Freedom Summer 109soldiers who would retreat to their northern homes at summer’s end. Despite
SNCC’s informal ban, interracial sex was commonplace because it was one of
society’s greatest taboos. When black men challenged white women to prove
their lack of prejudice in bed, some white women succumbed out of liberal
guilt. Those who resisted were labeled ‘racists’ or ‘white bitches.’ To relieve
their stress, many volunteers found solace in drinking alcohol and smoking
marijuana, which sometimes produced more trouble.
The endless violence multiplied such tensions. Mississippi literally burned
that summer of 1964. Racists beat eighty civil rights workers, shot at thirty-
five of them, and killed four. Seventy black homes, businesses, and churches
were bombed or burned. The police excused the white Mississippians who
perpetrated the crimes and arrested a thousand activists. The emotional
strain of dodging white men in pick-up trucks and receiving threatening
phone calls prompted Dorie Ladner of the Natchez office to vomit every
night after dinner. SNCC leader Cleveland Sellers called Freedom Summer
‘the longest nightmare of my life.’
Real gains nonetheless came from that nightmare. Three thousand black
children attended freedom schools that operated in church basements and
abandoned school buildings. The youngsters requested classes in foreign lan-
guages, the fine arts, arithmetic, typing, and journalism, none of which was
offered regularly in their schools. Historian Staunton Lynd, who had taught
at Spelman College in Atlanta, directed forty-one schools in the four ‘Rs’:
reading, ’riting, ’rithmetic, and radicalism. Howard Zinn, Lynd’s colleague at
Spelman, described the free-form classes, which were a forerunner of the
African American studies curricula: ‘Nine-year-old Negro children sounded
out French words whose English equivalents they had not yet discovered....
They learned about Frederick Douglass, wrote letters to the local editor
about segregation, and discussed the meaning of civil disobedience.’ To nur-
ture a home-grown freedom movement, volunteers built community centres
where blacks learned general hygiene and to speak up against injustice.
Lawyers from the NAACP, National Lawyers Guild, and American Jewish
Committee worked to secure basic rights. To empower blacks directly, the
voter registration drive led 17,000 adults to attempt to register as Democrats,
though just 1,600 succeeded.
To increase this paltry black registration, COFO organized as the Mississippi
Freedom Democratic Party, a grassroots alternative to the state’s Jim Crow
party. Against all odds, MFDP sought recognition as the state’s true delega-
tion to the Democratic party’s national convention in Atlantic City, New
Jersey. Black demands had escalated from a seat at a lunch-counter to a
seat in the legislature. Behind the scenes, former SCLC director Ella Baker
pitched MFDP’s story to northern Democrats and enlisted Joseph Rauh, a
prominent Washington attorney, to serve as the party’s legal counsel. At the
Mississippi Freedom
Democratic Party: At the
1964 national Democratic
convention, this mainly
black contingent chal-
lenged the legitimacy
of the all-white state
delegation.