Bayard Rustin and the Civil Rights Movement by Daniel Levine

Author:Daniel Levine
Language: eng
Format: mobi, pdf
Published: 2008-01-04T15:02:00+00:00

Freedom Summer, which became one origin of the split, actually had its beginning in the summer of 1963. SNCC had for some time been working at a voter registration campaign in Mississippi. Progress was incredibly slow in the face of Mississippi repression. If black citizens of the state could not register for regular elections, perhaps as a desperate gesture they could form a new party, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP). Allard Lowenstein, a brilliant young idealist of irrepressible energy but with trouble keeping that energy focused, had persuaded a group of white college students to come down to help with the registration drive during summer vacation of 1963. The results of white northerners "helping" black southerners were not clear, but Lowenstein was pushing the idea of a sustained and broadened effort the next summer. Perhaps the MFDP could even challenge the regular Mississippi delegation at the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City in the fall of 1964.8

Rachelle Horowitz went to Mississippi (after Bayard arranged to have the rent paid for her new apartment) to help with the organizational work. She arrived just after the Kennedy assassination and stayed for some two and a half months. She found the situation terri bly complicated, already with a growing sentiment against whites.' Rustin himself did not go to Mississippi until the spring, but Horowitz was frequently on the telephone with him and wrote a report to him after she returned to New York. Rustin, in a phone call in December, said he "hoped that SNCC wouldn't go the way of the Wobblies, who were full of energy, ready to go to jail, ready to die, but cutting themselves off continually from the body politic."'() Horowitz, in other phone conversations, shared her doubts with Rustin about the idea of bringing a large number of white students to Mississippi. What would the implicit message be to the black students who had been working and facing danger and death if hundreds of white northerners came south? Wouldn't it imply that the danger, the violence, and even the murders that black young people faced were not worth anything in the eyes of the nation unless whites also were exposed to them? By February, "I decided I was white," she recalled with a chuckle, and she concluded that the project was a black southern effort that those young people should organize on their own. With the MFDP still unsure of its future course, Horowitz returned to New York just in time for the school boycott. I 1

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