Freedom Summer - Bruce W. Watson [6]
In small towns with lilting names—Holly Springs, Picayune, Coffeeville—people proud of their southern hospitality seethed at the thought of summer. How dare these “beatniks,” ignoring their Harlems and their Roxburys, invade Mississippi to tell the entire state how to deal with race! In tranquil town squares, where skinny men in suspenders sat on storefront benches, where women in sunglasses and sundresses promenaded beneath covered sidewalks, the majority of whites believed Mississippi had no “Negro problem.” “We give them everything,” Greenwood’s mayor said. “We’re building a new swimming pool. We work very close with the nigger civic league. They’re very satisfied.” For nearly a decade, white Mississippi had watched with dread as integration came to Montgomery, Little Rock, Greensboro, Nashville . . . And now this army of northerners was poised to overrun their state, to change “our way of life.” Word had it the “invaders,” including white women, would be living in Negro homes! Visceral fears of “wild” Negroes, of “carpetbaggers,” of the “mongrelization” of black and white, brought generations of hatred bubbling to the surface.
In Mississippi’s most remote hamlets, small “klaverns” of ruthless men met in secret to discuss the “nigger-communist invasion of Mississippi.” They stockpiled kerosene, shotguns, and dynamite, then singled out targets—niggers, Jews, “nigger lovers.” One warm April night, their secret burst into flames. In some sixty counties, blazing crosses lit up courthouse lawns, town squares, and open fields. The Klan was rising again in Mississippi. Like “White Knights,” as their splinter group was named, the Klan planned a holy war against the “dedicated agents of Satan . . . determined to destroy Christian civilization.” The Klan would take care of business, a recruiting poster said. “Get your Bible out and PRAY! You will hear from us.” Finally, as swamplike humidity spread and the noonday sky seemed to catch fire, summer arrived.
Before it was over, all of America would focus on Mississippi. TV and newspapers would tar and feather the state. Hundreds of doctors, lawyers, and clergymen would come to help student volunteers. Folksingers, Hollywood stars, and Martin Luther King himself would flock to Mississippi, where whiplash violence was shredding the social contract. Thirty-five churches would be torched, five dozen homes and Freedom Houses bombed, and Mississippi would become synonymous with murder. The FBI would give a code name to its investigation, one that eventually named a movie whitewashing the agency’s role—“Mississippi Burning.” But Freedom Summer was more than the sum of its violence.
That summer, the complexion of America began to change. President Johnson signed the landmark Civil Rights Act, and slowly, grudgingly, “Whites Only” signs vanished across the South. Urban riots ended racial complacency in the North. The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution plunged America deeper into Vietnam. And at summer’s end, a black sharecropper taking the microphone at the Democratic National Convention nearly ended the political career of the president of the United States. Meanwhile in Mississippi, several hundred students and their host families showed Americans, black and white, how to treat each other with uncommon decency.
That summer, whites hosted in black homes marveled at people who, after lifetimes of degradation, openly shared faith, food, and hope. That summer, Mississippi blacks met whites who shook their hands and spoke to them as equals. “Nobody never come out into the country and talked to real farmers and