American Educational Research Journal
Summer 1998, Vol. 35, No. 2, pp. 167-198
Well Never Turn Back: Adult Education
and the Struggle for Citizenship in
Mississippi's Freedom Summer
John R. Rachal
University of Southern Mississippi
In the summer of 1964, several civil rights organizations, led by the Student
Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), formed a coalition and conducted a voter registration and educational program in Mississippi which
was originally called the Summer Project but became known later as Freedom Summer. Continuing the civil rights work that preceded it, Freedom
Summer was distinguished by its organized, state-wide, and highly public
attempt to promote its three-pronged educationalprogram of Freedom Schools,
community centers, and voter registration and by the recruitment of several
hundred out-of-state student volunteers to implement the program. Adult
education played a critical role in the schools, the centers, and the voter
registration work and included literacy education, practical skills, and
political awareness. Paulo Freire's work in adult education in Brazil and his
paradigm of critical consciousness provide an intriguing historical parallel
as well as a useful theoretical frame from which to analyze the adult
education component of the Summer Project. Confronted with verbal, legal,
and sometimes violent hostility, Freedom Summer sought to use education
and moral suasion to give democracy and citizenship a more genuine
meaning.
JOHN R. RACHAL is a Professor of Adult Education at the University of Southern
Mississippi, Hattiesburg, MS 39406-5154. His specializations are historical and philosophical foundations of adult education and literacy.
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Adult education . . . turns out to be the most reliable instrument for
social actionists
Every social action group should at the same time
be an adult education group, and I go even so far as to believe that all
successful adult education groups sooner or later become social
action groups.
—Eduard Lindeman
I am determined to become a first class citizen.
—Fannie Lou Hamer
A Disappearance in Neshoba County
n a sultry 101° Sunday in the summer of 1964, one local Black and two
out-of-state Whites left the Chaney home in Meridian, Mississippi, for
Philadelphia, MS, 36 miles northwest. Their purpose was to investigate the
previous Tuesday night's destruction by fire of the Mt. Zion Baptist church,
located near the smaller town in Neshoba County known as "bloody
Neshoba" for its violent history. Two of the young men had spoken at a mass
meeting at the church 3 weeks earlier and persuaded the reluctant church
leadership to let the church serve as a Freedom School. James Earl Chaney,
a 21-year-old Black Meridian native, drove a blue, 1963 Ford station wagon
accompanied by White New Yorkers Michael Schwerner, 24, and Andrew
Goodman, 21. Returning to Meridian after their investigation, the three
Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) workers were stopped around 3:00 in
the afternoon by Neshoba County sheriffs deputy Cecil Price and taken to
the county jail for questioning. Chaney was arrested for speeding. Schwerner,
who had earned the sobriquet "Goatee" from the Klu Klux Klan, and
Goodman were locked up as suspects in the burning of the church. Around
10:30 that night, and after payment of a $20 fine, they were told not to make
any phone calls and released. Leaving town on Highway 19 West, they were
followed by several cars, including that of Deputy Price, who again stopped
them. Chaney, the driver, who had been in car chases before, might not have
complied, but, perhaps on the advice of Schwerner, he pulled over (Affidavits, 1965; Chaney, 1995; Civil Rights Education Project, n.d.; "Mercury
Soars," 1964; "Search Teams," 1964; Shoemaker, 1964).
Their burned-out station wagon was found the next day, but the young
men had vanished. Chaney's mother feared the worst, coping by endlessly
washing the dishes, cleaning the house, and humming spirituals. Schwerner's
wife, Rita, still at the Summer Project's training base in Oxford, Ohio,
remained outwardly calm and indicated to the mostly White, Northern
volunteers that their work must proceed. Also in Oxford, Robert Moses, a
29-year-old Black man wearing glasses and clad in t-shirt and bib overalls,
noted with characteristic understatement that "opposition to the project was
shaping up" ("First Students," 1964). As Director of the Mississippi Summer
O
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Freedom Summer
Project, he announced the disappearance of the three young men to a group
of hushed Oxford trainees who had volunteered for work in Mississippi. The
day of the disappearance, Sunday, June 21, 1964, coincided with the first
official workday of Freedom Summer, an educational and political action
project born in violence (Affidavits, 1965; Chaney, 1995; Civil Rights Education Project, n.d.; McAdam, 1988).
The disappearance of the "civil rights trio," as they were quickly dubbed
by the press, galvanized the nation as previous victims had not. Certainly the
CORE workers' association with a highly publicized and organized movement for the state and the mysterious aspect of the disappearance contributed to the national media frenzy surrounding the 44-day search. Inescapably, however, a great chasm between the attention paid to previous
murders and those of June 21, 1964 (for murders they soon enough proved
to be), opened, due to the race of two of the victims: Northern Whites, sons
of the American establishment. Rita Schwerner soon pointed out what
everyone knew: "We all know that the search with hundreds of sailors is
because my husband and Andrew Goodman are White. If only Chaney was
involved, nothing would have been done" (Holt, 1965, p. 30). Other states,
Northern and Southern, also had their murders, bombings, riots, and
intimidation, as the Mississippi press so fondly detailed (Civil Rights Education Project, n.d.; "Confusion," 1964), but the Magnolia state's grim necrology, now receiving the glare of national publicity, exposed the state as the
most recalcitrant on the issue of racial justice. The attention was all the more
acute because it was played out against the backdrop of the JohnsonGoldwater presidential campaign as well as the congressional debate over
the century's most important and contentious civil rights legislation.
The weekend of June 21, 1964, also saw the arrival by car and bus of
the first major contingent of 175 Freedom Summer volunteers, in whom
nervousness mingled with determination. Their week of training in Ohio had
prepared them, at least cognitively, not only for their educational and voter
registration goals but also for violence (falling to the ground, curling in a
ball, and covering the head) and general harassment, from both officials and
citizens. For these mostly Northern and mostly White college students, the
training and the disappearance provided a sobering introduction to the
danger and fear associated with participation in an underground politicalcum-educational movement. Steve Bingham, spokesman for the volunteers
still in Ohio, said, "We go afraid, yet dedicated" ("President Sends," 1964).
Barbara Mutnick, a 20-year-old from New Jersey, tried to tune it out: "Of
course I'm scared in going to Mississippi. But I can't think about it" ("More
Students," 1964). Rims Barber, a 27-year-old minister with the National
Council of Churches, arrived by Trailways bus in Canton and was surprised
to be greeted by the police, who promptly took him to the police station to
register as an alien (Barber, 1995). At least a few went back home. A 19-yearold Johns Hopkins student arrived in Moss Point, found himself quickly
arrested for vagrancy, and soon left after concluding that "my life within the
community was in jeopardy" ("Righter Tells," 1964, p. 6). Still, only about
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five of the contingent of 275 in the second week's training session dropped
out ("Second Wave," 1964).
