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By Root 1676 0

blacks—“the best people I ever met”—overwhelmed them. When they went out, they found themselves dodging whites and drawn to any passing black face. Politics was a distant drone from an America whose talk of equality seemed laughable. “I went from being a liberal Peace Corps-type Democrat to a raging, maniacal lefty,” one volunteer recalled. Decades later, sociologist Doug McAdam, surveying some 250 volunteers, found that Freedom Summer had moved two-thirds leftward and crippled respect for authority. In just ten weeks, 42 percent lowered their estimation of the president, 40 percent lost esteem for Congress, half for the Justice Department, and nearly three-quarters for the FBI. In the fall of 1964, this sea change spearheaded a generational challenge to America, a challenge that began on a single campus.

On October 1, a crowd at the University of California at Berkeley surrounded a police car holding a student arrested for handing out CORE leaflets. For the next thirty-two hours, the car sat trapped by swarms of students, many singing Freedom Songs, while one after another jumped on its roof and spoke about free speech. The most eloquent speaker, the one who would speak throughout that fall about the connections between Mississippi and Berkeley, had just returned from McComb. Before the summer, Mario Savio had impressed a SNCC interviewer as “not a very creative guy . . . [who] did not play much of a leadership role.” But back at Berkeley, Savio was on fire with summer memories. He remembered staying up late in Ohio talking about Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney. He recalled being chased by angry whites in Jackson, hearing the bombs in McComb, talking in sharecropper shacks. “Can I now forget Mississippi?” he wondered. “In other words, was that my summer job? ”

With Savio leading the protests, Berkeley’s Free Speech Movement kept students protesting through December, culminating in a sit-in that closed the administration building. Inspired by Berkeley’s call for free speech, student protests soon broke out across America—against the war, the draft, the patriarchy. And in the forefront of each were veterans of Freedom Summer: who had seen democracy denied, who had watched “the law” subjugate an entire people, and who had come home angry and disillusioned. For the rest of the 1960s, Mississippi would remain their benchmark of injustice, the place where one generation’s American dream went to die. Time and again, 1960s spokesmen—not just Mario Savio but Tom Hayden, Abbie Hoffman, William Kunstler, and others—would refer to Mississippi as the school where they had learned to question America. And as protests became increasingly shrill, bewildered parents would ask why their children seemed so cynical about their country. The answer was easy. The children had been to Mississippi.

As volunteers struggled to cope with an unbearably white America, several SNCCs decided they had to leave Mississippi, if only for a few weeks. Racial tensions were rising. Staffers were working without paychecks. SNCC’s Sojourner Fleet cars, after a summer of racing volunteers and staffers around Mississippi, were now lost, wrecked, scattered around the country. A year earlier, SNCC leaders would have faced down these problems, but Freedom Summer had left them even more exhausted than the volunteers.

On his visit to Greenwood in August, Harry Belafonte had seen the emotional toll. Handing over $60,000, the singer made a deal. SNCC could have another $10,000 if leaders agreed to an all-expenses-paid trip—to Africa. On September 11, Belafonte and eleven SNCCs, including Bob and Dona Moses, Fannie Lou Hamer, John Lewis, and James Forman, flew from New York to the new nation of Guinea. Shortly after they arrived in the palm-shaded, whitewashed capital of Conakry, President Sékou Touré summoned them to his palace. When the invitation came, Fannie Lou Hamer was taking a bath. “I’m definitely not ready to meet no president,” she said. But an hour later, she stood in an opulent palace, in awe. Here was a Delta sharecropper, her recent speech cut off by LBJ,