As my classmate Curtis Dunn and I entered the outskirts of Jackson, Mississippi, white men in three pickup trucks commandeered us off the road. Carrying rifles and shotguns, they ordered us out of our car.
We stepped onto the easem*nt, our hands above our heads. It was an afternoon in June 1964, and we thought we were going to be killed. We had just heard on the radio about missing civil rights volunteers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner in Philadelphia, Mississippi, 81 miles away. We were certain the trio was dead.
“Y’all boys here to cause trouble?” a man said, his shotgun leveled at us.
Curtis instantly lied that we were traveling to historically Black Rust College in Holly Springs for summer classes.
Another man said, “Long ways to go. You n----rs better get moving PDQ.”
We jumped back into the car expecting to be killed. We drove about 10 miles north of Jackson, turned around and zigzagged back through the Black community. Our destination was a tavern where we met a local field officer with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, pronounced “Snick”). We went home with him and stayed in his cellar for two days to learn about our tasks during what became known as the Mississippi Summer Project, Freedom Summer and “the long hot summer.”
I was 18 years old, and Curtis was 19. We were sophom*ores at Wiley College in Marshall, Texas. We joined other students in Jackson who, like us, were civil rights volunteers with the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO), an alliance that included SNCC, the Congress of Racial Equality, the NAACP, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and other groups.
Curtis and I would help register voters, and we were told to “stay low” at all times because White Citizens Council members and Klansmen regularly looked for “outside agitators,” “communists,” “n----r lovers,” “stinking integrationists” and “Jesus-killing Jews.”
The field officer cautioned that while we were visiting Mississippi only for the summer and would return to our “parties and booze” in the fall, local Blacks had to live there year-round. Our “stupidity,” “big mouths” and “ego trips” could get them tortured, imprisoned, fired from their jobs, evicted, denied credit or murdered.
It was a gut-wrenching reality.
The Council of Federated Organizations had trained nearly 1,000 white student volunteers, mostly from the Northeast, to come to Mississippi, and we would work alongside them. The belief, a correct one, was that the presence of young “blue-eyed” white students would attract international attention and thus decrease the viciousness of racist law enforcement.
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Explore all your optionsCourage in the face of danger
Curtis and I were sent to live with an older Black couple in Hattiesburg in their modest three-bedroom home. The wife was a maid for a prominent white family, the husband a tractor mechanic on a cotton farm and a member of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. He asked us to never mention that we were living with them and to come and go through the back gate.
We had Council of Federated Organizations training at a Baptist church outside of town, and of the 12 volunteers in our group, Curtis and I were the only Blacks. The others were American whites from Ivy League schools. We were put in teams of two, and we would go door to door and try to persuade Black residents to go to the Forrest County Courthouse and try to register to vote. We also would ask them to participate in a voter registration march whose date was to be announced.
We were taught voter registration protocol for the county and were warned that although the University of Southern Mississippi was located there, virulent racism ran as deep on campus as it did off campus.
Under no circ*mstances would we resort to violence or any other behavior that could be considered belligerent. We had to be committed to Gandhian nonviolence, and all “glory seekers” and “egoists” would be dismissed.
“Self-discipline and calm are a must,” the field officer said, repeating it often.
Never use profanity around cops, we were told, and we should “never, ever” tell cops that we had “rights” because they hated the very notion that “n----rs had any rights whatsoever.” Rights were reserved for white people only.
We role-played for many hours, learning how to stoically endure beatings, insults, yelling mobs and spitting in our faces. The most existential lessons were the techniques of bringing our knees to our stomachs, covering our heads with our arms and hands, dropping to the ground and curling into a ball when clubs rained down on us.
Cowards and sinners
On my first day of voter registration, I crawled out of bed doubtful that I had the courage to begin the most dangerous experience of my 18 years of life, and I was disheartened that Curtis and I were given different partners. His was a male history and political science whiz from Princeton, mine a female English major from Harvard who had never traveled south of the Mason-Dixon Line. She joked that everything she knew about the South came from “To Kill a Mockingbird,” “Gone with the Wind,” “Look Homeward, Angel” and “The Sound and the Fury.”
I met her at sunrise, and the temperature was already in the 90s as we walked to our first house, a wooden shotgun shack. I knocked on the door. We had decided that because I was Black, I always would do the introductions. A middle-aged woman, her hair artfully plaited, opened the door and frowned. Before I could speak, she said that if we were from SNCC and had come about registering to vote, she was not going to the courthouse. My partner asked why.
“Scared,” the woman said and glanced back into the house toward the crying of a young child.
