1968 - Mark Kurlansky [53]
Yet not one volunteer backed down, although one underage volunteer was forced to leave by his parents. In fact, Moses had to ask that volunteers stop coming because SNCC workers could not train all the new recruits they were getting.
Among those who went south that summer was the son of an Italian machinist in Queens, New York, who was studying philosophy at Berkeley. Born in 1942, Mario Savio was six feet two inches tall, thin, and gentle in demeanor. He stammered so badly that he had struggled to deliver his high school valedictorian address. He was a Roman Catholic who like many Catholics embraced Catholic morality while being at odds with the Church itself. At a younger age he had dreamed of becoming a priest.
In 1964, twenty-one-year-old Savio was walking across the Berkeley campus, and at Telegraph and Bancroft, a narrow strip of land that had been designated the area for political activity, someone handed him a leaflet about a demonstration by the local civil rights movement against unfair hiring practices in San Francisco. Savio later remembered, “I said, ‘Oh, demonstration, okay.’ These demonstrations had the moral cachet of the campus. Absolutely, they had won out over football games, no doubt about it.”
So with little internal debate, Savio went to the demonstration. An elderly woman shouted at him, “Why don’t you go to Russia!” and he tried to explain to her that his family was from Italy.
For the first time in his life, Mario Savio was arrested. In the lockup a man named John King casually asked him, “Are you going to Mississippi?” When Savio learned of the Mississippi Freedom Summer, he knew he “had to be there.” Most of the volunteers felt that way, they had to be there. Savio went. In Mississippi he would knock on the screen door of a poor black sharecropper. Politely, the head of the household, looking a little scared, would say that he just didn’t want to vote. Savio would ask him if his father had ever voted.
“No, sir.”
“Did your grandfather ever vote?”
“No, sir.”
“Do you want your children to vote?”
Then he had them, and they would come with him into town, averting the glares of hatred of half the citizens, and risk their lives to register to vote. “I don’t know where I got the nerve to say such a thing,” Savio said years later. But he always remembered those people he had persuaded to risk their lives.
The experience shaped Savio and a generation of white northerners. They arrived in Mississippi looking clean and young. They were greeted by local workers, and they crossed arms and held hands to form a tight chain, singing “We Shall Overcome,” swaying sightly as they sang of “white and black together,” which for that moment they were. They spent the summer being young and brave, risking their lives, getting beaten and jailed. Like Albert Camus’s doctor in The Plague, which everyone was reading, they were doing something, fighting society’s pestilence. They left in September, experienced activists. Freedom Summer probably did more to develop radical campus leadership than all the efforts of SDS. The volunteers returned north in the fall energized, moved, committed to political change, and trained in one of the finest schools of civil disobedience in American history.
Savio returned to Berkeley, the incoming president of the local Friends of SNCC, in a fever of political commitment, only to find that the university had rescinded the right to political advocacy on campus even from that small strip of land at Telegraph and Bancroft where he had