Confronted with local hostility and minimal federal assistance, four
organizations—the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC,
pronounced and unofficially written as "Snick"), the Southern Christian
Leadership Conference (SCLC), the local chapters of the National Association
for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and CORE—maintained
their individual identities but combined their forces within the state to revive
the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO), an ad hoc, state-wide
coalition of civil rights organizations first formed in 1962. The national
NAACP, led by Roy Wilkins, was far too conservative to be comfortable with
SNCC and CORE, both of which courted the rural poor as opposed to the
NAACP's more urban middle class. But within the state, confronted by the
larger threat and committed to a larger cause, COFO sufficiently unified the
four organizations to produce a united front and to minimize organizational
jealousies. SNCC, however, was numerically dominant, with four of
Mississippi's five congressional districts assigned to it by COFO. SNCC and
CORE represented a younger generation of civil rights workers, including
many, like Moses, from outside the South. Atlanta-based Septima Clark of
SCLC liked the young Jacobins of SNCC, including the voluble and sometimes imperious Stokely Carmichael (despite his response of "Prone" to a
question about the position of women in SNCC), but she noted that "they
don't have time to wait. I felt that they were young people who didn't get
the facts and just went right off the top of their hats" (Clark, 1976a, p. 95).
More charitably, she admired their spartan lifestyles and undemanding
commitment, observing in a letter that "SNNC [sic] students are true disciples
of Christ. They do not ask for salaries nor a place to lie down" (Clark, 1963a).
What these volunteer and staff civil rights workers did that summer in
Mississippi, known then as the Summer Project and later as Freedom
Summer, remains a milestone in the civil rights movement, and adult
education was at its heart. Proposed primarily for youth with adult education
as an ancillary activity, the Freedom Schools have received more scholarly
attention. The community centers, however, were conceived primarily as
places of adult education coupled with community recreation (Mississippi
Freedom Summer, 1964). Both settings embodied progressive educational
principles and methods—especially discussion, questioning, and collaborative inquiry over lecture. The teacher's job was "not simply to teach, but
rather to learn with the students," declared Florence Howe, a teacher in the
Jackson Freedom Schools (Dittmer, 1994, p. 258). As for the Summer Project
goal of registering voters, it was by definition for adults. As several letters,
contemporary newspapers, and SNCC and COFO documents revealed, it
was also inherently educational. Not only did staff and volunteers prepare
Black Mississippians for the voter registration tests, there was also the larger
educational enterprise of learning the language of democracy, the meaning
of citizenship, the pride of Black heritage, the responsibility of leadership,
and the transformative power of self-respect. These constituted the educa170
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Freedom Summer
tional vision of Freedom Summer, while literacy work, voter registration, and
fostering indigenous Black leadership were operational goals supporting the
vision. And though it was not among Freedom Summer's overt purposes, the
experience of that summer also educated and matured many of the workers.
Staff, mostly Black, honed and tested their leadership and organization skills;
volunteers, mostly White, middle-class college students from outside the
South, learned more than they taught and began to see the world through
a different lens.
Summer Project Prologue
Representing a younger generation of leadership, Bob Moses, Harlem-,
Hamilton-College-, and Harvard-University-educated, had learned much
from Mississippian Amzie Moore and the SCLC's Ella Baker. Moses had met
Baker in I960 while volunteering at SCLC in Atlanta, and he would later
become, in the words of one scholar, the "architect and guiding spirit of
Freedom Summer" (McAdam, 1988, p. 146). He had been SNCC's first
representative in Mississippi when he came in 1961, connecting with Moore
and engaging in adult education by starting voter registration classes near
McComb. Based in Jackson a year later, he traveled the state giving
workshops on nonviolence (Mills, 1992). By 1962, both Moses of SNCC and
Dave Dennis of CORE had established an organizational presence in the
state. Many of SNCC's and CORE'S workers were young locals, like Lawrence
Guyot, Sam Block, and Hollis Watkins of SNCC and Oretha Haley, Jean
Thompson, and James Earl Chaney of CORE. SNCC even became involved
in food distribution after LeFlore County in 1962 terminated its participation
in the federal surplus food program as retribution for voter registration
activities, thereby affecting 22,000 of its indigent citizens. SNCC and CORE'S
work in adult education, voter registration, food distribution and generally
talking up "the movement" was conducted against the ever-present backdrop of intimidation, economic reprisal, and violence, including several
drive-by shootings and arson.
Just as Freedom Summer itself would be an extension of its antecedents,
so were its adult education activities. Alongside Moses' voter registration
classes and nonviolence workshops, as well as the "informal teaching"
("Handbook," 1964) of the canvassing for voter registration, the Citizenship
Education Program (CEP) was explicitly engaged in providing the educational foundations of a more meaningful citizenship—focusing on adult
literacy. While SNCC and CORE tended to focus more on voter registration
in the state early on, the SCLC had been conducting citizenship education
classes in several Southern states prior to 1964. In 1961, SCLC had inherited
the Citizenship Education Program as well as Septima Clark from the
Highlander Folk School when the school was shut down by the state of
Tennessee and subsequently burned by persons unknown, or at least
unconvicted (Clark, 1976a, 1976b; Cotton, 1961). By the spring of 1962,
Diane Nash and James Bevel were recruiting CEP trainers and teaching
classes in the Delta region of the state, as was Bernice Robinson that summer
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(Burner, 1994; Moses, 1967). Annell Ponder (1963), SCLC field supervisor in
Mississippi, pointedly added the goal of "learning ways of gaining first class
citizenship" to the literacy and problem-solving aspects of the program.
The CEP traced its lineage to Esau Jenkins and Septima Clark's work in
"a two room shack" on John's Island in South Carolina (Clark, 1963b). Clark,
who had taught public school there and had been teaching adults to read
since around 1916, was fired in 1954 and had come to Myles Horton's
Highlander Folk School, where she conducted workshops in citizenship
education with Andrew Young and her niece, Bernice Robinson. She invited
Ella Baker, who had served as Executive Director at SCLC until I960, to a
workshop at Highlander, to which Baker responded favorably: "I have long
since been committed to the idea of teaming up with you" (Baker, I960;
Clark, I960). Clark wanted to continue working with Robinson in citizenship
education, and, with Highlander facing a forced closure, Horton recommended negotiating with SCLC for joint employment (Horton, 1961). SCLC
head Martin Luther King had also attended Highlander workshops in the
fifties, and, as his star in the civil rights movement rose, his photo with
Horton, Rosa Parks, and others at Highlander soon adorned billboards
throughout the South with the heading "Martin Luther King at Communist
Training School" (Egerton, 1995). King was quite willing to hire the two
women and inherit the Citizenship Education Program (Clark, 1976a), while
Horton, more interested in initiating programs than administering successful
ones, observed later that the transition would "solve our problem, getting it
[CEP] off our hands" (Horton & Freire, 1990, p. 75). Clark, along with Young
and Robinson, brought it to the SCLC in Atlanta, Young as administrator and
Clark as Supervisor of Teacher Training. Both Baker, who had chafed under
King's paternalism at SCLC, and Clark each noted the organization's strong
patriarchal ethos: For Baker, "It was too much for the masculine and
ministerial ego to have permitted" an "old lady" to be a spokesman (Baker,
1974, p. 19), while, for Clark, "The men wanted all the glory," and King
"never felt that the women should have much of anything" (Clark, 1976a, p. 12).
