When I heard about Freedom Summer, I had just graduated five months early from high school, and I decided to join SNCC and the Freedom Summer project, not something that went down quietly with my mother and stepfather. In March, hundreds of us trained in Ohio. In the fourth week of June, I arrived with a handful of others in Jackson, Mississippi. Schwerner, Goodman, and Chaney had been missing for just four days when we arrived. It was widely assumed they were dead. Six weeks later, as a result of an intense, federally coordinated manhunt that must have had FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover grinding his molars into dust, authorities pulled the men’s bodies from an earthen berm.
The three were members of the Congress on Racial Equality, a mixed-race organization which was fighting to ensure that Black Americans got the rights they had been constitutionally granted nearly a century previously after tens of thousands of their ancestors bled for their freedom wearing the Union uniform. CORE, SNCC, and the other civil rights groups backed the radical notion that the Constitution’s 14th and 15th Amendments mean what they say.
Opposed to them, in theory and practice, was an array of powerful Southern officials. The progenitors of their ideology had replaced slavery with a sort of secessionism without war. They called it Jim Crow, an almost mythic name with which to euphemize American apartheid. A system in which uppity nigras got whupped for exercising rights every citizen was supposedly guaranteed. Sometimes the whupping ended up with a noose and a bonfire.
Like the earlier bus strikes and diner sit-ins and Freedom Rides, the tactics of Freedom Summer had both a real and symbolic value. Our job was to persuade Black Mississippians to register to vote. The presence of outsiders, especially outsiders who weren’t Black, was seen as a way to focus more attention on the situation from parts of the nation — and the media — where Jim Crow’s consequences were more likely to be viewed with distaste, disgust, or rage even though many liberals urged activists not to push too hard or “go too fast,” as if guaranteeing the citizenship provisions of what was then the nearly century-old 14th Amendment was too speedy.
Every day, two-by-two, we went door to door cajoling Black men and women to gather up the courage to come with us and demand their constitutional right to cast a ballot. We didn’t get many takers. Some people wouldn’t let us in their house. Others wouldn’t let us on their property. They were scared, and justifiably so. After the summer, most of us were going back where we came from and they were staying in Mississippi, no longer officially accounted for as 3/5ths a person, but legally kept from being whole.
My partner and I, Charly Biggers, a Black man who had been a Freedom Rider in 1961, registered seven people all summer, and that was only because Charly was one of the best talkers I ever met. Some volunteers didn’t register anyone. Many of us were arrested, often more than once. Early on, Charly and I shared a cell for two days with other activists, including one from Massachusetts named Abbie Hoffman. He made us laugh the entire time. When the summer was over, out of 500,000 eligible but unregistered Black people, Mississippi had 1,200 new Black voters.
Not many, we thought, but a victory, nonetheless.
Unlike the impression one might get from watching the deeply flawed whitewash Mississippi Burning, J. Edgar Hoover was no friend of the civil rights movement. A gentleman racist himself, he had strongly suggested in a report about racial tensions to Eisenhower in 1956 that the NAACP was “overzealous” and that communists had strong influence among civil rights leaders. His despicable record of smearing and spying on civil rights leaders, including Martin Luther King Jr., are well-documented.
In 1961, the John F. Kennedy Administration had its own reasons for trying to keep the Freedom Rides from going forward. These consisted of Black and white activists riding side-by-side into the South on segregated public transit to protest Jim Crow laws mandating that Black passengers ride in the back of the bus. The Supreme Court had ruled five years earlier that segregated buses violated the Constitution in Browder v. Gayle. When it became apparent the riders would not back down, the president ordered the FBI to become involved. Instead of doing something public, transparent, and pre-emptive of the Southern establishment’s violent response to any challenge of Jim Crow, Hoover took the secret police’s usual approach and spied on the dissidents. Nothing was done to stop Freedom Riders from being beaten up, firebombed, and generally terrorized.
Informed by a Ku Klux Klan snitch, the FBI knew beforehand that violence would break out in Birmingham. Even though agents knew that one police official regularly passed on information to the Klan, the bureau let the Birmingham cops in on some details about the Freedom Riders' schedule. Later, in 1963, the bureau’s indifference got too little blame when four little girls were blown up in a Birmingham church basement. At the time, the FBI might just as well have been a charter member of the good ol’ boy network when it came to Jim Crow.
