Freedom Summer - Bruce W. Watson [179]
18 “possess a learning attitude”: SNCC Papers, reel 39.
18 “John Brown complex”: John Fischer, “A Small Band of Practical Heroes,” Harper’s, October 1963, p. 28.
18 “A student who seems determined”: SNCC Papers, reel 39.
19 “an unmistakable middle-class stamp”: New York Times, June 17, 1964, p. 18.
19 “I don’t see how I have any right”: New York Times, July 11, 1964, p. 22.
19 “You’ve deserted us for the niggers”: Alice Lake, “Last Summer in Mississippi,” Redbook, November 1964; reprinted in Library of America, Reporting Civil Rights: American Journalism, 1963-1973 (New York: Library of America, 2003), p. 234.
19 “Absolutely mesmerized”: McAdam, Freedom Summer, p. 56.
19 “Surely, no challenge looms larger”: Ibid., p. 46.
20 “You didn’t run into many situations”: Chris Williams, personal interview, October 9, 2007.
20 “to actually do something worthwhile”: Ibid.
20 “The Birmingham church bombing had occurred”: Williams, interview, November 23, 2007.
20 “do-nothings”: Greenfield Recorder-Gazette, June 26, 1964.
21 “like I was the nation’s most wanted criminal”: Chris Williams, journal, Summer 1964, p. 7.
21 “That government which governs best”: Ibid.
21 “a homosexual,” “a car full of hoods”: Ibid.
21 “and the whole Mississippi adventure began”: Williams, interview, October 9, 2007.
21 “I realized Mississippi was more educational”: Ibid.
22 “the hairy stories”: Williams, journal, pp. 8-9.
22 “When you go down those cold stairs”: Cagin and Dray, We Are Not Afraid, p. 22.
23 “That man beat me till he give out”: Ibid., pp. 24-25.
23 “It just scared the crap out of us”: Williams, journal, pp. 8-9.
23 “I turned down a chance to work”: Martinez, Letters from Mississippi, p. 11.
23 “I just ran until I was really tired”: Williams, journal, p. 9.
23 “We don’t know what it is to be a Negro”: Martinez, Letters from Mississippi, p. 5.
24 “They would argue with a signpost”: Cheryl Lynn Greenburg, ed., A Circle of Trust: Remembering SNCC (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1998), p. 143.
24 “beautiful community,” and “a circle of trust”: Ibid.
24 “cracking Mississippi,” “beachheads,” and “behind enemy lines”: James Atwater, “If We Can Crack Mississippi . . . ,” Saturday Evening Post, July 25, 1964, p. 16; Calvin Trillin, “Letter from Jackson,” New Yorker, August 29, 1964, p. 105; Dittmer, Local People, p. 198.
24 “To be with them, walking a picket line”: Howard Zinn, SNCC: The New Abolitionists (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), pp. 1-2.
24 “because I met those SNCC people”: Sara Evans, Personal Politics (New York: Vintage, 1980), p. 70.
24 “group-centered leadership”: Daniel Perlstein, “Teaching Freedom: SNCC and the Creation of the Mississippi Freedom Schools,” History of Education Quarterly 30, no. 3 (Fall 1990): 298.
25 “He is more or less the Jesus”: Martinez, Letters from Mississippi, p. 19.
25 “the Masters’ degree from Harvard”: Atwater, “If We Can Crack,” p. 16.
26 “Before, the Negro in the South had always looked”: Burner, And Gently He Shall Lead Them, p. 17.
26 “words are more powerful than munitions”: Albert Camus, “Neither Victims nor Executioners,” in The Power of Nonviolence: Writings by Advocates of Peace, ed. Howard Zinn (Boston: Beacon Press, 2002), p. 73.
26 “We were immensely suspicious of him”: Payne, I’ve Got the Light, p. 105.
27 “uncover what is covered”: Raines, My Soul Is Rested, p. 235.
27 “a tree beside the water”: Burner, And Gently He Shall Lead Them, p. 28.
27 “There’s something coming”: Ibid., p. 41.
27 “rural, impoverished, brutal”: Robert P. Moses and Charles E. Cobb Jr., Radical Equations: Math Literacy and Civil Rights (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001), p. 24.
28 “You the nigger that came down from New York”: Ibid., p. 48.
28 “Boy, are you sure you know”: Burner, And Gently He Shall Lead Them, p. 49.
28 “Dr. King and some other big people”: Hollis Watkins, personal interview, June 14, 2008.
29 “No administration in this country”: New York Times, June 21, 1964;