Freedom Summer by Bruce Watson

Author:Bruce Watson
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Penguin USA, Inc.
Published: 2010-03-28T15:00:00+00:00

With the movement’s leading light touring Mississippi, with volunteers refusing to cower in the face of violence, those determined to derail Freedom Summer made their own midcourse correction. Rank violence and vile hatred were not enough to end the invasion. Across America, Mississippi’s image had sunk so low that residents traveling to the New York World’s Fair were changing their license plates to out-of-state tags. Someone had to stand up for Mississippi.

Lawrence Rainey stood up first. The Neshoba County sheriff filed a $1 million libel suit against NBC, charging that a Huntley-Brinkley News interview had implicated him in the disappearance. (The suit was ultimately dismissed.) Three days later, Mississippi newspapers reprinted a letter to NBC’s Today show, whose host had criticized the state. “It is a known fact,” a Hattiesburg man wrote, “that more violence has occurred in one subway in the city of New York in the last three months than in the whole state of Mississippi in the last year.” Next, with riots raging in Harlem, whites gloated. “It is a sad commentary,” a Mississippi congressman said on Capitol Hill, “that while mobs stalk the streets of New York . . . some 1,500 so-called civil rights workers and troublemakers are in Mississippi—a state with the nation’s lowest crime rate—subjecting innocent, law abiding people to insult, national scorn and creating trouble.” Mississippi newspapers, known for plastering northern crime stories on front pages, delighted in the Harlem riots. “Latest Wave of Invaders Badly Needed in New York Area Today,” the Jackson Clarion-Ledger sneered. Batesville’s weekly Panolian, noting the tension caused by summer volunteers, concluded, “Happily, the inclination toward violence is less in Mississippi than in New York. Otherwise there could have been a holocaust.” But in Mississippi’s propaganda arsenal, the strongest weapon was the oldest.

Accusations of communism in the civil rights movement dated to the Brown decision, handed down in the waning days of McCarthyism. Kneejerk red-baiting did not die with McCarthy, however. It just moved south. Into the 1960s, J. Edgar Hoover fanned Cold War suspicions—“We do know that Communist influence does exist in the Negro movement and it is this influence which is vitally important.” Hoover’s charges, constantly invoked by southern congressmen, were woven into the fabric of the white South—anyone who worked for civil rights had to be a Communist. SNCCs had heard the red-baiting so often they could joke about it. “Hey, you don’t worry about the communists,” Stokely Carmichael often told the press. “Worry about SNCC. We way more dangerous, Jack.” Just as the red-baiting was growing stale, Freedom Summer brought hordes of “Communists” to Mississippi. All summer, volunteers heard “the usual” taunts. Cops and sheriffs asked them whether they (1) believed in Jesus; (2) believed in God; and (3) were Communists. A Batesville volunteer was stopped on the street and asked to say something in Russian because “all communists speak Russian.” But now, with Mississippi in disgrace, it was time to name names.

On July 22, as Martin Luther King toured Jackson, Senator James

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