Freedom Summer - Bruce W. Watson [170]
As with any group, there were fringes, some dangerous. Dennis Sweeney, having suffered a concussion and frequent arrests in McComb, descended into paranoid schizophrenia. Voices in his head caused Sweeney to gouge dental crowns from his teeth. But the voices did not cease. On a March day in 1980, Sweeney took a gun and entered the Manhattan office of Allard Lowenstein, the “Pied Piper” who had brought Sweeney and other volunteers to the 1963 Freedom Election. Sweeney emptied his gun, killing his former mentor. Found not guilty for reasons of insanity, Sweeney was confined to a mental hospital. Twenty years after the murder, psychiatrists, noting his recovery, released him from all care.
During the Reagan era, sociologist Doug McAdam found ex-volunteers increasingly restless. Many remained searchers, moving from job to job or relationship to relationship, looking for what one called “the ultimate Mississippi.” McAdam also found volunteers, when compared to a national average, more likely to be loners, unmarried or divorced. Just a handful, having seen the stuff democracy is made of, had entered politics. Harold Ickes, son of a member of FDR’s Brain Trust, went from Freedom Summer to law school and then into Democratic Party politics. Ickes later became President Bill Clinton’s deputy chief of staff and ran Hillary Clinton’s campaigns for Senate and the presidency. Barney Frank has been a Massachusetts congressman since 1980. Of Freedom Summer, he spoke for many volunteers: “I am prouder of being there than of anything else in my life.”
No less than those they recruited, the leaders of Freedom Summer were transformed by its hope and violence. A few months after the summer ended, Bob Moses began a painful withdrawal from Mississippi. Late in 1964, disdaining what James Forman called the “almost Jesus like aura that he and his name had acquired,” Moses changed his surname to Parris, his mother’s maiden name. The following spring, he and Dona moved to Birmingham, Alabama, where they worked with young black students. Soon Moses was in Washington, D.C., speaking out against the Vietnam War. In the fall of 1965, he briefly returned to Africa, where, appalled by American propaganda about the progress of blacks back home, he cut off all contact with whites. Drawn back to Mississippi, he lived again with Amzie Moore in the Delta, but Moore found his protégé bitter and withdrawn.
Although he had filed as a conscientious objector and proven his pacifism daily, Moses got his draft notice in 1966. With his marriage crumbling, his hopes shattered, Moses fled to Montreal, where he worked as a janitor, a night watchman, an airline cook. He also married a former SNCC field secretary. In 1968, Bob and Janet Moses moved to Tanzania, where they taught in a rural school and raised four children. They stayed eight years, returning only when President Jimmy Carter offered amnesty to draft evaders. Moses went back to Harvard to finish the doctorate he had been forced to abandon. Then one day, he visited his daughter’s algebra class. Concerned that inner-city students were falling behind in math, he began devising ways to involve them in his favorite subject. With help from a MacArthur genius grant, Moses’ lessons grew into the Algebra Project.
Moses has since turned the Algebra Project into a continuation of his life’s work. He crafted a clever curriculum using subway trips to model number lines, and lemonade recipes to teach ratios. By 1990, he was traveling all over America, even back to Mississippi to work with teachers and organize parents too often dismissive of math. “Like working with sharecroppers demanding the right to vote, we’re trying to get students demanding quality public education in algebra,” he says. After several years of commuting from Massachusetts to Mississippi, Moses is currently an Eminent Scholar at Florida International University in Miami. In his seventies now, bearded and white-haired, Moses still speaks at math and civil rights conferences around the country. He remains