My old friend Eric Etheridge, a Mississippian and author of an important history of the Freedom Riders, responded to my post saying that Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman, who were killed in Mississippi in ’63, were like the Gaza flotilla members:
1. CSG were not Freedom Riders but Freedom Summer volunteers. Rides were 1961, Freedom Summer 1963. Rides were classic nonviolent direct action, targeting segregated bus and train stations. Freedom Summer was about registering black Mississippians to vote, which was a provocative idea, granted, but not nonviolent direct action.
2. Ironically, the focus on voting rights came in some part from the Kennedy Administration. Even while the Rides were still going on, Bobby Kennedy met with Diane Nash, CT Vivian, James Lawson and a handful of other movement leaders in DC and urged them to forgo any more nonviolent direct action and focus on voter registration, which they (the Admin) thought was much less confrontational and much less likely to lead to violence. Admin offered funding, indirectly, and other support to try to induce the movement to shift its focus. Of course, any provocation was at risk of being met with deadly violence in the South in the early ’60s, and voter registration, as it turned out, wasn’t any safer than Freedom Riding. For CSG, it was even worse.
3. Not sure how you intended the question about provocation in the headline of your post ("Did Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman provoke and incite their murderers in Philadelphia, MI?"). I think the Freedom Riders intended to provoke violence in the south, in this sense: Whites had been using violence for nearly 300 years to control blacks in the United States. The Riders were essentially saying, if you (white Southerners) are going to keep doing this, we’re going to make you do it in public, for all the world to see. We are willing to die in public for our freedom. If you kill the first group, we’re going to keep sending more groups for you to kill. We’re not going to let you do it in the shadows anymore.
4. Which is not to say the Riders wanted to die, but that they were willing to die.
5. I think the Riders’ essential gambit was this: either the White South attacks us, and they lose, or they let us desegregate the bus stations, and we win. So either way, the Riders were going to win, as long as they could muster the effort, keep the Riders coming and stay nonviolent. I think this is essentially the Flotilla’s gambit, but frankly I don’t know enough to know.
6. It is interesting to see what happened since some of the Flotilla people fought back. I’m sure all the things being said about them would have been said about the Riders if any of them had fought back.
