Freedom Summer - Bruce W. Watson [154]
While McComb approached a state of siege, Americans inspired by Freedom Summer shone their own lights on Mississippi. Volunteers’ parents continued to meet, raise funds, and send them south. Pharmaceutical companies shipped vitamins and first aid kits. Public schools across America adopted Freedom Schools, sending books and supplies. And with nearly three dozen churches destroyed, congregations responded to a “Committee of Concern.” Formed by Mississippi clergy, black and white, the committee’s campaign collected $10,000 in its first week, enough to begin building. The title of the committee’s campaign, “Beauty for Ashes,” came from the biblical book of Isaiah: “The Lord hath anointed me to preach good tidings unto the meek . . . to give unto them beauty for ashes. . . .” By Christmas, college students were giving up their vacations to build churches in Mississippi.
But Freedom Summer’s wounds could not be confined to Mississippi. Back at her Oregon college, Fran O’Brien was restless and angry. The once demure teacher now argued with old friends who seemed to have become bigots. No one understood what Fran had been through, but no one failed to notice her testiness. “I didn’t realize yet that it was because I was a different person, so my whole senior year was confusing,” she remembered. Fran talked about the children of Mississippi but told no one about being beaten by Klansmen. She did not even tell herself. And so the horror festered, leaving her alone, aloof, and strangest of all, dreaming of returning to Mississippi the following summer. A similar estrangement could be found at colleges around the country.
In Chicago, Len Edwards, the congressman’s son, was back at law school. One evening at a bar, friends were talking about the Cubs, about “girls,” about the Johnson-Goldwater race, when someone asked, “Well, what was happening down there in Mississippi?” Edwards managed to get out two sentences, “and I started crying, I just burst out crying.” In North Hanover, Massachusetts, Linda Wetmore found “everything was awful.” Wetmore’s arrest during Greenwood’s Freedom Day had been on the front page of the Boston Globe. Back home she found herself notorious. At church, someone asked her, “You’re telling me you’d want to live next door to a nigger?” Her boyfriend came over to say, “I could never kiss anybody who’d kiss a black man.” Wetmore had not kissed any black men, but she replied, “Then I guess we can’t go out anymore.”
Studying returned volunteers, psychiatrist Robert Coles saw signs of “battle fatigue . . . exhaustion, weariness, despair, frustration and rage.” Many volunteers wanted to talk about Mississippi, but how could they describe a sharecropper’s shack? A Mississippi jail? Madhouse summer nights of pickups and shotguns and flaming crosses? Some spoke to service clubs, but many more refused to talk to anyone. First in hometowns, then back on campus, their white world seemed so isolated, so pointless. Summer had immersed them in a movement, swarming with people, anointed in spirit, struggling for others. And now they were asked to resume their studies, to go to parties, to focus on careers. There was simply no way to explain this to friends, to parents. One mother lamented, “Our very normal, bright young child has changed.”
Many spent long hours in their rooms. Guilt over leaving Mississippi