American Experience: Freedom Summer (Firelight Films, PBS, 2014)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night I insisted that my husband Charles and I watch the American Experience presentation “Freedom Summer” on KPBS last night. It turned out to be an “oldie” from 2014 -- that was the copyright date and I had already guessed it was an old program from the appearance of interviewees like Julian Bond and Pete Seeger that have passed since. The “Mississippi Freedom Summer” was organized by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) to recruit both Black and white college students to volunteer to come to Mississippi in the summer of 1964 and get Black Mississippians to register to vote. This was excruciatingly difficult because in the post-Reconstruction era Mississippi had so thoroughly and totally disenfranchised its African-American citizens there were virtually no Black voters in the state -- through much of this documentary I was reminded of the chilling scenes at the end of D. W. Griffith’s racist masterpiece The Birth of a Nation in which Black Southerners are stripped of their votes and (even more significantly) their guns, and we are obviously meant by Griffith to approve and see these scenes as a restoration of the natural order of things in which Blacks are subservient to whites and have utterly no political or social power. At times this documentary seems like a sequel to Griffith’s film, with whites using the time-tested traditional means they had used to keep generations of Mississippi Blacks from voting -- including firing them from their jobs, calling in their loans if they owned their own businesses, and in perhaps the cruelest blow of all literally trying to starve them out by cutting off the government’s surplus commodities distribution program on which a lot of them, especially the sharecroppers in the state’s rural areas, depended to sustain them during the harvest.

The situation of Blacks in Mississippi was so oppressive that a Black interviewee remembered that as a boy he was expected to bow and tip his hat every time he passed a white person on the street -- which meant he had to do an awful lot of bowing and hat-tipping to go out anywhere at all. One interviewee noted that until the Mississippi Freedom Summer project started, Mississippi hadn’t had a Ku Klux Klan because it hadn’t needed one: the Citizens’ Councils (sometimes more bluntly called White Citizens’ Councils) were able to do the Klan’s work for it without resorting to the sort of outright violence and terrorism the Klan was known for, and the white establishment that ran the state was united in its commitment to white supremacy. There was no room in Mississippi politics for even the relatively mild racial moderation of figures like Alabama Governor Jim Folsom, much less an out-and-out apostate like South Carolina federal judge Julius Waties Waring (who was on the three-judge panel that heard one of the cases that later became Brown v. Board of Education and wrote a blistering dissent that anticipated the final decision in flat-out saying, “Segregation is per se inequality”). Most of the voices of the racists came from film footage at the time, though one former Citizens’ Council member was interviewed and he looked back without apology even though he seemed to accept that Black Mississippians had won equal voting rights (sort of) and the world hadn’t been destroyed by it.

The Freedom Summer project volunteers first had to go through an orientation in Oxford, Ohio where Black veterans of the civil rights movement tried to let them know what they were getting themselves into -- trying to register Black voters in the Deep South in a state that had been suppressing Black political participation for nearly 100 years (ever since the withdrawal of the final Federal troops from the South in 1877 ended Reconstruction and gave the white Southern elites the green light not only to disenfranchise Blacks but reduce them economically to a situation little better than slavery) -- and that their lives would be at risk. They also tested the white volunteers to see if they’d be willing to work a job that would require them to accept and follow orders from Blacks -- which was hardly a given even among the most self-consciously liberal whites in 1964, when there were virtually no situations in which whites ever worked under Black supervisors.

One group that isn’t mentioned here but was the subject of a separate PBS documentary, also released in 2014, called Spies of Mississippi (for more information see https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2014/03/spies-of-mississippi-trilogy-filmspbs.html), was the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, which was an official government agency authorized by the all-white Mississippi legislature in 1956. Its original purpose was as a P.R. arm of the Mississippi government to put out glossy books and “educational” films about how well the Mississippi system of racial segregation worked, how both whites and Blacks were happy with it, and how it spared Mississippi the high crime rates of Northern cities that had let their Black populations get out of control. The Sovereignty Commission eventually turned into a secret police force, gathering information on the civil rights movements (often by recruiting Blacks to be undercover agents or informers) and keeping dossiers on anyone -- Black or white, from “outside” as well as within Mississippi itself -- they considered a threat to the existing racist order.

