Freedom Summer 101segregation nationwide with a huge speakers bureau. It vilified black activists
and their white allies as faggots, lechers, and drug users. This underhand
campaign received a powerful boost from two wealthy, extremely powerful
brothers, Thomas and Robert Hederman. Their influential newspapers – the
only dailies published statewide – printed a steady stream of blatantly racist
editorials and slanted stories that reinforced existing prejudice. One reader
complained that the Hedermans made Hitler’s propagandist Joseph Goebbels
‘look like an amateur.’ When intimidation was ineffective, whites murdered
defiant blacks.
The campaign of terror persuaded local NAACP leaders that Mississippi
would never change unless they courted the media and invited other civil
rights organizations, especially SNCC, into the state. At Amzie Moore’s
request, young SNCC workers, such as Marion Barry, Ruby Doris Smith, and
Charles McDew, reinforced the NAACP’s struggle in a state with widespread
black apathy and fear. Basing themselves in McComb in 1961, SNCC
believed that the only way to change the deep South was to register blacks in
remote areas where racial confrontations were likely. The plan required
tedious door-to-door canvassing and classes in literacy and citizenship. SNCC
counted on reporters to carry word of voting discrimination and mob action
to the rest of the country, thereby applying pressure for protection. Ulti-
mately, SNCC expected local leaders such as C.C. Bryant, E.W. Steptoe, and
Webb Owens to maintain the movement on their own.
SNCC was unique among civil rights groups. Unlike the full-time,
middle-class students in Greensboro who politely asked for food at a lunch-
counter, SNCC workers were full-time radical activists who organized black
communities to secure more of the region’s wealth and power through voter
registration. Unlike SCLC, SNCC was composed of northern, as well as
southern, workers, and many of them were non-churchgoers. To appeal to
local blacks, SNCC encouraged nonbelievers to attend church services and
frowned on alcohol and cohabitation between men and women, though
none of these suggestions was widely followed. SNCC activists adopted new
organizing techniques, including working with the poor and the young,
rather than the middle class that they considered unreliable. Such time-
consuming techniques required activists to stay for months in the field, so
that terrified blacks would not feel abandoned.
SNCC’s ostensible leader in Mississippi was 26-year-old Bob Moses, the
antithesis of Martin Luther King. The magnetic King was born to a promin-
ent Atlanta family, attended Morehouse College in his hometown, was
inspired by the pacifist teachings of India’s Gandhi, and found his vocation
serving God. Moses came from a Harlem housing project, attended Hamilton
College, an elite, mostly white school in New York, was inspired by French
existentialist writer Albert Camus and Chinese philosophers, earned a