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By Root 1697 0

like anvils, and when marble-sized rain-drops would turn the red earth to mud, cooling the oven to a sticky 80 degrees or so. But volunteers were still learning the patterns. It was not unusual to find them alone on the street at noon. Chris Williams could not understand why no male in Mississippi wore shorts, and neither could he. Nor could volunteers swim anywhere, the rivers being muddy or snake-infested and the public pools off-limits to “invaders.” Day after day the heat mounted, turning skin into hot leather and tempers into fuses. With air-conditioning in only the richest homes, relief came solely when leaden clouds unleashed their fury, releasing a collective sigh from the people and the land. And as volunteers gradually learned the patterns, Mississippi unleashed its own fury.

That week, a Confederate flag flew outside the elegant Robert E. Lee Hotel in Jackson. A sign in the door read, “Closed in Despair—Civil Rights Bill Unconstitutional.” (The hotel opened a few days later as a private club.) Across town, city officials fenced off a park after whites complained about black kids running through it shouting, “I’m free!” Elsewhere in Mississippi, pools and libraries closed. Restaurant owners drove blacks off at gunpoint. Governor Paul Johnson predicted more violence “unless these people get out of the state and go back to their own problems at home.” And a few hours after the Moss Point shooting, flames torched three more churches in Mississippi. The pattern was now heat and fire, heat and fire. But as this merciless climate descended, it could not smother those too innocent, too committed, to heed the mayhem all around them.

Warm, soft rains had greeted Fran O’Brien when a Greyhound bus left her on the bluffs above the Mississippi River in the Civil War siege site of Vicksburg. Being from southern California, where it never rains in summer, Fran immediately sensed Mississippi as exotic. Yet once inside COFO’s Freedom House, she felt right at home among her lifelong friends—children. A black woman named Bessie, her husband killed by the Klan, her house recently bombed, was living with her six children amid the boxes and clutter. While other volunteers roamed the Freedom House that Sunday afternoon, the children flocked around the newcomer with the pale face, dark, curly hair, and sweet smile, begging Fran to do something with them on a rainy day. And so, fresh from an Oregon campus and two long bus rides, twenty-one-year-old Fran O’Brien began her summer. In the next seven weeks, she would meet Martin Luther King. She would have a terrifying encounter with the Klan. She would turn the red clay of Mississippi into craft projects, and although too modest to claim the role, she would represent creativity in its ceaseless battle with destruction.

Fran cared little about the politics of Freedom Summer. Instead, she saw the project as a chance to test her Christian values, and to teach. Bashful around adults, Fran came alive with children. In high school and at Pacific University in Oregon, the slim, demure woman had helped out in classrooms, doing crafts and drama with minimal materials, precisely what was planned in Freedom Schools. Learning of the summer project from her United Campus Christian Fellowship, Fran took out an application, but could not make up her mind. Finally, a scene from the film Judgment at Nuremberg sent her south. When a judge asked a German housekeeper what she had done under Hitler, Fran asked herself how she would feel if, in thirty years, someone asked what she had done during the civil rights movement and she had to say, “Nothing.”

A long letter home to Whittier, California, surprised her parents. “I hope you’re not too upset,” Fran wrote. “I also hope our ceiling is still in tact.” Her father, a labor attorney, felt proud. Her mother, a former social worker, tried to be supportive but kept asking, “Are you sure this is what you want to do? ” Fran was sure. Her letter made it “clearly understood that this is my project.” She had saved $100 and, throwing in $57.30 from her tax return, insisted