In the early 1960s, the CEP trained numerous local people like Victoria
Gray of Hattiesburg who would run in 1964 as a Mississippi Freedom
Democratic Party candidate for congress. The training took place at the
Dorchester Center in Mcintosh, Georgia, after which the trainees returned
to their communities and set up literacy classes with a citizenship—that is,
modestly political—twist. Often in homes or churches, classes typically
would be offered two nights per week, beginning at 7:00 with a devotion
and ending at 9:00 ("Class Programming," n.d.; Gray, 1995). By February of
1964, the program was operating in 11 states, with 101 classes set up in
seven Mississippi counties ("Refinement by Fire," c. 1964). Still, as Clark
wrote to Young that July, "We have a long way to go in adult education"
(Clark, 1964). Training workshops began Sunday evening and concluded
Friday evening, and included demonstration classes and role playing as well
as discussions of bookkeeping, recruiting students, and assessing the community. The Dorchester workshops encouraged teachers to use state laws
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for teaching reading, fertilizer mixtures and seeds for math, and local
government for politics (Clark, 1976b; "Training Leaders," n.d.). Also included in the training was an "art of teaching" session centering around the
philosophy "that the good teacher does not tellbvX asks and creates a climate
and situation in which the student discovers for himself (Cotton, 1963). This
CEP philosophy of education meshed with Freedom Summer goals and
guided both the Freedom Schools and the community centers, the two
settings in which the more structured youth education and adult education
took place.
Describing the program, SCLC Director of Education Dorothy Cotton
(1963) reported that "the adult student in the citizenship class is learning to
read, but at the same time he is gaining a knowledge of his community and
how he can participate in a way that seeks to deal with his problems." It was
this second aspect, the politicizing of literacy, that invited reprisal. Sally
Carthan, a tenant on one plantation, had taught CEP classes with the owner's
acquiescence until he was visited by masked men who told him to evict her.
Fearing consequences, he did so, thus depriving her of her home and
minuscule income. George Gates was a CEP teacher in Oktibbeha County
whose activities got him fired from his job and thrown out by his landlord,
along with his pregnant wife and five children (Gates, c. 1963; "Report of
Harassment," 1964).
In June of 1963, SCLC field supervisor for the Citizenship Education
Program Annell Ponder was viciously beaten along with Fannie Lou Hamer
and June Johnson while in police custody in the town of Winona (Guyot,
1996; Hamer, 1966; Ponder, 1963; Ponder, c. 1963). A few days later, Medgar
Evers was murdered in his driveway in Jackson. The ratcheting up of
violence in 1963, partially in response to educational and voter registration
activity, coupled with 2 years of COFO work that resulted in "really not
seeing any breakthroughs at all" (Moses, c. 1967, p. 12), invited reflection
within COFO and thereby contributed to Freedom Summer. Allard Lowenstein,
a 33-year-old multi-issue White activist with important Democratic Party
political connections and a nettlesome style, had come to the state in July
of 1963 and soon proposed to a receptive Moses a "Freedom Vote." The
Freedom Vote would allow unregistered Blacks to vote in a mock campaign
that would parallel the state gubernatorial election that fall. The Freedom
Democratic Party ran an integrated ticket with Aaron Henry, Black war
veteran and COFO president in 1962, as candidate for governor and Ed King,
White chaplain at Tougaloo College, as candidate for lieutenant governor,
against the official candidates. The Freedom Vote was intended to demonstrate that if Blacks were allowed to register and vote they would do so.
Lowenstein further offered to recruit, through his contacts in the Democratic
Party, a cadre of mostly White college students to help organize the
campaign. Despite unprovoked arrests and attempts to seize ballots, the
mock election made its political statement with over 75,000 Blacks voting.
After the volunteers returned to their campuses following the November
election, Bob Moses sought to expand the idea, including large numbers of
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White volunteers, for an ambitious program the next summer (Burner, 1994;
McAdam, 1988; Moses, c. 1967).
The Highlander Folk School had moved to Knoxville, modified its
name, and re-opened shortly after its closure by the state of Tennessee—
Horton saying that you could padlock the doors but not the idea (Horton
SL Freire, 1990). It sponsored a lively November 14-16, 1963, meeting of the
COFO staff in Greenville, Mississippi, where the Summer Project was first
debated. One participant, Jesse Morris (1979), indicated that the focus
evolved from voter registration to mass education, but the most contentious
issue concerned the presence and especially the scale of outside White
participation. Former Howard University student Charlie Cobb (1983, 1996),
one of the opponents of a large White infusion, later articulated the
opposition as a fear that the White volunteers, by virtue of their superior
education, would take over, and thus the movement "would cease to be
defined in terms of Black people from Mississippi and become defined as
White people doing good works for Black people" (1983). The national
press's take on Freedom Summer in coming months would demonstrate the
prescience of this view. When Lowenstein (c. 1964) told a reporter who had
approached him in a crowd to interview native Mississippians instead of
outsiders like himself, the reporter replied, "Oh, they're not news . . . the
news is when outside White people are interested."
Another concern was voiced by Mississippi native and SNCC veteran
Hollis Watkins (1996) who feared that large numbers of any outsiders would
set back what had already been achieved in developing the indigenous
leadership that COFO and particularly SNCC were philosophically committed to nurture. This was a critical SNCC educational objective. An undated
SNCC document, "COFO's Proposed Community Centers" (c. 1964), stressed
"leadership training" to young adults in the development of community
leaders. Viola Brooks (1965) noted that "the heart of the idea back of SNCC
is finding and assisting and training local leadership." Aside from the danger
1,000 educated outsiders might pose to the goal of developing local
leadership, there was also the simple fact that the mostly Black COFO staff,
many of whom were local, had almost anonymously risked their lives
working on voter registration and education for up to 2 years. Though
supportive of White recruitment himself, Guyot (1996) could see how the
prospect of an army of out-of-state johnny-come-latelys usurping those roles
with the national press in tow would be seen by some as an invasion of their
"turf." For him, turf was primary, race secondary. Lowenstein (1967), who
had originally suggested Whites for the Freedom Vote campaign, afterward
acknowledged an understated point of the opponents', whose frustration
derived partly from "the simple human fact that there were kids who had
been risking their lives in Mississippi for a long time, and nobody even
noticed it." Then the White kids "came down, and there was publicity. It
would have taken an angel not to resent that" (p. 18).
