Freedom Summer is an important event in Civil Rights history led by people such as Bob Moses, Fannie Lou Hamer, and John Lewis. Freedom Summer by Doug McAdam makes significant contribution in his account in this milestone event but eventually the book leaves a sour taste as it places the most important players in minor roles.
McAdam,
Doug. Freedom Summer. New York,
Oxford University Press, 1988.
In 1964 James Chaney, Andrew
Goodman, and Michael Schwerner were murdered near the town of Philadelphia,
Mississippi by local members of the Ku Klux Klan with the active help of local
law enforcement. Goodman and Schwerner were among the first wave of young
volunteers recruited by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)
for an event called Freedom Summer. Their deaths caused a multitude of
reporters to descend upon Mississippi and report on the activities of the white
volunteers. In his book, Freedom Summer, Doug McAdam examines the
recruiting and use of the youthful volunteers to register African Americans to
vote and to staff freedom schools in Mississippi. Doug McAdam is a professor of
sociology at Stanford University and was the former Director of the Center for
Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. He is the author of numerous books
and specializes on race in the United States, American politics, and the study
of social movements. Along with Freedom
Summer, his most prominent book is Political
Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 1930-1970 first published
in 1982.
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| From: PBS |
McAdam examines the Freedom Summer crusade
in Mississippi and determines that the movement was the high point of new
liberalism and served as a link to other liberal social movements in the 1960s.
The volunteers who spent the summer of 1964 in Mississippi found themselves
transformed by the experience and many became leaders of other radical
movements such as the free speech movement in Berkley, the Anti-war movement,
and the Feminist movement. McAdam proposes that the different social movements
of the 1960s are not isolated social events, but instead they overlap through
common participants and leaders with the Freedom Summer serving as the
high-water mark of liberal movements.
Using the files of the white
students who applied to journey South to Mississippi, McAdam combines these
with interviews, letters, and surveys to paint a picture of life during the
summer of 1964. The white students recruited by the SNCC hailed from prominent
northern families and attended prestigious northern and western universities.
They possessed self-confidence and optimism common among the elite class from
which they originated. Their self-assurance gave them the courage to pursue an
adventure in Mississippi, but it also caused friction with the black SNCC
leadership. While their assertiveness often developed into paternalism, that
same confidence and assertiveness led to their involvement and leadership into
many of the leading liberal social movements of the 1960s. Upon arriving in
Mississippi, the summer volunteers experienced a part of America that they
never dreamed existed. While other Southern states adapted to mechanized
agriculture, Mississippi still relied upon black labor for picking cotton. The
poverty in Mississippi was comparable to the Third World with infant mortality
rates for blacks twice as high than white Mississippians. (26) Blacks who
attempted to assert their rights faced vicious persecution and sometimes death
from a white majority desperate to maintain their grip on society.
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| https://scholarblogs.emory.edu/woodruff/fyi/new-digital-sources-sncc-core-claude-barnett-and-robert-f-williams |
The air of oppression and violence
dominated the atmosphere the young students faced when they arrived in the
Magnolia state. Local law enforcement and state police prepared themselves for
the arrival of the volunteers with every intention to oppose the students and
preserve the Mississippi status quo. The students involved themselves in the
effort to support the efforts of SNCC to bring justice to Mississippi through
the ballot. The students engaged themselves in voter registration efforts and freedom schools. For many, this was their first
experience interacting with blacks and the fellowship and community developed
into the “beloved community.” Early in the summer, the student volunteers
worked jointly with their black sponsors and black members of the SNCC for a
common goal. The hope for the beloved community was a color-blind collective rooted
in love and fellowship. But the beloved community fell short. The white
students never understood how pervasive racism was in their culture and
society. Many students developed a missionary attitude, which produced an
attitude of paternalism toward those they wanted to help. The missionary
attitude never escaped the notice of the black SNCC workers, who often resented
the amount of press and attention the white volunteers received. Sexual
relations also complicated interactions as sex between students and races caused
difficulties that spread into their working relations. Sexism also spoiled the
environment of the beloved community as sexual discrimination placed women into
inferior tasks.
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| http://www.sncclegacyproject.org |
The experience in Mississippi left the
white students changed forever as they returned to their homes and education.
