A look back at Freedom Summer

Dr. Edward McNulty pens the first of two installments on his experiences in Mississippi 60 years ago

by Dr. Edward McNulty | Special to Presbyterian News Service

A woman casts her ballot in Mississippi in 1964. (Photo by Unseen Histories via Unsplash)

Editor’s note: Dr. Edward McNulty, a retired Presbyterian pastor who normally submits features about films for Presbyterian News Service, turns his attention Monday and Tuesday to Freedom Summer, which occurred 60 years ago. Below is the first installment of his firsthand account.

This summer marks the 60^th anniversary of what was dubbed by white Mississippians an “invasion” by “outside agitators.”

As of the night of Aug. 4, it was 60 years ago that I drove myself and Methodist colleague the Rev. Roger Smithe over Old Man River at Natchez, Mississippi, just as the news bulletin about finding the bodies of the three missing civil rights workers came over our car radio.

Although many memories remain vivid after the passage of six decades, I am thankful that I kept a daily journal so that I could check the memories recounted below. Roger and I pastored churches in Bottineau, North Dakota, in 1964, and when we discovered the other had answered a Council of Churches’ letter to join the Freedom Project, arranged to travel together.

We drove on through the night, keeping a careful watch on our speedometer because we had been warned that the State Highway Patrol was stopping and giving tickets to out-of-state cars traveling even a mile above the speed limit. Our destination was the state capital’s Sun and Sands Motel, Jackson’s only motel that would house Blacks as well as whites — but no integrated swimming, or they would shut down.

For a little background: Though some progress was being made toward integration in other areas of the South in 1964, progress was blocked in Mississippi by massive violence and legal roadblocks. The Mississippi Freedom Project was started by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), joined by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE),  the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), along with an umbrella organization called the Council of Federated Organizations, or COFO.

SNCC had been working in the state on voter registration for several years, but white violence had been so great that very few Blacks had been added to the roster of voters. The specter of the mutilated corpse of murdered teenager Emmett Till in 1955 and NAACP staffer Medgar Evers’s assassination in 1963, as well as dozens of others, hung over the state like a pall. Only about 6% of Blacks could vote, and the average wage for many was $3 for a hot day’s work of 10 hours or more in the cotton fields.

SNCC staffer Robert Moses met with NAACP leader Amzie Moore and others in 1961 and returned later to found COFO, despite so many of his SNCC colleagues being opposed to inviting white students to the state. Previously they had been unable to get the federal government interested in registering Blacks or even getting the FBI to protect voting rights activists. FBI agents had looked on while local thugs dressed in cop uniforms beat SNCC activists in front of courthouses. Nor was the Northern press concerned about Black sharecroppers, no matter how many Blacks were beaten or murdered. Moses believed that if it were white activists threatened by the Klan and the Mississippi White Citizens Council, network and national news agencies would send reporters to cover events in the state — and then the federal government would have to act.

The morning after our dramatic entrance into the state, we met with the Rev. Warren McKenna of the National Council of Churches (NCC), the first of several staff members who crammed into one day what the vanguard of students had absorbed up in Oxford, Ohio, in a week of orientation. We were especially impressed with our SNCC trainer in nonviolence and how to protect our bodies if attacked when we learned he had been imprisoned and hung up by his thumbs at the infamous prison, Parchman Farm. Yet he still spoke softly about the need to stay nonviolent! We visited the busy COFO headquarters, appropriately located on Lynch Street, where dozens of SNCC staffers were on the telephones and mimeographs, with volunteers coming and going. The front windows had been shattered one night by bricks, and the staff decided to replace them with sheets of plywood. That night, despite the 100+ degree heat, we thoroughly enjoyed Pete Seeger’s concert at a crowded Black church. This humidity-laden heat we would have to get used to. We either slowed down our pace or we became sick.

The next day we drove the 125 miles to the village of Shaw in Bolivar County, located in the northern region called the Delta, where cotton was still king, along with Jim Crow. We marveled at the long rows of the cotton plants and clusters of unpainted shot-gun shacks sticking up like desolate islands in the fields. Because of the mechanization of the harvest, many of the shacks were empty.

Shaw was at that time a town of about 2,700 people, with most businesses located along the main street and surrounded by well-kept homes owned by whites. Many businesses posted “Whites Only” signs. The town was separated by a marshy stream known as the bayou, with the “colored” section (the polite name) on the other side. The sidewalks and street pavement stopped at the border. So did the sewer system. We would have to get used to outhouses and bathe during the night at a single spigot that served an entire block of homes. Open ditches ran parallel to the street, the odors arising from them advertising their contents. The streetlights also stopped at the edge of the white section, leaving the Black neighborhood pitch black at night. Many homes did not have electricity.