The Freedom Summer project began with a pall over it from the murders of James Cheney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner; the Black Cheney and the white Goodman and Schwerner were ambushed in Neshoba County and the station wagon they had been driving was recovered long before their bodies were. (Freedom Summer writer-director Stanley Nelson misses the point that racist Mississippians were as anti-Semitic as they were anti-Black -- indeed, one of their beliefs was that Blacks were too stupid to have organized the civil rights movement themselves and Jews had done it for them as part of their centuries-long plan to destroy the white Christian race -- and therefore the killers, who turned out to include Neshoba County’s sheriff and deputy sheriff, would have hated Goodman and Schwerner as much as they hated Cheney because Goodman and Schwerner were Jews.) Spies of Mississippi director Dawn Porter argued that the Sovereignty Commission had directly “fingered” the three victims, whose bodies weren’t discovered for nearly a month -- and Pete Seeger has a fascinating story in his Freedom Summer interview about how he was giving a free concert for the Freedom Summer volunteers at a Black church when his concert was interrupted by the announcement that the bodies of the three dead volunteers had been found, whereupon he and his audience spontaneously started singing “We Shall Overcome.” (One of the Black volunteers who was at Seeger’s concert recalled that Seeger’s brand of folk music held little appeal for them: “We were all into James Brown.”)

Among the topics writer-director Stanley Nelson covered, largely through interviews with the surviving participants looking back with a kind of bemused tolerance for their younger selves, are the campaign’s effective use of Michael Schwerner’s widow Rita as a spokesperson for the cause -- she even got an audience with President Johnson and addressed him in a no-B.S. way that horrified his aides, one of whom told her, “You don’t talk to the President that way!” (She replied, “I just did.”) Nelson also mentioned that when the local law enforcers arrested the white women volunteers, they seemed obsessed with their sex lives; convinced that the only way young white women would hang out with Black men would be to get fucked by their legendarily huge appendages, the local police and sheriff’s deputies were obsessed with asking them about the size of Black men’s penises. (I wonder if one of these women ever dared come back with the obvious response: “How big are Black men’s dicks? How the hell should I know?”)

Unable to make much headway with their original task -- trying to get Black people in Mississippi registered to vote -- the project refocused on two other programs. One was the so-called “Freedom Schools” in which Black Mississippians were told about their racial heritage, including the great civilizations that had existed in Africa before the white slavers and colonizers came, and also a rewrite of American history to tell the story of the African-American experience honestly and without the overlay of racial prejudice that had infected white American historiography and was still the view being taught when I was in grade school and high school in the 1960’s. I remember that my mother, who was very active as a white supporter of the civil rights movement at the time, gave me the SNCC Freedom School primer on American history and so I got exposed to the point of view that Reconstruction had been a major civil-rights advance and its end had been a bad thing not only for Blacks in the South but the country as a whole before I got exposed to what was then the mainstream view that Reconstruction had been an oppressive disaster and the white Southern “Redeemers” who took power after it ended had been justified in essentially ignoring the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments and suppressing Black political participation. (To this day I thank the authors of the SNCC history primer for writing the book that first made me aware of this slice of American history -- and to my mom for giving it to me.)

The other project around which Freedom Summer ended up pivoting was the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, an attempt by Black and white Mississippians to send an alternative delegation to the 1964 Democratic National Convention and unseat the all-white delegation chosen by Mississippi’s white racist Democratic establishment. This was during the presidency of Lyndon Johnson, the Texas Senator who was proud of his record as a racial moderate (when the Left turned against him over the Viet Nam war and made Arkansas Senator J, William Fulbright their new hero because he chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and held hearings challenging the war, Johnson bitterly reminded his more Left-leaning aides that Fulbright had signed the 1956 “Southern Manifesto” -- a pledge by Southern Senators to continue racial segregation by every legal means available -- while Johnson hadn’t) in shepherding a civil rights bill through the Senate in 1957 and the even more expansive Civil Rights Act of 1964. But he also seemed, based on the tape recordings of conversations from the White House used as part of Freedom Summer (every President from Franklin Roosevelt to Richard Nixon had the White House offices wired so they could record conversations, but Nixon was the only one who made the process automatic so his conversations got recorded whether he wanted them to be or not), to have regarded the Freedom Democratic Party challenge as a personal insult that he needed to quash by any means necessary.

