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Mississippi Freedom Summer, 1964

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Mississippi Freedom Summer, 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer, 1964 By Bruce Hartford Copyright © 2014. All rights reserved. For the winter soldiers of the Freedom Movement Contents Origins The Struggle for Voting Rights in McComb Mississippi Greenwood & the Mississippi Delta The Freedom Ballot of 1963 Freedom Day in Hattiesburg Mississippi Summer Project The Situation The Dilemma Pulling it Together Mississippi Girds for Armageddon Washington Does Nothing Recruitment & Training 10 Weeks That Shake Mississippi Direct Action and the Civil Rights Act Internal Tensions Lynching of Chaney, Schwerner & Goodman Freedom Schools Beginnings Freedom School Curriculum A Different Kind of School The Freedom School in McComb Impact The Medical Committee for Human Rights (MCHR) Wednesdays in Mississippi The McGhees of Greenwood McComb — Breaking the Klan Siege MFDP Challenge to the Democratic Convention The Plan Building the MFDP Showdown in Atlantic City The Significance of the MFDP Challenge The Political Fallout Some Important Points The Human Cost of Freedom Summer Freedom Summer: The Results Appendices Freedom Summer Project Map Organizational Structure of Freedom Summer Meeting the Freedom Workers The House of Liberty Freedom School Curriculum Units Platform of the Mississippi Freedom School Convention Testimony of Fannie Lou Hamer, Democratic Convention Quotation Sources [Terminology — Various authors use either "Freedom Summer" or "Summer Project" or both interchangeably. This book uses "Summer Project" to refer specifically to the project organized and led by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO). We use "Freedom Summer" to refer to the totality of all Freedom Movement efforts in Mississippi over the summer of 1964, including the efforts of medical, religious, and legal organizations (see Organizational Structure of Freedom Summer for details). In this book, we use the term "volunteer" to refer those from out of state who came to Mississippi for Freedom Summer, though of course, the many thousands of Black Mississippians who participated were also unpaid volunteers.] Origins With the student-led sit-ins of 1960 and the Freedom Rides of 1961, a new wind begins to blow across the South — a "freedom" wind — an urgent wind of "now." Discontented Black youth are no longer willing to wait for the slow, tedious, ineffectual progress of court cases and legislative reform. No longer are they willing to leave matters of justice and equality in the hands of attorneys and community elders. They want an end to the humiliations of segregation and the barriers of second-class citizenship, and they want it now. To achieve those ends they are determined to take a stand, to "put their bodies on the line" to win "Freedom Now!" By the summer of 1961, sit-ins have desegregated some lunch-counters and other public facilities in college towns of the Border South. And the Freedom Rides are in the process of ending separate white and "Colored" facilities in inter-state travel. Yet most of the South remains as thoroughly segregated as ever. The lives of most southern Blacks continue to be ruled by the iron fist of white-supremacy and consist of drudgery and grinding poverty, political powerlessness, and economic dependency. It is a truism of the era that the further south you travel the more intense grows the racism, the worse becomes the poverty, and the more brutal is the repression. In the mental geography of the Freedom Movement, the South is divided into zones according to the virulence of bigotry and oppression: the "Border States" (Delaware, Kentucky, Missouri, Oklahoma, and portions of Maryland); the "Upper South" (Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Arkansas, Florida, Texas); and the "Deep South" (the Eastern Shore of Maryland, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana). And then there is Mississippi, in a class by itself — the absolute deepest pit of racism, violence, and poverty. In most of the South, the 1950s bring enormous economic changes. "King Cotton" declines as agriculture diversifies and mechanizes. But those economic changes come slowly, if at all, to Mississippi and the Black Belt areas of Alabama, Georgia, and Louisiana. In 1960, almost 70% of Mississippi Blacks still live in rural areas, and more than a third (twice the percentage in the rest of the South) work the land as sharecroppers, tenant farmers, and farm laborers. In 1960, the median income for Afro-Americans in Mississippi is just $1,444 (equal to a bit over $11,000 in 2013). The median income for Mississippi whites is three times higher. More than four out of every five Mississippi Blacks (85%) exist below the official federal poverty line. Education for Blacks is totally segregated and severely limited. The average funding for "Colored" schools in Mississippi is less than a quarter of that spent to educate white students, and in rural areas the ratio is even more skewed. In 1960, for example, Pike County spends $30.89 to educate each white pupil and only $0.76 cents per Afro-American child. It is no surprise then that only 7% of Mississippi Blacks finish high school, and in the rural areas where children are sent to the fields early in life, functional illiteracy is widespread. Mississippi is still dominated — economically and politically — by less than 100 plantation barons who lord it over vast cotton fields worked by Black hand-labor using hoes and fingers the way it was done in slavery times. They are determined to keep their labor force cheap and docile. The arch-segregationist Senator James Eastland provides a good example of the economic riches reaped by racism in Mississippi. His huge plantation in Sunflower County produces 5,394 bales of cotton in 1961. He sells that cotton for $890,000 (equal to almost $7,000,000 in 2013 dollars). It costs Eastland $566,000 to produce his cotton for a profit of $324,000 (equal to a bit over $2,500,000 in 2013). The Black men and women who labor in his fields under the blazing sun — plowing, planting, chopping, and picking — are paid 30 cents an hour (equal to $2.34 in 2013). That's just $3.00 for a 10-hour day, $18.00 for a six-day, 60-hour week. The children sent to labor in the fields are paid even less. This system of agricultural feudalism is maintained by Jim Crow segregation laws, state repression, white terrorism, and the systematic disenfranchisement of Afro-Americans. Overall, whites outnumber Blacks in Mississippi, but the ratio of Blacks to whites is higher than any other state in the union. And in a number of rural counties, Blacks outnumber whites, in some cases by large majorities. Given these demographic realities, the power-elites know that white-supremacy can only be maintained if they prevent Afro-Americans from voting. To ensure that nonwhite have no access to the ballot they use rigged "literacy" tests, white-only primaries, poll taxes, and economic retaliation. Any attempt at registering to vote, any act of defiance, any protest, any cry for freedom, is met with swift arrest. Violent repression is also a traditional component of Mississippi's "Southern Way of Life." Since 1880, the state has averaged more than six racially- motivated murders per year in the form of mob lynchings and "unsolved" assassinations. So if you're Black in Mississippi, attempting to register to vote is a courageous act that challenges the established order. You can only register at the courthouse at certain times, the cops are always there to threaten, intimidate, and arrest you on trumped up charges. You have to pass the humiliating, so-called "literacy test," which is not really a test at all, but rather a bogus fraud explicitly designed to deny voting rights to Blacks. Pass or fail, your name is published in the local paper so that the White Citizens Council, your employer, your landlord, and your white business associates know to target you for economic retaliation. According to the 1960 Census, 41% of the Mississippi population is Black, but in 1961 no more than 5% of them are registered to vote. In many of the Black-majority counties not a single Afro- American citizen is registered, not even decorated military veterans. For example, in some typical Mississippi counties where Blacks are the majority: Registered Voters as a Percentage of Population Whites Blacks Coahoma 73% 8% Holmes 74% - Leflore 70% 2% Marshall 96% 1% Panola 69% - Tallahatchie 85% - Source: U.S. v Mississippi, Supreme Court, 1964. This systematic denial of Black voting rights is not unique to Mississippi, it is replicated in the Black Belt areas of Louisiana, Alabama, South Carolina, Southwest Georgia, and portions of North Carolina, Virginia, and Maryland. Much of Mississippi agriculture — particularly the Delta cotton plantations — still rely on large- scale use of cheap Black hand-labor. But after Brown v Board of Education, the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and now the sit-ins and Freedom Rides, the White Citizens Council has begun urging plantation owners to replace Black sharecroppers and farm hands with machines. This is a deliberate strategy to force Afros out of the state before they can achieve any share of political power. The Freedom finds itself in a race against time, if Blacks don't get the vote soon, it will be too late. In the summer of 1960, with student sit-ins roiling the South, Bob Moses, representing the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), meets with Amzie Moore, Medgar Evers, and other local Black leaders in Mississippi. They tell him that voter registration is more important than demonstrations against segregation. Few Mississippi Blacks can afford to eat at lunch counters even if they were allowed to do so. It is poverty that most cruelly affects them, and at the most fundamental level their poverty is rooted in political powerlessness because the lawmakers and judges, sheriffs and school boards, agriculture commissioners, welfare officials, public works agencies, and all other officials are elected only by whites and exclusively serve white interests.
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