But the publicity was double-edged: While it would obscure the
pioneering work done by COFO staff and uproot the tender shoots of local
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leadership, it would also bring, Moses (c. 1967, p. 18) argued, "a searchlight
from the rest of the country on Mississippi." Because of the press coverage,
a large White presence would presumably bring physical protection to the
movement. If that view were to prove too optimistic, violence against
Northern Whites would at least get Mississippi on the nightly news—a grim
but prophetic observation. Moreover, the sheer number of several hundred
volunteers would yield results in voter registration attempts as well as mass
education. The fact of housing Whites in Black homes would itself be a
victory, aiming at the heart of the strict segregationist code. Three years later,
Moses summarized the discussions, unintentionally echoing his favorite
philosopher Camus' perpetually and futilely struggling Sisyphus:
The staff were exhausted, and they were butting up against a stone
wall, no breakthroughs for them. How long could you expect to
survive working in that kind of isolation? Where was the help to come
from? . . . The question of whether or not the White students would
dominate [and] set back the whole process [started by] the local
people and everything was a risk but not as important as the risk of
not being able to do anything at all. . . . There were really very, very
deep heated discussions about that." (c. 1967, pp. 18-19)
Besides the tactical considerations, there was the moral argument that
SNCC and COFO could hardly advocate an integrated society while opposing integration at the operational level for themselves, as Charlie Cobb,
himself an opponent, and Mrs. Hamer, an advocate, both noted. According
to Mrs. Hamer (whose stature within the movement was such that her name
was always preceded by the honorific), "If we're going to break down this
barrier of segregation, we can't segregate ourselves" (cited in Mills, 1992,
p. 64). By 1966, Stokely ("Sweets") Carmichael, the very antithesis of Bob
Moses' cerebral, self-effacing style, would be leading SNCC to a more
militant Black separatism, but, in early 1964, he accepted SNCC's philosophy
of nonviolence and the integrationist view. Perhaps the most compelling
argument for massive White recruitment was the quietly forceful statement
of Moses that he would not be part of an all Black project—compelling
because, as June Johnson (1979) would later observe, "When Bob Moses
spoke, everybody listened." The debate continued in meetings over the next
2 months; by its end, Kennedy was dead, a Texan was in the White House,
and Whites would be a large part of Freedom Summer (Burner, 1994; Cobb,
1983, 1996; Dittmer, 1994).
In October of 1963, frustrated CORE Field Secretary Dave Dennis (1963)
had noted in a letter that "no Civil Rights organization seems to want to
tackle Mississippi." Almost in response, on February 29, 1964, James Farmer
of CORE, James Forman of SNCC, and Moses, representing SNCC and COFO,
announced the Summer Project in a joint statement: "We now need a large
number of students and faculty who are willing to commit their very beings
as well as their minds to our common struggle." The project would have two
aims: "the intensification of voter registration and educational activity" and
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"the establishment of Freedom Schools and community centers throughout
Mississippi" (Council of Federated Organizations, 1964). COFO, particularly
SNCC and CORE, began laying the foundation for the summer: recruiting
students, fund-raising through "Friends of SNCC" groups, issuing press
releases, and organizing book drives, all the while continuing the slow,
methodical, and occasionally harrowing registration and educational work
in "the rural."
COFO's inherently educational program intended nothing less than the
subversion of the political and social structure of Mississippi life. It aimed
at making full citizenship meaningful through the political and educational
enfranchisement of the state's second-class citizens. While SNCC's "Mississippi Summer Project Running Summary of Incidents" (1964) report, a kind
of dispassionate diary of hostile acts against the movement, depicted the
ugly backdrop against which COFO and local Blacks struggled, the incidents
themselves also served literally as part of the curriculum for an expanded
Black consciousness. Confronted with White hostility, Black apprehension,
illiteracy, poverty, and volunteer culture shock, COFO and the volunteers
undertook an experiment in citizenship. Would this experiment—the voter
registration, the Freedom Schools, the community centers, with education at
the heart of all three—"crack" Mississippi, as national SNCC Chairman John
Lewis had famously phrased it? (Atwater, 1964). After months of planning,
recruiting, fund-raising, and organizing, the Summer Project sought to
answer that question.
Freedom Schools, Community Centers, and Voter Canvassing as
Venues of Adult Education
Despite Mississippi's Black public schools' manifold shortcomings, in a June
25, 1964, CBS News special entitled "The Search in Mississippi," Senator
Eastland informed Walter Cronkite that "a Negro in Mississippi is employed,
makes good wages, he's prosperous, he has the finest school system in the
United States for his children to attend" (Mills, 1992, p. 98). It was a rhetorical
flight of fancy so stunningly preposterous that informed observers could
only have been left agape. In fact, state funding allotted an $81.77-per-pupil
annual expenditure for Whites compared to a $21.77 annual expenditure for
Blacks (McAdam, 1988), sometimes supplemented by even greater percentage disparities from the districts. For example, in McComb, the local district
added $30.89 per pupil above the state minimum for the White schools and
$.76 per pupil for the Black schools; in nearby Magnolia, the numbers were
$59.55 and $1.35, respectively (in Hattiesburg, the numbers were better,
$115.96 and $61.69) ("Mississippi Freedom Schools: New Houses of Liberty,"
1964). In response to the stifling, spotty, and underfunded public schools
which had "caged" (Cobb, n.d.) Mississippi's Black youth, Charlie Cobb's
November 1963 "Prospectus for the Mississippi Freedom Summer" envisioned a statewide system of small, highly nontraditional schools as an
alternative educational system (Cobb, 1963).
Cobb's Freedom Schools, which were originally proposed for teenagers
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and encouraged animated role playing and discussions, are often regarded
as the most visible symbol of Freedom Summer. But it is a misleading image,
both in undervaluing the tedious work of voter registration canvassing and
in implying that youth education dominated the pedagogical objectives.
Adult education actually underlay the entire project, integral to all three
prongs of Freedom Summer: voter registration, the community centers, and
the Freedom Schools themselves. Several of the canvassers commented on
the educative component of the voter registration work (Barnhill, 1995;
Orris, 1995; Rubin; 1995; Watkins, 1996). As for the Freedom Schools, Cobb's
original proposal did not articulate a role for adult education, but as the
Freedom School concept evolved adult education became an important
secondary purpose, especially in the evenings. By early June, plans for the
Freedom Schools had expanded beyond Cobb's "Prospectus" (1963) to
include "adult education classes, citizenship courses, and health clinics"
("Mississippi Legislature 1964," p. 383). Community centers and evening
Freedom Schools offered classes in sewing, arts and crafts, literacy, hygiene,
federal aid programs, Negro history, infant care, and voter registration. In the
Freedom Schools and the community centers, COFO sought to wed practical
education with the larger goals of meaningful citizenship and awareness of
the possibilities for personal and social change.
