also suspended, SNCC opened its own school, quickly dubbed “Non-Violent High.” Bob Moses taught math again; other SNCCs taught history, black history, art, and literature. Non-Violent High classes continued until all the teachers were convicted of contributing to the delinquency of a minor and sentenced to six months. Ever since, parallel schooling had been a SNCC dream and, for young blacks in Mississippi, a light in the wilderness.

  A decade after the Brown decision, Mississippi remained the last southern state whose schools were completely and defiantly segregated. Schools were just one of Mississippi’s “separate but equal” institutions, but they made the biggest mockery of the phrase. Forty-two percent of Mississippi whites had finished high school; among blacks the figure was 7 percent. Statewide per-pupil expenditures f
or whites were four times what they were for blacks, and in some counties the ratio was fifty to one. Black teachers struggled on in dilapidated classrooms with ancient texts, no equipment, and only the most basic subjects. Yet it was their teaching that infuriated SNCC veteran Charlie Cobb. With fifty students in a class, teachers had no time for questioning or investigation, and principals hired by white school boards did not dare challenge the status quo. Freedom Schools, Cobb noted in a cowritten prospectus, would be different. The prospectus was sent that spring to all Freedom School teachers.

  To those who had plowed through dry educational monographs, SNCC’s “Notes on Teaching in Mississippi” must have stood out like the prose of Eudora Welty. It opened: “This is the situation. You will be teaching young people who have lived in Mississippi all their lives. That means that they have been deprived of decent education from first grade through high school. It means that they have been denied free expression and free thought. Most of all it means that they have been denied the right to question. The purpose of the Freedom Schools is to help them begin to question.”

  What would the students be like?

  “They will be different but they will have in common the scars of the system. Some will be cynical. Some will be distrustful. All of them will have a serious lack of preparation . . . but all of them will have a knowledge far beyond their years. This knowledge is the knowledge of how to survive in a society that is out to destroy you.”

  And what would students demand of teachers?

  “They will demand that you be honest. . . . Honesty means that you will ask questions as well as answer them. It means that if you don’t know something you will say so.” Freedom Schools, the prospectus concluded, would mount a full frontal assault on Mississippi’s power structure, a structure that confined Negro education to “learning to stay in your place . . . to be satisfied—‘a good nigger.’ ”

  Planning three dozen schools for a thousand students on a budget of $2,000 took more time than most had expected. In March, SNCC meetings in Manhattan had tapped the expertise of professors and teachers. The Freedom School curriculum they devised would include (1) remedial and standard classes in reading, writing, and math; (2) a study of the movement; (3) more black history than anyone had yet taught in an American public school; (4) lessons questioning conditions in Mississippi and in northern ghettos; and (5) comparisons of the Negro and the “poor white.” Teachers were also encouraged to offer the electives whites alone enjoyed in Mississippi public schools, including typing, French, Spanish, art, drama, and dance. And above all, they were urged to “be creative. Experiment. The kids will love it.”

  Arriving in Mississippi on June 28, teachers had spent a week arranging classrooms, shelving books, and spreading word about their schools. But with the term “Freedom School” seeming like an oxymoron, would anyone come to classes taught by strangers in the middle of summer? The answer depended less on curiosity than on terror.

  Three schools were planned in Canton, half an hour north of Jackson. But a man threatened to bomb students’ homes, and others broke into the new library and urinated on the books. On registration day, no one showed up at one school, just a handful at others. Then teachers went door to door and hosted their own Fourth of July picnic. Enrollment soon topped seventy-five. In Ruleville, fifty packed into the old shack that carpenter Fred Winn and others had brought back to life. Because Ruleville’s public schools were still in session, morning classes were for adults, often with toddlers. While cotton baked in surrounding fields, the house swarmed with activity. Children raced in and out. Adults studied citizenship, health, and the three R’s, while teachers sat on the sagging porch near the tall sunflowers, discussing Huckleberry Finn or the truth about Reconstruction. Following a midday break from the heat, high school students took over the school, exploring literature, African culture, art, and biology. Girls especially liked dance classes, where they taught their ungainly teachers how to flap their arms and do “the Monkey.” Above the clamor, students could hear a loud clacking coming from the porch. Typing class.

  In Meridian, where Rita and Mickey Schwerner had paved the way, 50 students were expected, but 120 showed up. Teachers facing classes of 30 or more struggled to draw answers from shy students. “What do we mean when we say things are bad in Mississippi?” “What do white people have that we want? ” Despite the overcrowding, one Meridian teacher noticed what SNCC had said about “a knowledge far beyond their years.” “If reading levels are not always the highest,” he wrote home, “the philosophical understanding is almost alarming: some of the things that our 11 and 12 year olds will come out with would never be expected from someone of that age in the North.”