The Freedom Democratic Party had hired as their attorney Joseph Rauh, a well-connected liberal lawyer with a reputation as a “fixer” for good causes, including civil rights. But Rauh’s main gig was as attorney for the United Auto Workers, and Johnson leaned on the UAW’s president, Walter Reuther, to threaten to fire Rauh unless Rauh could work out a deal that would eliminate the Freedom Democrats’ challenge. The Freedom Democrats got a hearing before the convention’s Credentials Committee at which their principal organizer, Fannie Lou Hamer -- a Black former sharecropper who had been fired, thrown out of her home and savagely beaten for daring to attempt to register to vote -- spoke before TV cameras until President Johnson abruptly pulled her off the air by announcing an impromptu “press conference” from the White House, knowing the TV networks would cut away from Hamer’s testimony for him. Only it backfired: the TV cameras kept rolling and showed Hamer’s full speech later, and thus built up public sympathy for her and the cause of the Freedom Democrats -- especially among the more liberal convention delegates who regarded Johnson as a hero of the civil rights cause. There was a brief attempt -- unmentioned in this film -- to compromise the issue by seating half the Freedom Democrats’ delegation and half the regular Mississippi Democrats’ delegation, but in the end all the party would offer was two “delegate-at-large” seats to the Freedom Democrats, who rightly rejected this as patronizing and insulting.

Freedom Summer writer-director Stanley Nelson regards the Freedom Democrats’ debacle as the pivotal moment that ended the so-called “Beloved Community” of Blacks and whites working together for civil rights and pursuing change both within the political system and outside it, and its replacement by the more radical, more violent, racially separatist “Black Power” ideology. I think this somewhat overstates the case -- the debacles Martin Luther King and other nonviolent activists faced when they tried to mobilize against racial discrimination in housing in Northern cities probably had a lot to do with the rise of “Black Power” and the sense among a lot of younger Black activists that white liberals were merely pretending to support them and would stick up for white supremacy when the crunch came. But ultimately the Freedom Summer had one positive effect: along with the police riot in Selma, Alabama in early 1965, also over a struggle by African-Americans to be allowed to register and vote, it helped spur passage of the Voting Rights Act, which from 1965 to 2013 required states with a documented history of trying to discriminate along racial lines in whom they would or would not allow to vote to “pre-clear” any changes in their elections laws with the U.S. Department of Justice to make sure they weren’t covers for racial discrimination. It also abolished literacy tests for voter registration and the kinds of bizarre hoops white Southern registrars had put would-be Black voters through -- including having to read back and interpret a passage from the Mississippi state constitution -- tests that, as some of the well-educated Blacks interviewed for this program admitted, they couldn’t pass even though they had masters’ degrees and, in some cases, Ph.D.’s.

Freedom Summer is one of those programs that you can read as a positive statement of how far we’ve come and a bitter criticism of how much is left undone and how strong white-supremacist attitudes still are in the U.S.: the violence that was once used against Blacks who tried to vote still exists, only now it’s aimed at people (including the governor of Michigan) who dare to try to keep her state’s people safe from the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. In 2013 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the “pre-clearance” clause of the Voting Rights Act unconstitutional on the ground that it was obsolete and no longer needed -- and the Southern states that had previously been subject to it, dominated by Republicans ever since the two major parties switched their positions on civil rights in the 1960’s (the Democrats, once the party of slavery, segregation and the Klan, became the party of civil rights, and the Republicans embraced the racists who no longer felt welcome in the Democratic Party), responded by instituting more sophisticated versions of the same tactics of voter suppression that had kept most of their Black popultions from voting before 1965. In 2016 these states provided the base for Donald Trump, perhaps the most openly white-supremacist President in our history, and in 2020 Trump carried all the former Confederate states except Virginia and Georgia: proof that the racist attitudes and actions that drove the response documented in Freedom Summer are still alive and all too well in our country.