Many worked to reconstruct the community experience and purpose through further
social action. For many,
the most important cultural
contribution of Freedom Summer was the early behavioral expression it gave the
link between personal liberation and social change. It was this connection as
much as anything that gave the decade its distinctive style and ideological
tone. (138)
Freedom Summer became
an important road mark in the road toward social change and radical politics.
For many students, the summer of 1964 was the training ground that prepared
them for the social protest of the latter half of the sixties. Leaving the
South, the volunteers carried the lessons learned from the Southern civil
rights movements to the cities and campuses in the North, thereby diffusing
those ideas to society. (235) A survey of the major social justice movements of
the seventies reveals the direct and indirect influence of those young students
from 1964.
Most of the volunteers continued in
a life of social activism years after their Mississippi experience. Their
activism became costly as many sacrificed their personal lives for their
political ideals. Isolation became the norm as they sought their political
vision. With over half of the volunteers remaining single in their older years,
the evidence of a solitary lifestyle in pursuit of political justice is evident.
(219) The volunteers are not typical of the stereotype of the sixties hippy who
transformed into the business Republican in the eighties. McAdam not only
believes that the summer volunteers of 1964 were the vanguard of political
liberalism in the sixties, but he also
hopes that they might transform the politics and culture of the future. With
the current political environment, perhaps there is the possibility that the
millennial generation might receive leadership from older veterans of Freedom
Summer or learn from the experience of the veteran volunteers.
Why didn’t the volunteers have a
greater impact on the culture at large? While the final goal of complete racial
equality has yet to appear, progress appeared as civil rights legislation
passed. Struggles remain, but many Americans assume that the battle for civil
rights is over. The urgency of racial issues remains forgotten history for
many. Perhaps the divisions and inability of left-wing groups to unite and form
successful coalitions explain much of the
failure. The racial divisions that appeared within the SNCC were a foretaste of
the partitions that inhibited liberal coalitions.
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| Bob Moses from http://spartacus-educational.com/USAmoses.html |
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| Bob Moses 2014 from: http://freedom50.org |
The climax of the movement was the
1964 Democratic Convention when Bob Moses and the SNCC formed the Mississippi
Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) and challenged the seating of the all-white
Mississippi Democratic delegation. The inability of the MFDP to receive a fair
hearing disillusioned both black and white members of the SNCC as many
questioned the wisdom of nonviolence tactics. Tension developed from the
paternalism of the white volunteers also led many of the black SNCC members to
question the inclusion of the white members. The lack of concrete goals caused
a crisis from which the SNCC never recovered.
The ideal of the beloved community
became history as weary black workers insisted on whites leaving the SNCC. Both
blacks and whites separated and became more radical.
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| Fannie Lou Hamer and Bob Moses represent the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party at the 1964 Democratic. From Duke University Library Blogs |
The disillusionment and involvement
of the black SNCC members appear as the
weakest link in McAdam’s book. The black
SNCC members laid the groundwork for the work the white volunteers experienced
in 1964, yet they appear as minor players in a production in which they wrote
and directed. It is not surprising that they were resentful. They fought and
died, yet reporters and the media pursued the experiences and struggles of the
newly arrived white volunteers. Bob Moses, one of the primary SNCC architects,
receives only scant mention in McAdam’s
pages. While it is evident that the white volunteers are the heroes of the
volume, it’s not unreasonable to wish that McAdam was more inclusive in his
treatment of the Freedom Summer movement. Reading McAdam’s Freedom Summer
brings one to the conclusion that the movement was predominately a story of
white warriors rescuing the poor helpless black victims. McAdams rightly calls
out the volunteers for their patronizing attitude and paternalism, but by
leaving the black SNCC workers as minor actors, McAdams produces a well-meaning
but paternalistic account of the movement. The real heroes were black students,
black homemakers, black fathers, and black preachers. The idealistic white
volunteers, while important were minor
players in the fight for civil rights.
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| Fannie Lou Hamer sing at a rally. From PBS. |
Watson, Bruce. Freedom Summer: The Savage Season That Made Mississippi Burn and Made America a Democracy. New York: Viking, 2010.
PBS, American Experience: Freedom Summer at https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/freedomsummer/
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