Translating such lofty goals into operational plans required adaptability
and improvisation. COFO staffers like Moses, Dave Dennis, Hollis Watkins,
Lawrence Guyot, and a couple of dozen others had established bases in
Meridian, Greenwood, Hattiesburg, and other towns throughout the state.
By July, Hattiesburg had the largest Freedom School operation in the state,
with 575 students—a third of them over age 35—and 33 teachers in five
Freedom Schools. The evening classes ran from 7:30-9:30 and largely
repeated the curriculum of the age 13 and older group, focusing on such
subjects as language arts, American history, and typing (Hattiesburg, c. 1964).
As of late July, 20 communities had 41 Freedom Schools, enrolling over 2,000
students taught by 175 full-time teachers, according to "Mississippi Freedom
Schools" (1964). A COFO map ("Progress and Problems," c. 1964) of
uncertain date marks 20 community centers and 21 Freedom School sites
(some with multiple schools), but McAdam (1988) concludes that by
summer's end 44 different sites dotted the state, with 30 having Freedom
Schools, and 23 having community centers. All but two sites had voter
registration workers.
The original plan for each of the community centers included a library,
recreational facilities such as ping pong, and classes in literacy, voter
registration, Negro and American history, health issues, childcare, music,
crafts, home improvement, federal programs, and vocational training ("Little
COFO Work at Demo Precincts," 1964; "Overview of the Community
Centers," 1964), with underlying goals of promoting both political awareness
and indigenous leadership (COFO's, c. 1964; "Mississippi Freedom Summer," 1964). As early as March, a CORE community center in Meridian started
offering reading classes and clerical training (Schwerner, 1964). Inevitably,
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however, local interests, needs, and resources dictated multiple variations,
additions, and abandonments. No single, universal curriculum, physical
setting, or set of services emerged for either the schools or the centers.
Freedom Schools were held in churches, the staff headquarters' office (the
Freedom House), community centers, and available buildings, while community centers themselves usually stood alone or jointly with the Freedom
House. Most needed elbow grease and more. Volunteer Zoya Zeman (1996)
described what would become—after scrubbing, painting, laying linoleum,
and partitioning—the community center in Clarksdale:
What a beaut of a place! Dark except for the light coming in the dirty
front windows, the floor was sort of rotting... and some of the boards
have to be re-nailed, old Budweiser and Schlitz signs hung on the
walls and the ceiling, droplets of grease [from a grill] still cover the
interior. . . .
But at least two community centers were new buildings built by COFO
workers and local residents; for example, in Greenville, a local, White
women's group held bazaars to help raise money to build a center there.
Most, however, were small, existing buildings with "a Freedom School, a
recreation program and library supplemented with an adult educational and
citizenship program, day-care class for small children, and a distribution
center for food and clothing" ("Outlook for COFO Educational Programs,"
1964). By May, 100,000 books had been collected in book drives, and
volunteer Fred Winyard (1995) spent a few weeks organizing books into
independent collections and distributing them to schools and centers throughout the state.
As the summer progressed, it became clear that the community centers
were more effective in their programs for recreation and youth activities than
in adult education. A SNCC document in August reported that at least 10 of
the centers were serving far more youths than adults, adding that the primary
reasons appeared to be residents' fear of reprisal and, secondarily, the large
number of children and youth, a fact which tended to deter adult participation ("Community Center Report," n.d.). Another document looking at the
progress and problems of the centers in early fall concluded that adults
valued the centers primarily as a place for "our young people to go" and that
"the programs of adult education are not so urgent in their minds" ("Progress
and Problems," 1964). In Greenwood, SNCC's national headquarters as of
mid-June, the literacy program was attracting less than 10 adults, suggesting
"a desperate need for a better program for teaching literacy." In Clarksdale,
the literacy program fizzled out altogether ("Report to the Staff," 1964;
Zeman, 1996). Sally Belfrage (1965) in Greenwood settled into checking out
books mostly to children, noting that, "It was soon clear that few adults
would be customers: many couldn't read well enough, but, even for those
who could, reading was not an item in life" (p. 100).
The disappointing numbers in the literacy classes were especially
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ment and to make the content relevant. Training workshops admonished
teachers to organize well, treat all questions as good, go slowly, praise freely,
and open and close, if participants desired, with a prayer and a song
("Techniques for Field Work," n.d.). Classes emphasized using relevant,
context-related materials. A March Highlander workshop devoted to the
Summer Project curriculum stressed the use of case study, including Mrs.
Hamer's campaign for senator, the Hattiesburg demonstrations, and the
pending civil rights bill ("Report of a Sub-Group," 1964). Although the
Laubach method of literacy instruction had been introduced at the Ohio
training session and was being used with some success in literacy near
Hattiesburg, most classes in basic skills focused on COFO-prepared materials (often discussing levels and functions of government), newspapers, the
voter registration form, and, necessarily, the Mississippi constitution. The
state constitution, hardly an ideal text for weak readers, nevertheless loomed
large because the most difficult aspect of the voter registration form was the
requirement to copy a specified section of the constitution and then to give
an oral interpretation of it. Having little to do with literacy and everything
to do with race, the requirement was not deemed necessary until 1955, when
it was enacted into law (Laws of the State of Mississippi, 1955).
In retrospect, the limited participation in the basic skills classes is hardly
surprising. Historically, participation in literacy programs has always been
modest; current figures indicate that fewer than 6% of the eligible population
(i.e., adults with less than 12th-grade credentials) attend such programs, with
two thirds of those being in GED programs (National Center for Education
Statistics, 1997). Almost certainly the Bible would have been more appealing
as a text than the state constitution. In addition, the stigma attached to being
a poor reader may have dissuaded some, and the working day for most of
these rural folk exacted a physical toll, dissuading others. For others, sheer
indifference or a perception of irrelevance deterred participation, the "programs of adult education" not being "so urgent in their minds" ("Progress
and Problems," 1964). A kind of fatalism—what psychologists call an
external locus of control and a staffer called psychological slavery—withered
the initiative of some. Fear of reprisal undoubtedly played a significant role,
as all the canvassers could attest. The movement had routinely been smeared
as communist, and, even where the transparency of that charge was
recognized, many instinctively shunned "that mess," with its potential for
dangerous change and consequent repercussions. An unnamed staffer in
Panola County, working with the County Voter's League, recognized the
paralyzing effects of the state's history on Black political participation:
The breakdown of fears, the opening up of political significance
through the vote, and limitless other attempts at overcoming what is
basically a psychological slavery created by years of physical slavery
all incur an educational job which in itself calls forth organization.
