Brian Watson’s book Freedom Summer was reviewed by Dwight Garner in yesterday’s Times. A lot of Mississippi echoes, to Emily Henochowicz and Tristan Anderson and Rachel Corrie and the fact (apropos of voter registration and the 64 convention) that Palestinians are not included in Israeli governing coalitions. Oh, and Barney Frank was among the young idealists. Empowered hypocrisy that reveals the cultural/political knot we must undo. Excerpts:
“Freedom Summer” is about the more than 700 college students who, in the summer of 1964, under the supervision of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, risked their lives to travel to Mississippi to register black voters and open schools. It was a summer, Mr. Watson writes, that “brought out the best in America” but “the worst in Mississippi.”
…“Freedom Summer” opens with these students, many if not most from places like Yale and Oberlin and Harvard and Berkeley, arriving in Ohio in June 1964 to study with coordinating-committee members before heading south. What they learned made some flee. They were taught how to take a beating. A security handbook read, “No one should go anywhere alone, but certainly not in an automobile and certainly not at night.”
Organizers cherry-picked the students they wanted. Any student with a “John Brown complex” was out. So was anyone who expressed an interest in interracial sex. Those who made the cut, the author writes, made up “a group portrait of American idealism.”
The summer of 1964 in Mississippi was in some ways a failure for the volunteers. They didn’t register as many voters as they had hoped. Their plans to unseat Mississippi’s all-white delegation at the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City came to naught. But their actions had permanent resonance, bringing the nation’s full attention to Mississippi’s second-class citizens. “If it hadn’t been for the veterans of Freedom Summer,” Representative John Lewis of Georgia says in this book, “there would be no Barack Obama.” ..
…To be with Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee members during the civil rights era — “walking a picket line in the rain in Hattiesburg, Miss. … to see them jabbed by electric prod poles and flung into paddy wagons in Selma, Ala., or link arms and sing at the close of a church meeting in the Delta” — was, Mr. [Howard] Zinn wrote, “to feel the presence of greatness.”
