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Mississippi Freedom Summer, 1964 Fifty Years Later — the Old Jim Crow, the New Jim Crow

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Mississippi Freedom Summer, 1964 Fifty Years Later — the Old Jim Crow, the New Jim Crow Mississippi Freedom Summer, 1964 Fifty Years Later — The Old Jim Crow, the New Jim Crow The Editorial Board Heather Booth, Freedom Summer volunteer (with guitar), with Fannie Lou Hamer, vice-chair of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and field organizer for SNCC. Photo by Wallace Roberts 4 JEWISH CURRENTS SPRING-SUMMER 2014 5 n the books, there was the Fourteenth been the poorest in the nation since the Civil War. Amendment, in force since 1868, guar- The majority of blacks in Mississippi worked as anteeing that “No State shall make or farm laborers or as domestic workers, with typical Oenforce any law which shall abridge the privileges wages of $3 per day. Labor unions did not exist. or immunities of citizens of the United States . nor Imprisonment at hard labor was used by Missis- deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal sippi’s authorities as a tool of social control of protection of the laws.” There was the Fifteenth the black population. Efforts by black churches, Amendment, guaranteeing the right to vote since activist groups, and national civil rights organiza- 1870. There was Brown v. Board of Education, the tions to change these conditions were met with 1954 Supreme Court decision that racial segregation legal repression as well as terrorist violence by the in education violated the Constitution — and there Ku Klux Klan, the White Citizens Council, and was about to be a new Civil Rights Act, signed by the state police — while the federal government President Lyndon Johnson on July 2nd, 1964, which provided no protection. would make segregation in all public facilities, na- Into this environment, in the summer of 1964, tionwide, illegal. came more than seven hundred civil rights volun- Then there was the reality, especially in Mis- teers from the North, 90 percent of them white — sissippi — “a state sweltering . with the heat of and, by most estimates, at least a third of them Jew- oppression,” as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. had said ish. Of these, some were from left-wing families: the previous year in his “I Have Marilyn Lowen of Detroit, Robert Moses, field secretary of SNCC and co-director A Freedom Summer training session — non-violent a Dream” speech. In the state’s VOICES OF FREEDOM SUMMER for example (who postponed of the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO, an role-playing — in Ohio. five congressional districts, the coming to Mississippi until umbrella for the major civil rights groups then work- Photograph by Galen Gockel black portion of the population “When you’re not in Mississippi, 1965), describes herself in ing in Mississippi), is pictured here at the Statewide ranged from 21 percent to 52 it’s not real, and when you’re there the 2010 book, Hands on Freedom Schools Convention, August, 1964. Born justice and saw parallels between the story of the percent, yet blacks constituted the rest of the world isn’t real.” the Freedom Plow: Per- in Harlem in 1935, Bob Moses is a Harvard-trained Hebrews’ enslavement (and liberation) in Egypt Bob Moses educator who received a MacArthur Fellowship (the under 3 percent of registered sonal Accounts by Women in and the Negro’s fight for freedom.” “genius” award) in 1982 and used it to create the voters in three of the five and SNCC (Columbia University Algebra Project, a nationwide program to improve Religious or not, strongly identified as Jewish under 7 percent statewide, thanks to onerous Press), as attending an I.L. Peretz kindershul (a math education for blacks and other minorities. or not, they would experience the summer of and discriminatory voter registration “testing,” secular Jewish school) and growing up “feeling that Moses had come to make change in Mississippi in 1964 as the “exodus” of their lifetimes. Invited economic retaliation, and racist intimidation and racism was insane, something to be gotten rid of. 1961, but found the state’s racism to be intractable. by the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Com- violence by police, officials, and vigilantes. Mis- . From a very young age, as a Jew, I always By the time Freedom Summer was underway, writes mittee (SNCC) with the thought of shining a sissippi’s segregated education system, meanwhile, felt my purpose was to be involved in fighting Bruce Watson in Freedom Summer (2010), he was national spotlight on the horrors being perpetrated graduated only 42 percent of white students from injustice, fighting for freedom . when I read “little known outside civil rights circles but a legend in Mississippi, the volunteers were screened and high school and only 7 percent of blacks, whose biographies of Jewish women resistance fighters within.” trained for a week at a college campus in Ohio schools were so underfunded and inadequate that in Eastern Europe, I felt as if I knew them