Training for Freedom (Ohio Public Television, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The next PBS show was actually more interesting, even though it’s at best a skirmish in a battle as yet unfinished. It was called Training for Freedom, and it was a vest-pocket 22-minute documentary produced by Ohio public television about the training volunteers for the Mississippi Freedom Summer project went through in June 1964 at the campus of Western College for Women in Oxford, Ohio. (By coincidence, there is a city called Oxford, Mississippi too, and it’s the location of the University of Mississippi, site of a previous battle over civil rights in October 1962, when James Meredith became the school’s first African-American student.) This was a history I actually lived at least vicariously; my mother was a volunteer with the so-called “Friends of SNCC,” SNCC being the acronym of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. The group had formed in 1960 to coordinate the spontaneous demonstrations young Black activists were holding at lunch counters in South Carolina and Georgia, where they would sit down and get themselves arrested for violating the segregation laws. When SNCC sent organizers to Mississippi, the Black people there told them that demonstrating at lunch counters would be meaningless since most Black people in Mississippi didn’t have the money to eat there. Instead the local Black residents told SNCC’s staff that they should concentrate on winning the right to vote, because once Black people could vote in Mississippi they could elect their own to public office and start the unraveling of segregation once and for all.

As part of the orientation of the Freedom Summer volunteers, SNCC obtained a print of a CBS-TV documentary called Mississippi and the Fifteenth Amendment – the one that supposedly guaranteed all Americans, regardless of race, the right to vote – and one of the clips they showed that was included in Training for Freedom was of a Mississippi registrar of voters named Theron Lynd. Dripping with condescension and sarcasm, Lynd was shown telling one would-be Black voter that his application was rejected because he had left some blank spaces on the form. Most of the Freedom Summer volunteers were white (only about 10 percent were Black), and many of them had come from elite colleges and universities. Though many of them came from families with conservative political views, they’d been radicalized by the news coverage of the AFrican-American civil rights movement and had come to the conclusion that segregation was evil and they needed to do something to end it. The leader of the Mississippi Freedom Summer project was a young Black activist named Robert Moses – though he was embarrassed by the literally messianic connotations of his last name, so much that when he did a similar project the next year in Alabama he changed his name to “Robert Parris” – and he warned the white volunteers, “We don’t want any John Browns here.”

What he meant was he didn’t want people coming into the project with the idea that they could save Black Mississippians from racism or die in the process, even though the threat of death was real and was vividly brought home early in the training when three young Freedom Summer volunteers ,James Chaney (Black) and Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman (white), were murdered just as the training sessions were in progress. At first Chaney, Goodman and Shcwerner were just reported as “missing,” and a bulletin board containing the latest news about their disappearance was put up in the training center. Then federal authorities found the car the three men had been traveling in and dredged it out of the river in an image that has itself become iconic, and subsequently it turned out that a local sheriff and his principal deputy had been directly involved in murdering the three men. What’s fascinating about this documentary now is the sheer weight of racism, including unconscious racism, the trainers had to cope with; almost none of the white volunteers had ever worked under the supervision of Black people before. They also had to be trained in nonviolence as a technique and strategy, including resisting the instinctive fight or flight” tendency of human beings to respond to violence against them either by hitting back or by running away. (One of the most common misconceptions about nonviolent resistance is the idea that it’s “easy.” It takes as much, if not more, skill and training as being a soldier in a conventional military does.)

One of the most interesting parts of the film is the footage of the actual June 1964 training sessions, in which white volunteers were assigned to pose as a racist mob, yell insults like “Nigger!” (or “Nigger-lover!”) and “Commie” at the volunteers – and some of the white volunteers playing racists got all too much into the role. The other sad thing about this program is how abruptly the hope of the so-called “Beloved Community” of Black and white Americans working together to end racism ended – and it was the Blacks who ended it. In 1966 a new generation of activists like Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown were elected to lead SNCC, and they disbanded the white auxiliary organization FOSNCC (“Friends of SNCC”) my mom had worked for. They took to heart Frantz Fanon’s famous dictum that “the liberation of oppressed people must be the work of oppressed people themselves,” and interpreted that to mean it must be the work only of oppressed people themselves. Acting under the slogan “Black Power!,” they brusquely drove away the white allies earlier civil-rights leaders cultivated and told whites to get lost.

Meanwhile, the racists regrouped and, under the leadership of President Richard Nixon and racist Senator Strom Thurmond (R-South Carolina), they essentially took over the Republican Party and shifted the so-called “solid South” from solidly Democratic to solidly Republican. When successive Republican Presidents packed the U.S. Supreme Court with Right-wing justices, the Court started gutting the 1965 Voting Rights Act and, among other things, eliminated the so-called “pre-clearance” requirement that states with a history of discriminatory voting laws get approval from the federal government to enact any changes in their elections laws. The result has been the systematic undoing of the Voting Rights Act and its protections for voters of color, leading to drastic cutbacks in the number of polling places available for people of color to vote, long lines and preposterous laws like the one in Georgia that makes it illegal to provide water to people waiting in line to vote. Just as the racists running the South took advantage of the end of Reconstruction in 1877 to strip Blacks and other people of color of their right to vote, so the unreconstructed racists of today’s South are once again looking for inventive ways to stop African-Americans from voting. It seems like there are no permanent victories against racial prejudice and hatred; just temporary wins that are all too easily reversed and turned into losses.