(Panola Project Report, 1964)
Those who did participate recognized the risk. Classes in voter registration,
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whether in churches, homes, Masonic and Elks' lodges, or community
centers, inevitably extended beyond reading, writing, and interpreting a
section of the constitution to include organizing the logistics of going to the
courthouse as well as the moral responsibility to participate in the democratic process (Sutherland, 1965; Watkins, 1996).
Critical to the modest success of the adult education classes was the
preliminary work of "informal teaching" ("Handbook for Political Programs,"
1964) through canvassing and urging attendance at mass meetings and voter
registration classes. The Panola staffer similarly recognized the adult education inherent in the canvassing work:
This organization, which in essence is education, is brought about
through merely, at times, teaching people how to fill out the
registration form. The process which leads up to this need to know
how to fill out the registration form is always an educative one in itself.
(Panola Project Report, 1964)
Canvassing was tedious and made more difficult by the legislature and the
police. The legislature had made distribution of flyers without a permit
illegal, and in at least two known cases in which application was made it
was denied ("Seventy-Seven Civil Rights Workers Held," 1964; "Summer
Project Workers Arrested," 1964). While illegal flyers and word-of-mouth
were important recruitment tools, nothing could substitute for the door-todoor canvassing. As Joe Morse (1964) wrote to his family from the Meridian
jail in the fall,
There are usually two-ten persons in these classes depending upon
how hard we worked the area around the place of the class. We have
to go back to a person's home at least two and possibly three or four
times before we have him convinced that nothing will happen and
that it isn't difficult and that it really is their duty to try to register . . . .
Of course things could happen, a perception law officers sometimes
encouraged by following in their police cruisers canvassers like Rims Barber
(1995) in Canton and Hollis Watkins (1996) in Holmes County—more to
intimidate residents than the canvassers. Local skepticism about registering
could also be forgiven simply on the grounds of its low likelihood of success.
From June 21 until July 31, 144 people went to the courthouse in Greenwood, 123 took the test, and two passed. In Canton, 22 people took the test;
none passed. In Hattiesburg, 70 people took it; five passed (Fact Sheet,
1964). Still, canvassing was the backbone of the work, a process of gentle
persuasion and incidental education. As Vicksburg volunteer Jan Handke
(1996) noted, "If you could achieve voter registration, then you could do
these other things."
Attempting to register to vote was hazardous, and fear prevented many
from doing so. The courthouse symbolized a hostile power structure and
often housed the sheriffs office. The atmosphere, in the words of one
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volunteer, was "extremely White" (Barnhill, 1995). Outside the courthouse,
prospective registrants faced the malignant stares and jeers of Whites. Inside,
unmistakably contemptuous registrars had sole authority in determining
whether or not the applicant passed the test, which required an interpretation of a randomly selected section of the Mississippi Constitution. Whites,
whether literate or not, routinely passed; Blacks routinely failed (Hudson,
1995). Seeing Blacks coming, the registrar might simply close the office.
Often, to heighten the intimidation, only one applicant at a time was allowed
in the office. Those attempting to register would find their names listed in
the newspaper, in keeping with a new state law putatively passed to allow
anyone to come forward and challenge the applicant's good character but,
in fact, meant simply to intimidate.
Economic reprisal for attempting to register was common. Domestics
were fired, sharecroppers thrown off the plantation. In Hattiesburg, three
school bus drivers who attempted to register in 1962 were all fired the next
day. Teachers and principals, however, rarely jeopardized their middle-class
jobs by association with the movement. By 1964, teachers were required to
sign a form disclaiming any affiliation with even the relatively conservative
NAACP (Hudson, 1995). Whether in the fields, the kitchen, the warehouse,
or the school system, job loss for attempting to exercise one's constitutional
right to register to vote was common enough that even the normally
reactionary Hattiesburg American newspaper confided in February of 1964
that it "cannot condone" the practice "if it is happening"—a disingenuous
concession quietly inserted in a condemnation of the "meddlers" (Meddling,
1964).
Several White volunteers observed how their race affected the dynamics
of voter registration canvassing. Black Mississippians could hardly ignore a
White face at their door and were occasionally very agreeable without any
sense of commitment. One volunteer found many who
would generally agree with everything you say, yessir, yessir, yessir
... and just wait for you to go away. You were a direct threat to them,
their livelihood, and their family just being there. They didn't even
have enough power to say, "Get the hell off my porch!" since you
were the White and they were the Black and this is Mississippi. (Orris,
1995)
By contrast, SNCC veteran Hollis Watkins could introduce himself as a
Summit, Mississippi, native and found Holmes County residents very receptive. Geographic area of the canvassing may have played a greater role than
the race of the canvassers in any event: Where there was less violence, as
on the more cosmopolitan Gulf Coast, residents were more welcoming.
When White volunteer Barry Clemson (1995) traveled 30 miles north of his
coastal home base in Biloxi to Wiggins, he found that it "was a different
country."
Where possible, workers canvassed in pairs, often Black and White.
Repeat visits were common, allowing familiarity to encourage trust while the
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message sank in. The message remained the same: You need to try to
register, so meet us for the trip to the courthouse, come to the mass meeting,
or come to the voter registration classes. Larry Rubin (1995), who spent all
of 1964 and part of 1965 as a volunteer, would ask if residents had tried to
register, how much they made from their crop last year, whether they were
satisfied with that, and what they thought of the schools—always leading to
the role that voting could serve in rectifying the ills besetting them.
Canvassers might also hand out flyers and go over a copy of the voter
registration form, explaining the requirements and the process. But aside
from the utilitarian business of learning about the form and the process of
voter registration, Watkins (1996) saw these visits, at least initially, as more
educational than political. The real educational task, for him, was convincing
people that it would make a difference just to try to register, that they had
a right to, and that no change would come for them or their children if they
did nothing.
This larger view of the canvassers' educational role and Black citizens'
moral duty tacitly acknowledged that the effect of the vote, even at the local
election level in Black majority counties, was not likely to be immediate. Yet
COFO regarded voter education and registration as the most pragmatic
means, slow as it may be, of claiming full citizenship as well as promoting
social and political change. But voter registration was not the only method.
The more confrontational method of direct action—lunch counter sit-ins,
going to the Whites-only movie theater, sitting in the Whites-only section of
the bus station—challenged the legal and social foundations of segregation
as a separate means of claiming the full rights of citizenship. Its confrontational character, however, made it inherently more dangerous and occasionally left it vulnerable to derision from some voter registration advocates who
saw their own work resulting in "more than a hamburger." Hollis Watkins
did both and felt that both were necessary. In reality, the two methods
tended to merge, at least on those occasions when a line of voter registration
applicants would walk to the courthouse singing I've Got the Light of
Freedom or We'll Never Turn Back.