and as before travelling south, where white officials and “any test of educational skills as a prerequisite to if I were there with them.” impacted by the Holocaust by losing relatives or vigilantes were waiting and ready for this so-called voting would necessarily discriminate,” according The great majority of Jewish Freedom Sum- having emigrated from Germany or Poland to es- “communist invasion.” SNCC’s trainers saw the to a 1965 report of the United States Commission mer volunteers, ranging in age from 18 to 25, had cape Nazism. For many, America did not yet feel young volunteers as “so naive, so vulnerable, so on Civil Rights. been born during World War II, recalls Gail Falk like a secure place for Jews . [and they] believed maddeningly certain of themselves,” writes Bruce Hard poverty was everywhere in Mississippi, at her website, http://freedomsongs11.wordpress. their status was closer to that of Negroes in the Watson in Freedom Summer (2010, Viking), that and stretched back for generations; the state had com, and “some came from families immediately South than to the white Protestants who were in “the thought of throwing them into the hellhole control of the South.” Others, Falk continues, “were of Mississippi terrified those who bore its bruises motivated by the moral and ethical teachings of and bullet wounds. Mississippi sheriffs, cops, Photographs, unless otherwise noted, are by Mark Levy, from the Queens College/CUNY Civil Rights Archive. Judaism that emphasized the historic struggle for and highway patrolmen already knew their names, 6 JEWISH CURRENTS SPRING-SUMMER 2014 7 also came to provide care for the activists and the black communities supporting them. Volunteer lawyers from the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and National Lawyers Guild provided legal services amid arrests and beatings. Thirty-six members of the United Federation of Teachers attended a Free- dom School orientation session in Memphis, and then went to Hattiesburg, Mississippi and spread out to Freedom Schools across the state. A Caravan of Music brought folksingers south, including Pete Seeger, Phil Ochs, Judy Collins, and Julius Lester. The National Council of Negro Women, at the instigation of Dorothy Height, its national president, and Polly Cowan, a Jewish supporter, organized a program, “Wednesdays in Mississippi,” which for two summers surreptitiously brought inter- racial and interfaith teams of Northern women to Jackson, Mississippi, from where they spread out to civil rights sites across the state before return- ing to organize support at home. There were also ministers and rabbis who came to protest at court- houses, accompany voters to registration offices, and teach in Freedom Schools. (Already on site in Hattiesburg was Rabbi David Z. Ben-Ami, a child Pete Seeger leading a song in Meridian, Mississippi, shortly after announcing the discovery of the bodies, which were refugee from Nazi Germany who had brought his hidden by the murderers in an earthen dam. family to Mississippi in 1963 and was appointed to the Mississippi State Advisory Committee of the who was Jewish, headed the Congress of Racial segregation in its cemeteries. Poster for a rally following the discovery of the bodies United States Commission on Civil Rights at the Equality (CORE) field office in Meridian, Mis- Alongside this triple murder, violence was ever- of Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman. start of Freedom Summer. Ben-Ami would soon sissippi and was an indispensable organizer; present throughout the non-violent Freedom Sum- lose his contract at the local Temple B’Nai Israel Goodman was a Queens Col- mer campaign. Activists were their hometowns, their full descriptions . [and the because of his civil rights activism.) lege student from a progres- VOICES OF FREEDOM SUMMER driven off the road in high volunteers] would be classified into two groups, sive Jewish New York family; “I still feel that I would let Andy go speed chases, one of which ‘niggers and nigger-lovers.’” Soon, too, there would be reporters and FBI Chaney was a black Freedom to Mississippi again. Even after this took the life of Wayne Yancey, Still they went, in two waves from Ohio, to give agents, as on the very first day of the ten weeks Rider and CORE activist from terrible thing happened to Andy, a black volunteer from Chi- st support to the hundreds of activists of COFO, the of Freedom Summer, June 21 , 1964, three par- Meridian, Mississippi. Their I couldn’t make a turnabout of cago. Four other volunteers Council of Federated Organizations, a coalition of ticipants were murdered by the Ku Klux Klan corpses were successfully everything I believe in.” were critically wounded, and civil rights organizations that near Philadelphia, Missis- hidden from dozens of search Carolyn Goodman at least eighty received beat- VOICES OF FREEDOM SUMMER was trying to register black sippi. Andrew Goodman, Mi- parties for forty-four days (Andrew Goodman’s mother) ings. More than a thousand voters and create some three “The songs help to dissipate the fear.
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