Freedom Summer - Bruce W. Watson [166]
At the airport in Jackson, a banner read “Welcome Homecoming 1964- 1994.” On this thirtieth anniversary, most veterans were returning to Mississippi for the first time. After comparing lives, sharing photos of children and grandchildren, crossing hands for tearful renditions of Freedom Songs, volunteers boarded buses. Back at their old sites, few could believe this was, in fact, Mississippi. The sight of black cops startled them. Holly Springs’ black mayor gave volunteers the key to the city. Freedom School teachers met former students, learning of their college degrees and political offices. Beneath the surface, however, bigotry still seethed. Visiting James Chaney’s grave, volunteers found it vandalized. Ben Chaney, a civil rights activist, told them, “There has not been meaningful change in Mississippi.” Many agreed; others took their doubts deep into communities where they had once lived. The poverty was still painful, but reunions with white-haired hosts soothed spirits. Yet even though Mississippi had recently convicted Medgar Evers’s assassin, many “ghosts of Mississippi” remained.
It took Fran O’Brien twenty-five years to exorcise the demons of that single summer night. In June 1965, still repressing the Klan beating, finding memories of Mississippi “rosier and rosier,” she had returned to Vicksburg. She found her old Community Center in rubble and her project running on a shoestring. Fran hoped to teach former students, but she had “stepped into a hornet’s nest.” The statewide power struggle over child care sent her from COFO to Head Start and back again. After four weeks, she went home to southern California. That fall, she entered grad school and, in 1967, began teaching in California’s central valley.
During her first spring in the classroom, Martin Luther King was killed. Overhearing kids say, “It’s a good thing they got that Communist,” Fran decided to speak to them. “I told them that Martin Luther King was not a Communist and I knew because I had met him.” She spoke about the civil rights movement as a veteran. She spoke as she would continue to speak to children all her life. But decades would pass before she could speak about all of what happened that summer.
As the terror buried itself deeper, any talk of civil rights gave Fran nightmares. When she watched slaves flogged during the TV miniseries Roots, she woke up screaming. But in 1989, after attending the first Freedom Summer reunion, she sat down to write and the horror came pouring out. “It had been a rather quiet summer in Vicksburg . . .” Writing about the beating allowed Fran to face down fear and humiliation, but after a lifetime of empathy, she could not bring herself to blame the Klan. “One might as well hold a skunk morally accountable for spraying or a rattlesnake for striking,” she wrote. Fran’s “Journey into Light” was later published in an anthology of writings about Freedom Summer.
Though she worked her entire life with children, Fran never married—“I never really had the time”—nor had children of her own. Before retiring, she taught for thirty-four years, usually in classrooms for physically or mentally handicapped kids. In her students’ struggle for acceptance, she found parallels to the civil rights movement. Over the years, she nurtured a devout Christian faith that she cannot imagine living without. This quiet, gentle woman lives alone in a small house on a hillside near Bakersfield, California. None of her neighbors suspects she was once part of the summer that changed even their own attitudes about race and freedom.
In his final nine months in Indianola, Fred Winn faced an explosive violence that escalated all winter and into the