1968 - Mark Kurlansky [52]
The civil rights movement continued to dazzle with creative new approaches. In 1961 SNCC invented “Freedom Rides”—a good name always being important in the marketing of an idea. Freedom Riders rode on buses, blacks in white sections, whites in black sections, using the wrong rest rooms at each stop, provoking white racism all over the South. Freedom Riders became legendary. James Farmer, one of the creators of the tactic, said, “We felt that we could count on the racists of the South to create a crisis, so that the federal government would be compelled to enforce federal law.” White southerners responded with violence, and that attracted the kind of media coverage that made civil rights workers heroes around the world. A Montgomery, Alabama, newspaper reported on one of the first Freedom Rides:
Two adamant “Freedom Riders”—battered and bruised from beatings administered by a white mob—vowed Saturday afternoon to sacrifice their lives if necessary to break down racial barriers in the South. They were beaten into insensibility by the mob who attacked 22 integrationists after they debarked from a bus here Saturday morning.
Angry mobs reacted so violently to these integrated busloads that the Kennedy administration asked for “a cooling-off period” and CORE dropped Freedom Riding as too dangerous. This only made SNCC increase its riders, many of whom ended up spending forty-nine days in an antiquated dungeon fortress in Mississippi called Parchman Penitentiary.
In 1963, an estimated 930 civil rights demonstrations were carried out in eleven southern states with twenty thousand people arrested. A young generation around the world grew up watching and thrilling to these David-against-Goliath tactics. To them the civil rights movement was a mesmerizing spectacle, nourishing idealism and schooling activism. There was also an appeal to machismo, because the civil rights worker always faced significant danger. The more the racists resisted, the more heroic the rights worker appeared. What could be more admirable than standing up to racist bullies who were filmed attacking peaceful young people?
Then in 1964 came the most influential strategy of all. It was called Mississippi Freedom Summer. Those old enough to participate, to act at last, would be—sometimes unwittingly—trained to lead their generation.
1964 began with the nation still in mourning for the murder of a young president in whom so much optimism had been invested. But as the year went on, there was an excitement in the air captured in a recording by Martha Reeves and the Vandellas, “Dancing in the Street.” 1964 was a year of new beginnings. It was the year Americans got their first glimpse of the Beatles, with their salad bowl haircuts and strange collarless suits, so sexless that the fashion was doomed not to last. It was the year liberalism overran conservatism in the Johnson-Goldwater election. It was the year the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was emphatically passed, despite the solid opposition of the entire congressional delegations of Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia—not by chance, the only section of the country where Goldwater had done well against Johnson. But the most exciting event of the year was the Mississippi Freedom Summer.
Freedom Summer was the idea of Harlem-born, Harvard-educated SNCC leader and philosopher Bob Moses and activist and later U.S. congressman Allard Lowenstein. At a time when the civil rights movement was focused on the important but not visually dramatic work of registering black voters in the South, they realized that the work would get much more media attention if they put out a call for white northerners to come to Mississippi for the summer to register black voters.
If any of the almost one thousand volunteers had any doubt of the dangers of their work, early in the summer three SNCC workers, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, disappeared in a remote swampy section of Mississippi. Schwerner was an experienced civil rights worker, but