She explained that on two occasions, she had gone to the courthouse to register. The first time, she and more than 50 others had stood all day in intermittent rain, and no one was let inside. Three months later, she and her boyfriend waited in line with nearly 100 other Blacks. Only five entered the courthouse, and none registered because they flunked the literacy test.
Cops harassed, beat and arrested those who disobeyed orders to move away from the courthouse. She was hit on the back of her neck with a nightstick, and her boyfriend was beaten and arrested for trespassing. Although her boyfriend did not get a trial, he spent nearly a month in jail and was released only after a white ACLU lawyer in Jackson said he would handle the case pro bono.
We left the house respectful of the woman’s experiences, and I reluctantly knocked on the door of the next house. A man yelled from the backyard, and we went there. In his 70s and grossly obese, the man sat in a metal rocking chair sipping coffee and smoking a pipe. He knew why we were there and pointed for us to sit on a homemade bench.
He was born and reared in Hattiesburg, and he loved the “young SNCC folks.” He had tried to register many times since 1950, but he never succeeded because he always failed the literacy test, which was different each time. Most recently, a month before our arrival, he was asked to explain, in writing, the Supremacy Clause of the U.S. Constitution, which he had not heard of.
He sighed and said: “I can’t read and write.”
He would keep trying to register, he said, because he was “gittin’ old” and wanted to vote one time before he died. Then, nodding toward the street, he warned us that we were being watched by “some Klan crackers.”
He warned me that I should be extra careful “struttin’ ‘round with a white woman.” Although my partner and I knew the Southern taboos, the warning was chilling because it came from an elderly SNCC supporter.
During our second week of knocking on doors, we visited a couple in their 80s who were a delight because they were intrepid “old heads in the movement,” as longtime local activists referred to them. Nothing, they said, could prevent them from joining the upcoming demonstration at the courthouse, and they had encouraged their neighbors to participate.
They had tried to register many times over the years but had failed because of the literacy test. The husband showed me a ragged scar on his back, the result of deputies dragging him across broken glass in the courthouse parking lot.
He explained that one of white people’s most effective scare tactics against Blacks registering to vote was to get the local paper to publish the names of those who tried or succeeded. After their names were published, many would be fired, evicted or beaten, forcing them to relocate to start new lives.
My partner asked the couple if they were afraid.
“White folks the ones scared,” the wife said. “White folks the cowards, and they the sinners.”
Blackjacks and German shepherds
On the morning of the voter registration march, at least 200 people had gathered in front of the courthouse singing freedom songs and spirituals and clapping their hands. Many carried placards reading, among other slogans, “One Man/One Vote” and “End Voting Discrimination.” They kept coming all morning.
My partner and I stayed across the street away from the action. A phalanx of helmeted cops arrived. They were pejoratively called “the riot squad” because the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee was never riotous. The only rioters were the cops themselves.
Carrying nightsticks and restraining German shepherds, the cops marched and began to club and punch demonstrators. Blood was everywhere.
I spotted the older couple my partner and I had interviewed and saw the husband hugging his wife to protect her. He was hit several times with nightsticks, but he continued to shield his wife. When dogs and tear gas sent some of the crowd scattering, I lost sight of the couple.
More cops arrived with German shepherds, and more people were attacked, including a woman with a toddler in her arms. An old woman tried to run, but a dog leaped and snatched her down and chewed at her arms and legs until the handler pulled the animal away.
A voice blasted over a speaker warning demonstrators to disperse or be arrested for trespassing on government property and for disorderly conduct. The overwhelming majority of the demonstrators remained at the courthouse.
When a state trooper spotted my partner and me standing shoulder to shoulder near a fire hydrant across the street, he trotted toward us wielding a blackjack. Having practiced for such an encounter, we ran in opposite directions, leaving the trooper wondering whom to chase. I hid behind a gas station dumpster, and my partner ducked into a “whites only” cafe.
Although FBI agents and Justice Department officials observed the event, none intervened or recorded anything. During a news conference that was nationally televised, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover told reporters: “We will not wet-nurse troublemakers.”
Many Black residents thought the event had been a failure. But because of international news coverage of the police violence, dog attacks, arrests on bogus charges and tear gas, SNCC leaders saw a victory. So did I.
Teaching in a Freedom School
My partner and I were in for a surprise when we reunited that night at the regular staff meeting. Because we were English majors, we were reassigned to teach in a Freedom School.
Organizers had underestimated Black Mississippians’ hunger for “real education.” In Hattiesburg, no more than 150 students had been expected, requiring just 23 teachers. To everyone’s surprise, 600 students showed up. This was an incredible number because leaders had expected about 700 students statewide. Instead, some 3,500 enrolled, causing a severe teacher shortage before the first class was held.
