The Young Crusaders by V. P. Franklin

Author:V. P. Franklin [Franklin, V. P.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Beacon Press

FREEDOM SUMMER AND THE MISSISSIPPI FREEDOM SCHOOLS

Black History was the major topic of discussion in the freedom schools opened in Boston, Chicago, New York City, Cleveland, and Milwaukee in 1963 and 1964 and became one of the most important subjects included the curriculum for the Mississippi freedom schools opened during SNCC’s 1964 Freedom Summer campaign. In 1962, the Southern Regional Council, a civil rights leadership group, launched the Voter Education Project (VEP) to provide funds for voter registration drives. Bob Moses, SNCC’s lead organizer, established the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) in February 1962 to bring together the national and local groups engaged in civil rights activism throughout the South. The VEP helped to register over three hundred thousand Black southerners by 1964, but fewer than four thousand African Americans were on the voting rolls in Mississippi.56

SNCC’s and COFO’s organizing efforts in the Magnolia State were often stymied by opposition coming from law enforcement officers, local registrars, and members of the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacists. Black SNCC organizers working in Mississippi were targeted, and Herbert Lee, Louis Allen, and five others associated with the voting rights campaign were murdered in 1963 and 1964. Moses and organizer Lawrence Guyot decided that SNCC should recruit northern white students to work in Mississippi; they realized that “wherever white volunteers went, the FBI follows.” SNCC organizer Stokely Carmichael agreed. “While these [white volunteers] are here, national attention is here. The FBI isn’t going to let anything happen to them. They let the murderers of Negroes off, but already [white] men have been arrested in Itta Bena [Mississippi] just for threatening white lives.” Thus Moses and SNCC organizers decided to recruit Black and white college students to come to Mississippi for Freedom Summer.57

Over five hundred college and university students made the trip to Mississippi in the summer of 1964 and worked on voter registration campaigns, taught in freedom schools, and staffed SNCC’s community centers known as Freedom Houses. After receiving training in June 1964 at Western College for Women in Oxford, Ohio (now part of Miami University), the brave volunteers began arriving later that month. Funds to support the summer project were raised by New York City’s Friends of SNCC, the VEP, and other civil rights groups in northern cities and states. Unfortunately, the project got off to a bad start when three SNCC workers—James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner—went missing in June after going to Philadelphia, Mississippi, to investigate the burning of a Black church and were arrested by the local police.58

James Chaney (Black) was 21 years old and from Meridian, Mississippi. He had joined SNCC in 1963 and organized voter education classes. Michael “Mikey” Schwerner was born in 1939 in New York City and was a graduate student in social work at Columbia University when he joined CORE. He and his wife, Rita Levant Schwerner, had just arrived in Meridian, Mississippi, in January 1964. Andrew Goodman was born in New York City in 1943 and was attending Queens College studying to become a social worker.

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