  Other schools opened that week in Greenwood and Vicksburg, Greenville and Moss Point. But the most successful schools were down south in Hattiesburg. Blacks there were still talking about “Freedom Day” the previous January, when two hundred had picketed the courthouse in the rain. Since then, more than a thousand had tried to register, some trying six, seven, eight times. Much of Hattiesburg’s fervor stemmed from a single name—Clyde Kennard. The sturdy army veteran had tried to integrate Mississippi Southern College, only to be framed on a charge of stealing chicken feed. Sent to Parchman Farm, Kennard developed terminal cancer but was kept behind bars until just before his death. United in outrage, black Hattiesburg had welcomed SNCC and strengthened its NAACP. As Freedom Summer approached, plans were made for seven Freedom Schools. On registration day, 150 students were expected; 575 showed up. The first to register was an eighty-two-year-old man who had taught himself to read but needed help with the registration form. When classes opened, all seven schools were full. Directors had to promise a second session in August.

  Planning and publicity had filled Freedom Schools, but could classes foster any meaningful sense of freedom? Could white college students who had first read The Souls of Black Folk en route to Ohio teach black history? Could they help students see “the link between a rotting shack and a rotting America”? Pamela Parker, from Bucks County, Pennsylvania, sent the answers home in a letter.

  Dear Mom and Dad,

  The atmosphere in class is unbelievable. It is what every teacher dreams about—real, honest enthusiasm and desire to learn anything and everything. The girls come to class of their own free will. They respond to everything that is said. They are excited about learning. They drain me of everything that I have to offer so that I go home at night completely exhausted but very happy. . . .

  Not all teachers were happy, however. Many were appalled at what their students did not know. Asked the number of states in America, one boy answered, “Eighty-two” (the number of counties in Mississippi). In one Hattiesburg classroom, not a single student had heard of Brown v. Board of Education. “Where do roads come from?” Answer: “God.” And the capital of the United States? “Ummm . . . Jackson?” Compounding the ignorance were the conditions. Walls sported just a poster or two. Students clustered on benches instead of sitting at desks, supplies were chronically short, and classrooms were so stifling that afternoon classes often met outside under trees. To surmount such obstacles, teachers applied creativity—broken windows in one school were covered by kids’ watercolors—and tireless energy. Most teachers began at 7:00 a.m., planning classes that started an hour later. Teachers taught till noon, broke for lunch, ran three-hour afternoon sessions, went home for dinner, and returned for evening work with adults. Accustomed to low pay, these teachers were working for none. Their ten-dollar weekly room and board came out of their own pockets.

  While most Freedom Schools hummed, a few were all but silent. In Moss Point, still reeling from the drive-by shooting, less than a dozen students showed up each day. In several towns, ministers fearful of firebombs refused to turn church halls into classrooms, and Freedom Schools had yet to open. In the destitute Delta town of Shaw, forty students had shown up the first day, ten the second. Finally, the school’s director wrote Freedom School supervisor Staughton Lynd:I
think I am rapid [sic] losing whatever effectiveness I may have had as a coordinator, or even as a rights worker. . . . Living conditions here are so terrible, the Negroes are so completely oppressed, so completely without hope, that I want to change it all NOW. I mean this as sincerely as I can. Running a freedom school is an absurd waste of time. I don’t want to sit around in a classroom; I want to go out and throw a few bombs, burn a few office buildings, not to injure people but to shake them up. . . . I really can’t stand it here.

  Lynd scheduled a trip to Shaw.

  But despair was less common than discovery. Startled by teachers they could call by their first names, teachers who dared them to question Mississippi, kids were also amazed to learn they had a proud history. Stories of the Amistad slave rebellion spread smiles across black faces. Students were stunned to hear that a black man, Matthew Henson, had been one of the first to reach the North Pole. And they ate up the poetry of Langston Hughes, reading his poems aloud, begging to take his books home. Endesha Ida Mae Holland remembered reading Richard Wright’s Black Boy in the Greenwood Freedom School. “I kept thinking, ‘Well, you mean black folk can actually write books?’ Because I’d always been told blacks had done no great things, they hadn’t done anything, we had nothing that we could be proud of.” As initial awkwardness settled into familiar rhythms of call-and-response, students and teachers shared their curiosity and their surprise at coming together across racial boundaries, across the North-South divide, and across cacophonous classrooms where young hands shot in the air and withered old hands gripped pencils, slowly writing, A . . . B . . . C . . . “Our school was by any definition a fine school,” remembered Sandra Adickes, a New York English teacher who taught in Hattiesburg. “No attendance sheets, absentee postcards, truant officers, report cards—just perfect attendance.”