• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1860 0

on. Backyard games were as lively as dances. Coming back to class, teachers and students together, rare was the pale hand that did not hold a smaller, darker one. Classes relied more on enthusiasm than on textbooks. Moss Point students dramatized the Dred Scott decision. Ruleville students piled onto the floor to reenact slavery’s Middle Passage. Several schools held formal debates on nonviolence, and many did role-playing, with students playing the parts of Barry Goldwater, Senator Eastland, or members of their hometown Citizens’ Council. And almost every Freedom School published a newspaper. Typed by teachers onto mimeograph sheets, decorated with the students’ line drawings, the Ruleville Freedom Fighter, the Shaw Freedom Flame, and the Meridian Freedom Star featured poetry, essays on civil rights, and news of the Freedom Democrat drive.

No matter how upbeat teachers remained, however, they could not hide one harsh truth known to all students—that when the summer ended, Mississippi would be waiting for them. To keep freedom’s flame burning, students were encouraged to question Mississippi, to question their lives, to question, to question, to question.

“Why did Harriet Tubman go back into the South after she had gotten herself free in the North? ”

“Why doesn’t Mrs. Hamer stay in the North once she gets there? ”

“Who do you think the Movement is proving right—Booker T. Washington or W. E. B. Du Bois? ”

“And what comment on your own upbringing is made by the fact that you knew all about Booker T. Washington but most of you had never heard of W. E. B. DuBois? ”

One afternoon at the Harmony Freedom School, twelve-year-old Ida Ruth Griffin read her latest poem:

I am Mississippi fed

I am Mississippi bred

Nothing but a poor black boy.

I am a Mississippi slave

I shall be buried in a Mississippi grave.

Nothing but a poor, dead boy.

The class was soon tangled in debate.

“We’re not black slaves!”

“We certainly are!”

“Can your father vote? ”

“Can he eat where he wants to? ”

At another school a boy refused to believe what his teacher said about the proud civilizations of Africa. “I think you’re lying,” he said, and burst into tears. The teacher also cried.

By mid-August, students were already lamenting the imminent end of Freedom School. A teacher in Canton noticed the change: “Some of them are beginning to realize, now that we’re talking about the end of school and our departures, that we’re not saviors and we’re not staying forever and we’re not leaving any miracles behind.” But not all teachers were so discouraged. In Shaw, in Ruleville, in Hattiesburg, teachers knew they would be sending students back to their regular schools, fired up, demanding more. And each morning when students rushed to greet them, each evening when a gray old man read his first words, most teachers knew their summer had been worth all the sweat, the fear, the occasional chaos. “We’re giving these kids a start,” one said. “They’ll never be the same again. This isn’t something anyone can just snap off when the summer ends.”

Holding hands, dancing, sharing meals, teachers and students broke racial taboos. But outside the Freedom Schools, in crowded project offices and cluttered community centers, racial harmony was proving more elusive in August than it had been in June. As long as three men were missing, race had been just another cog in Freedom Summer. Black and white were working together, missing together, equally likely to be arrested, beaten, killed. But once Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney were found, mourned, eulogized with “bitter vengeance,” black and white were suddenly that again—black and white. And everyone on every project knew that within a few weeks, black would be staying in Mississippi, and white would be gone.

With equal alarm, blacks and whites noticed the rising tension. SNCC had integrated prior to Freedom Summer. Bob Zellner and Mendy Samstein, Sandra “Casey” Hayden and Mary King, had pioneered a small white contingent. But Freedom Summer had inundated SNCC offices with whites, and by August, their enthusiasm