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By Root 1827 0

by southern congressmen, were woven into the fabric of the white South—anyone who worked for civil rights had to be a Communist. SNCCs had heard the red-baiting so often they could joke about it. “Hey, you don’t worry about the communists,” Stokely Carmichael often told the press. “Worry about SNCC. We way more dangerous, Jack.” Just as the red-baiting was growing stale, Freedom Summer brought hordes of “Communists” to Mississippi. All summer, volunteers heard “the usual” taunts. Cops and sheriffs asked them whether they (1) believed in Jesus; (2) believed in God; and (3) were Communists. A Batesville volunteer was stopped on the street and asked to say something in Russian because “all communists speak Russian.” But now, with Mississippi in disgrace, it was time to name names.

On July 22, as Martin Luther King toured Jackson, Senator James Eastland charged that the “mass invasion of Mississippi by demonstrators, agitators, agents of provocation, and inciters to mob violence” was a Communist conspiracy. Eastland spoke on the Senate floor for an hour, citing J. Edgar Hoover, and producing a long list of names. According to the senator, volunteer Larry Rubin had cochaired the Fair Play for Cuba Committee at Antioch College in Ohio. When arrested in Holly Springs, Eastland said, Rubin had an address book containing names of known Communists. Eastland’s list of Communist “stooges and pawns” went on. A Moss Point volunteer had been thrown out of Costa Rica for distributing Communist literature. The National Lawyers Guild, notorious since the 1930s for defending Communists, was working with SNCC in Mississippi. And attorney Martin Popper, representing Andrew Goodman’s family, was “a long-time Communist legal eagle.” Rising to a fist-flailing righteousness, the senator charged that the summer invasion had subjected Mississippi to “a degree of vilification . . . unequaled since the black days of Reconstruction.” Mississippians, he concluded, deserved “everlasting credit [for] holding their tempers so well.”

Eastland’s charges made headlines across Mississippi. Within days, the Sovereignty Commission began trailing Larry Rubin and his “beatnik looking crowd.” The FBI did likewise, and the Mississippi legislature opened a full-scale inquiry into Communist influence in Freedom Summer. The red-baiters would find kernels of truth in Eastland’s diatribe. A handful of summer volunteers, many of them “red diaper” offspring of former Communists, did sympathize with Cuba and other left-wing causes. And the National Lawyers Guild was working with SNCC, which refused to be cowed by neo-McCarthyism. “If they ain’t calling you a Communist,” Fannie Lou Hamer often said, “you ain’t doing your job.” Yet as the summer accelerated, the vast majority of volunteers were far too busy to fight the Cold War—on either side.

At the Vicksburg Community Center, Fran O’Brien had been teaching arts and crafts for three weeks when her students demanded meatier subjects. One day, rummaging through the center’s library, the children spotted an American history text. They brought it to the gentle, dark-haired teacher with the funny accent. They wanted to learn history too, they told Fran. Just like the big kids. With a slight smile, Fran opened the tattered book and instantly noticed the publishing date—1930. The narrative began, “The history of America really begins in England because all Americans come from England.” She looked at the faces before her. She closed the book.

Three weeks in Mississippi had taught Fran far more than she had taught her students. When a girl in a school variety show recited “Four score and seven years ago,” Fran had learned not to be impressed by rote memory. “Do you know what the Gettysburg Address means?” she asked. “Yes,” the girl replied. “It means that all the slaves were free, and it was signed July 4, 1776.” Reading to her students, Fran learned that Little House on the Prairie books did not mean as much to black kids in Mississippi as they did to a white girl growing up in southern California. She began searching for