After getting lost due to poor directions, we found the three-room house that COFO had rented as its community center. It was one of about 40 around the state, all of them dubbed “Freedom Center.” It was recognizable not only by a small sign but by the ever-present cluster of children inside and outside during daylight hours.

The front room served as a gathering room and was equipped with chairs and a table for the board games that drew the children. The walls were covered with posters and signs, including “One Man, One Vote,” “We Shall Overcome,” and notices of future meetings.

The second room was the library filled with over 1,000 books sent down from the North. These were a mixture of history, civics, Black history, novels (lots of Readers Digest collections), and useless college textbooks.

In the office was a telephone — the only one in the area — a mimeograph machine and several typewriters, all in the service of getting the word out to the community concerning meetings, voter registration flyers and reports. The telephone was regarded as our lifeline, connected with several dozen offices, including law enforcement agencies, by a Wide Area Telephone Service (WATS) line. Everyone was under strict orders when leaving the center — never alone — to phone in upon arrival at their destination, and before starting on the return trip, to also phone in the time. If a driver did not arrive at the estimated time, the person managing the office would start calling around.

The Shaw volunteers were a bit older than that of most Freedom Centers. Among them were Dennis Flannigan, director of the Shaw Center; the Rev. Doug Marr, a United Church of Christ pastor from Connecticut who was about my age; Wally Roberts, a married high school history teacher in New England and the father of two children; George Robbins, working on a Ph.D. in political science in California; Grace Morton, a poet; and Lisa Vogel, who had put on hold a teaching position at Radcliffe College in order to come to the state.

We were welcomed, given a short orientation and then sent to the shack that would be our home for the next two weeks. The local people able to house volunteers were full up, so we had to rent a tumble-down house at the princely price of $10 a week. This was unfortunate in that we did not get to know as well a local family had we been hosted. We did on occasion receive an invitation to private homes, where we were treated to some delicious down-home meals of chicken and greens and enjoyable conversations.

Over the next two weeks, Roger and I were split up for our daily work: Roger to do office work at the Center, and, because I had a rare car, to transporting hopeful voters up to the courthouse in Cleveland, about 10 miles away, and other errands. Not allowed to accompany applicants to the registrar’s office, I learned of my passengers’ experiences only through them. Besides the poll tax and other requirements, an applicant had to write an essay on citizenship and take a test that included interpreting one of the 320 sections of the Mississippi State Constitution, some of which, a COFO lawyer informed us, he would have trouble understanding. None of the people I took up were able to pass, including a woman with two years of college who taught school.

One incident was telling, reminding me of Paul Lawrence Dunbar’s great poem, “We Wear the Mask.” I picked up an old man, and during our initial conversation he kept addressing me warily as “Sir” and speaking hesitatingly. But when I revealed that I was with the Freedom Project, his whole demeanor changed, and he opened up about his life. He explained how local white people were all happy until “you outside agitators invaded and spoiled everything.” He assured me that they know nothing of what Black people think or feel.

One day, we drove to a farm where the local KKK had burned a cross the night before. We encountered several Blacks armed with rifles who said if the Klan returned, they would give them a hot welcome. (SNCC might espouse nonviolence, but not everybody did.) Guided by a local woman, we also drove out to a seemingly abandoned house where the Klan had been spotted holding a meeting.

Dr. Edward McNulty

During our second week I transported a carload of youth to the cotton fields to pass out meeting and voting registration leaflets to field hands chopping cotton (when there was no white overseer present); to interview  people in their shacks concerning their experiences of intimidation and violence (this for a report George was working on and would be turned over to the FBI); and out to the shacks again to sign up people for the coming mock election of the Freedom Democratic Pary. Blacks were shut out of the state’s racist Democrat party, so a parallel party had been set up, which it was hoped would replace the segregated state delegation at the upcoming Democratic National Convention later in August.

Of our many experiences, I will single out one which could have ended very differently. We (I and four or five Black youth, with lots of leaflets) were driving away from a shack when a pickup truck, with the usual full gunrack mounted in the rear window, stopped. The white driver demanded to know what we were doing out there. He cursed and berated us, telling us what would happen if we didn’t get out of there right away.

As he drove away, the teenagers got out to write down his license number so we could report the threat. He saw the kids scribbling on pieces of paper, abruptly stopped, and pulled into a muddy driveway so he could come back to us. He got stuck in the mud and spun his tires. The delighted kids laughed, but quickly jumped back into the car, and we sped away. Funny, they thought, but fearful of running across him again, they directed us home by a different route.

On Tuesday, McNulty completes his firsthand account of Freedom Summer, including remembrances of Amzie Moore and Fannie Lou Hamer.