The immediate goal of the canvassing work was to get people to mass
meetings. Usually at a church, they ranged in size from less than a dozen
to occasionally over a hundred. Blending education, politics, prayer, song,
and exhortation, mass meetings informed, inspired, encouraged, and sometimes shamed. A particularly effective speaker in Clarksdale, 84-year-old Van
Arsdale at first "played the shuffling Tom, giving all the excuses for not
attempting to register, and then proceeded to demolish the argument by
demonstrating that Negroes had little to lose and much to gain by making
the attempt." The result was 40 freedom registrations, presumably a practice
form (Clarksdale Weekly Report, 1964).
Critical to these mass meetings was music, which suffused the meetings
as well as the movement generally. Andrew Young (1964) of SCLC wrote
Septima Clark in the middle of Freedom Summer that "music has been the
backbone of the Freedom Movement. I dare say that freedom songs have
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done as much for inspiring our students [in the Citizenship Education
Program] as all the teaching and preaching." The freedom songs rooted the
movement in the even deeper tradition of church music, aligning freedom
with faith. At mass meetings, songs inspired normally unconvinced residents
to commit to making the attempt to register, transcending the commonsense
reasons and natural fears that argued otherwise. Even in temporary defeat,
the songs consoled and strengthened; several staffers and volunteers have
given testimony to the spiritual uplift gained from singing while in jail or on
the way to or from the courthouse. Charlie Cobb (1996) remembers a silent
group of locals returning by bus from an unsuccessful trip to the courthouse
in 1962, when the then unknown Fannie Lou Hamer started singing in a
strong voice, changing the mood on the bus and foreshadowing her
leadership in the movement. Barry Clemson (1995), the only White face in
a crowd of marchers to the Biloxi courthouse, thought his time was up as
he and a lady who had just given a speech led the group, two abreast,
straight into a White mob; she took him by the arm and said, "Walk slow
and sing loud." Influenced also by some strategically placed policemen, the
White crowd parted.
In addition to the inspirational and spine-stiffening roles, the songs had
other functions. One was pedagogical. Just as stained-glass windows have
portrayed scriptural narrative visually, freedom songs captured snippets of
movement history aurally, such as, for example, We'll Never Turn Back
alludes to the murder of Herbert Lee. Volunteers learned We'll Never Turn
Back in Ohio, and, according to one (Sutherland, 1965), it was to the
Mississippi workers what We Shall Overcome was to the national movement.
Still, to locals, We Shall Overcome, sung with crossed arms and clasped
hands, had the deepest spiritual resonance, and it usually closed mass
meetings. Songs also recruited. SNCC staffer and Mississippi native Sam
Block "began to see the music itself as an important organizing tool" after
people would approach him on the street, remembering the songs at a mass
meeting more vividly than even the oratory, and asking him "when . . . [are]
. . . we going to have another meeting and sing those songs?" (Dittmer, 1994,
p. 131). Recruiting, teaching, giving courage, and inspiring, music touched
emotions and bound together the educational, political, social, and economic purposes of the movement in ways that "all the teaching and
preaching" could not.
Politics and Pedagogies
On April 1, 1964, a month after the formal announcement of the Summer
Project, a military coup overthrew the Goulart government in Brazil. Almost
immediately, a professor of the history and philosophy of education at the
University of Pernambuco in Recife was imprisoned. His offense had been
that, as the country's Coordinator of the Adult Education Project (Freire,
1973), "For more than fifteen years [prior to 1964], I had been accumulating
experiences in the field of adult education" (p. 41) in the slums of Northeast
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Brazil. Paulo Freire came to see literacy instruction, rooted in the social,
political, and economic realities of the student, leading to what he alternately
called critical consciousness or conscientization as the essential weapon in
the empowerment of the dispossessed peasants of Brazil. He had developed
this approach to literacy during the years prior to the coup, but in 1963 it
began to spread throughout the country with the help of his university
students and other contacts. By March 1964, training programs had been
established in most of Brazil's state capitals. A month later he was in jail,
where he began writing his first book, Educacao Como Pratica da Liberdade
(1967), which appeared in English as the first part of Education for Critical
Consciousness (1973). After a 70-day incarceration, the new authorities
"invited" him to leave the country. After a short stay in Bolivia, he moved
to Chile, continuing his writing and his interest in the literacy of the poor
(Elias & Merriam, 1995; Freire, 1970, 1973; Horton & Freire, 1990).
Though presumably unknown to the planners of the Summer Project,
Freire's work among the poor in Brazil, along with his later writings,
provides an illuminating paradigm from which to analyze Freedom Summer.
Freire's writings, most notably Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970), articulate
a philosophy of education which in several ways parallels Freedom Summer's
less theoretical educational program. Mississippi rural Blacks and Brazilian
peasants had much in common: poverty, poor education, and a nonexistent
political voice. Slavery in Brazil had been abolished in 1888, 23 years after
it had been ended in Mississippi by the Civil War (Freire, 1973). Literacy was
a requirement for voting in Brazil (Horton & Freire, 1990), while Mississippi's
1955 law, requiring a reading and an interpretation of the Mississippi
Constitution, had the same effect, at least for Blacks. Both Freire and COFO
viewed adult education as critical in combating what they respectively
regarded as oppressive systems. The contrast that Freire (1970) would draw
between banking education and problem-posing education, Charlie Cobb
(n.d.) had already observed and intuited. Education of Blacks in Mississippi,
he said, had "caged them" and ranged
from an attack by a cop to public schooling . . . . As people have
started motion and agitation in their communities, they have discovered that they need an education that is geared to the relevancies they
discover while building this new life if they are to function and
participate in it. For education is not the development of intellectual
skills, but a preparation for participation in living.
For Freire, banking education domesticates learners and preserves an
oppressive status quo, making deposits into the brains of the oppressed,
and, thus, shifting to Cobb's metaphor, "caging" them. Florence Howe
perfectly captured this concept of banking education in her repudiation of
"pouring pre-digested, pre-censored information into their brains" at her
Jackson Freedom School (Dittmer, 1994, p. 258). Howe and Cobb saw in
Mississippi what Freire saw in Brazil:
The capability of banking education to minimize or annul the
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students' creative power and to stimulate their credulity serves the
interests of the oppressors, who care neither to have the world
revealed nor to have it transformed
The banking approach to adult
education, for example, will never propose to students that they
critically consider reality. (Freire, 1970, pp. 60-61)
Similar in theme and even in language, a SNCC document envisioned the
Freedom Schools as "new houses of liberty" and noted that they "are a focal
point for personal expression against the oppression on the one hand, and
for personal growth and creativity, on the other. The regular Mississippi
schools are fundamentally opposed to this approach" (Mississippi Freedom
Schools: New Houses of Liberty, 1964). Opposing a passive acceptance of
reality among their students, both Freire and COFO urged an active and
critical examination of that reality. Banking education, in its role of preserving an existing sociopolitical structure, is necessarily top-down and
noncollaborative. Freedom Summer's educational goals confronted that
structure in Mississippi, seeking to change it. While Freedom Summer's
educational program retained some top-down elements for both youth and
adults, it aspired to mutuality of learning, as in Howe's observation that the
teacher's role was not just "to teach, but to learn with the students" (Dittmer,
1994, p. 258). Liz Fusco (1964a) echoed the point: "It was the Whites, the
Northerners, listening to the Mississippi Negroes, reading what they wrote,
taking them seriously, and learning from them. . . . So the teachers were
transformed too."