And we desperately needed books. SNCC put out the call, and many white liberals, predominantly Northeasterners, sent thousands of books to benighted Mississippi. I received a trove of classic Black literature, and I gave my students copies of their favorite works to keep, a gift that permanently changed many of their lives.
Each day in my classroom, an unventilated shack, I saw the real magic of teaching and learning. I learned why racists did not want Black children to attend quality schools, why they wanted to keep those children in separate-and-unequal Jim Crow outposts where the curriculum was abysmal and where books and supplies were barely usable discards from local white schools.
It was a system of planned inferiority as whites controlled all course offerings in the “Negro schools.” Three official prohibitions were especially onerous: “Neither foreign languages nor civics shall be taught in Negro schools. Nor shall American history from 1860 to 1875 be taught.”
The history ban, which one white state legislator called “the ignorance is bliss rule,” had a cynical purpose. From 1860 to 1875, which was the era of Reconstruction, Black people were permitted to vote. More than a century later, whites did not want Blacks to know that they ever had the right to vote in Mississippi. Teachers who discussed Reconstruction risked being fired and arrested.
Instead of being discouraged, many of us were inspired to become classroom teachers. We met our students in churches, in yards under trees, on porches, in garages, in living rooms and anywhere else thought to be moderately safe. Of course, no place was fully safe from white terror, and although several of our 41 Freedom Schools statewide were burned or bombed, we continued to work.
The words of fellow teacher Pam Parker spoke for us: “The atmosphere in class is unbelievable. It is what every teacher dreams about — real, honest enthusiasm and desire to learn anything and everything. ... The kids 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. ...”
Confrontation in Atlantic City
While we teachers nurtured our students, thousands of other activists battled the all-white Mississippi Democratic Party whose leaders proudly called themselves “Dixiecrats.” To challenge these racists, the Council of Federated Organizations created the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and sent representatives to the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey, to show the nation that the all-white Mississippi delegation was illegitimate because it did not represent all Mississippians.
In Atlantic City, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party tried to unseat the entire white supremacist delegation from the nominating committee. When that failed, they asked for a fair number of Black seats on the committee. President Lyndon Johnson, up for election, was afraid of losing Southern support if he spoke favorably of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party’s demand, so he attempted to please both sides by offering the party two at-large seats on the committee. The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party rejected the offer, which was viewed as an insult.
Although Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party leaders left Atlantic City empty-handed and angry, they knew they had shown the rest of the nation on live TV that the South had systematically disenfranchised Black Americans and that federal intervention was required.
Was Freedom Summer a failure?
At the end of August, a day before Curtis and I drove back to Texas, we attended a service in Philadelphia in honor of Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner. Curtis pointed out, ironically, that we had arrived in Mississippi a few hours after the trio was reported missing, and we were driving back to Texas a few hours after attending a memorial service for them.
I struggled to readjust to campus life while trying to forget the violence, hostility and fear we had endured. What was the reward for all the terror and death? What did we accomplish?
Each time I asked those questions, reality — or what my 18-year-old mind thought was reality — stared me in the face. While some 17,000 Black Mississippians attempted to register to vote, only 1,200 succeeded; six people were known to have been murdered by racists; nearly 100 other people were beaten by mobs; the unidentified corpses of five Black men were dragged from rivers; some 1,000 residents, college volunteers and Council of Federated Organizations staff members were arrested on bogus charges; at least 40 Black churches were bombed or burned; and more than 30 Black homes and businesses were destroyed.
Gradually, as the weeks passed and as civil rights events filled the news nationwide, I began to feel better. A real turning point came when I wrote an essay about my Freedom Summer experience. Many people, including political and social scientists, argued that because of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s leadership and the courage of Black Mississippians and students, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed despite fierce Southern opposition. The act prohibited discrimination in public places, ordered the integration of schools and made employment discrimination illegal. The Voting Rights Act was passed, empowering millions of Blacks to vote for the first time. The consolation prize for me was learning that Freedom Schools had provided the blueprint for initiatives such as Head Start and many government-sponsored adult education programs.
And when I read the words of SNCC Chairman Stokely Carmichael, I was glad I had gone to Mississippi.
“In many ways, the Mississippi Summer Project was a turning point for a whole generation of us. It was certainly the boldest, most dramatic and traumatic single event of the entire movement,” Carmichael said. “It certainly had the most far-reaching effect: for national party politics, for that activist college generation, for the state of Mississippi and the movement there and especially for student as an organization. After the summer, none of those would be the same.”
Indeed, I was changed forever.
Bill Maxwell is a former Tampa Bay Times columnist. His book “Maximum Vantage: New Selected Columns,” an anthology of his columns for the Times, won the 2022 Florida Book Awards silver medal in Florida nonfiction.