It is bitterly illustrative of white supremacy that the feds didn’t see fit to intervene when violence had accompanied previous voter registration efforts. Voter registration meetings were broken up by white citizens, often watched, sometimes led, by deputies. On September 25, 1961, Herbert Lee, a 52-year-old farmer and father of nine who had attempted to register to vote, was shot and killed by E.H. Hurst, a white member of the state legislature from the ironically named Liberty, Mississippi. The sheriff and others intimidated Black witnesses to testify that Lee had threatened Hurst with a tire iron. Hurst was acquitted on the same day he killed Lee in an Amite County courtroom brimful of armed white men.
One of the Black witnesses, Lewis Allen, later said he had lied to protect himself and his family. He was soon being harassed by the police. Three weeks after Lee was murdered, Allen was blasted to death with buckshot in his driveway.
When Goodman, Chaney and Schwerner disappeared, however, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy “urged” Hoover to get a serious investigation going, and he did. The FBI search turned up eight bodies, including that of a 14-year-old African American boy wearing a CORE tee shirt, Herbert Oarsby. It is said that, eventually, the FBI interviewed 1,000 Mississippians about what happened to the three men before finding where the bodies were buried.
By the time their corpses were dug up six weeks after their disappearance, the national attention given to what everybody had known from the beginning was more than a “disappearance” made the failure of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party to be seated at the Atlantic City Democratic Convention in August all the more infuriating. While the regular, all-white Mississippi Democratic Party had already begun its break with the national party after the Civil Rights Act passed that summer, Lyndon Johnson feared immediate and more future losses in the South and chose to offer a ludicrous compromise that made nobody happy and was an affront to justice.
At its most basic, Freedom Summer was about stopping the ruthless terrorism at the hands of the Ku Klux Klan, the killing of Americans who were merely trying to exercise their rights, and ending the intimidation of others who were too afraid to even try to secure their rights. The murder of the three was no anomaly but took place amid other murders in the context of protests led by courageous African Americans, some of whom were also murdered. The violence didn’t end just because of the national spotlight shone on Mississippi, a focus that would not have occurred had two of those young men in 1964 not been white. Black lives simply weren’t viewed as being worth as much as white ones . Some Mississippians figured they’d continue with the old ways once the “outside agitators” and national media went home.
They were, to some extent, right. From June that year until January of 1965, Ku Klux Klansmen burned 31 Black churches in Mississippi. And, although some men were convicted and sentenced to short terms in prison made even shorter by parole, it took another 41 years before Edgar Killen, the Klan kleagle who recruited the murderers, was convicted of manslaughter on the anniversary of the day the three men disappeared.
Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman didn’t end racism, didn’t make everyone equal, didn’t bring down Jim Crow by themselves. But they, like others in Mississippi, gave their lives for freedom, which American myth and reality deems the most patriotic of acts. That summer 60 years ago, the courage of hundreds of local Black people, the three murders, the publicity given to the voter registration drive, and the confrontation at the Democratic National Convention by the Freedom Democrats played a part in crushing American apartheid. Forty-four years later, the seeds planted that summer came to fruition as Barack Obama won the Mississippi primary.
Sadly, infuriatingly, racist voter suppression wasn’t ended by that seminal presidential victory anymore than the 14th Amendment of 1868 or the Voting Rights Act of 1965 ended it. Indeed, the Supreme Court has gutted that act, asserting — against the evidence — that it is no longer needed.
A young John R. Lewis suffered a skull fracture from baton-swinging cops in one of his many civil rights-related protests and arrests. He would later become a distinguished representative from my birth state of Georgia. That June of 1964, he gave some of us our final Freedom Summer training once we reached Mississippi.
In light of current efforts to curtail voter suppression, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act was introduced in 2021 by Rep. Terri Sewell of Alabama. This amendment to the deeply wounded Voting Rights Act of 1965 would repair some of the damage the Supreme Court has engendered with its Shelby ruling. But, while the House of Representatives voted for the amendment, the Senate turned it down twice, unable to get 60 affirmative votes to defeat the filibuster.
The struggle continues.