In contrast to banking education, Freire's problem-posing education
liberates rather than domesticates and leads to critical consciousness or
conscientization. In both Education for Critical Consciousness (1973) and
Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970), Freire uses a grammar metaphor, transitiveness (the learner as subject or object), and posits four stages of consciousness: intransitive, semi-intransitive, naive transitive, and critical consciousness or conscientization. Though speaking of Brazilian peasants, Freire
offered descriptions of these stages that would have been recognizable to
the Summer Project staff and volunteers. In the intransitive consciousness
stage, the peasants have no understanding of the social and political forces
shaping their lives; the semi-intransitive peasant has slightly more awareness
but has accepted the negative values attributed to him by the dominant
culture. In the third stage, the peasant begins to have a glimmering of the
reality of the social forces which oppress him but is still susceptible to the
manipulation of this dawning recognition by propaganda and coercion. The
fourth level, critical consciousness or conscientization, involves praxis, in
which there is "action and reflection of men upon their world in order to
transform it." At this level, "the students—no longer docile listeners—are
now critical co-investigators in dialogue with the teacher" (Friere, 1970,
pp. 66, 68).
This same ideal of developing political and social consciousness that
leads to action reverberated in the language of the Summer Project. As the
summer neared, the "Handbook for Political Programs" (1964) emphasized
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the "political education programs" and "statewide community organization."
At one meeting in June, participants were told that "freedom and civil rights"
would be a part of the curriculum of the Freedom Schools ("Little COFO
Work," 1964). Praxis—reflection and action—mirrored the adult educational
goals, particularly the voter registration work. The emphasis on leadership
training for young adults assumed that the cadre of new leaders would be
actively engaged in organizing and improving their communities. As the
summer progressed, the symbiosis of politics and pedagogy became selfevident to COFO's friends and foes alike.
As to pedagogical method, Freire avoided the schooling atmosphere
and advocated culture circles, emphasizing a nonhierarchical, collaborative
relationship between teacher and adult learner. Culture circles fostered an
atmosphere in which the learner's voice and experience were valued. The
peasant's experience became the foundation for literacy and eventually an
expanded consciousness, particularly through the use of visual aids and
generative words (Freire, 1973). These words—such as slum, land, government, and wealth—derived from the peasant's own experience rather than
from primers and thus had immediacy and personal meaning for the student.
Collectively these words, written down by the teacher, served as a text; adult
basic educators today refer to this as the Language Experience Approach.
The words are generative in their ability to generate additional words,
especially words with social, political, and cultural significance. At least one
teacher in Mississippi realized the significance of generative words even if
she had no name for them: "The words the adults want to learn are such
words as 'courthouse,' Voter registration,' 'affidavit,' etc., rather than 'jump
Spot, jump'" (Fusco, 1964b).
But even where this particular pedagogical insight was lacking, the
importance of the learner's immediate circumstances as a guide to methodology was broadly recognized and was thematically similar. Summer Project
planners recognized that this problem- or situation-based learning, axiomatic with adult educators since Lindeman (1926), intensified both youth and
adult education. A situation-based curriculum provided the obvious alternative to the impoverished banking education which sought to distort and
idealize Black reality. Banking education, by inculcating the values of the
White political and social structure, could hardly chance an examination of
the realities and circumstances of Black life; COFO's educational program,
attempting what Freire called problem-posing education, could hardly do
otherwise. Thus a document entitled "SNCC Educational Program" (c. 1964)
advocated the study of "problem areas, specific incidents close to their own
experience, and the basic tenets of a democratic society." The document
"Outline for COFO Programs—1964" (1963) espoused this problem orientation for the voter registration campaigns, which serve "as a means of
organizing Negro communities around their most important problems . . . . A
general interest in political affairs will be aroused . . . . Where there is
interest, education is also possible."
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teristic of banking education," democratizes the teacher-student relation and
emphasizes dialogue and questioning. While "banking education resists
dialogue!,] problem-posing education regards dialogue as indispensable to
the act of cognition which unveils reality" (Freire, 1970, pp. 67, 71). This
problem-posing education precisely accorded with COFO's view because
unveiling reality, both for Mississippi Blacks and the nation at large, was
what the Summer Project was about. COFO Educational Advisor Noel Day
("Notes on Teaching in Mississippi," c. 1964) recommended dialogue and
discussion because they encouraged expression, exposed feelings, developed group loyalty and responsibility, and permitted participation and
snaring. Another COFO curricular statement considered questioning to be
the "vital tool" and "the path to enlightenment" ("Academic Curriculum,"
n.d.). If COFO's view of questioning and discussion were to prove too
quixotic, it differed only in tone from Freire's use of problem-posing
education to achieve conscientization.
Given an unequal power structure, an educational program aimed at
developing critical consciousness and a more equitable distribution of
power inevitably challenges that structure and spurs opposition. As Coordinator of the Adult Education Project in Brazil before the coup, Freire and his
literacy campaign were part of the Popular Culture Movement which
threatened power elites and helped provoke the military coup. By comparison, Mississippi officials and media relentlessly denounced COFO's Summer
Project as an "invasion" of "intruders," "left-wing agitators," "carpetbaggers,"
"troublemakers," "do-gooders," "misled pawns," "meddlers," "integrationists," "ideological manipulators," "propagandists," "CORE creeps," and
"weirdos." The bilious rhetoric deepened the alarm and hostility. From
bogus traffic tickets and jailings to church burnings and murder, the Project
met resistance.
Likewise the problem-posing educational aspects of both movements
invited charges of communism. In the context of the Cold War, Mississippi's
elected officials and police found the red menace a convenient target lurking
in the shadows of the whole civil rights movement, and especially in the
"invasion" represented by the Summer Project. Fraternal twins race-baiting
and red-baiting were almost interchangeable in the statehouse and on Main
Street—communists advocated Negro rights, and Negro rights advocates
were communists. Senator Eastland rolled his two favorite bogeymen—civil
rights and communism—into one, saying that the missing civil rights
workers (Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman ) "were laughing it up in a New
York hotel room on Moscow gold" (Rubin, 1995). Ruleville mayor Charles
Dorrough viewed COFO's educational program as an effort to "poison the
minds of the younger Negroes" who "will have to be taught the democratic
way of doing things . . . . [COFO has] helped the Communist cause"
("Summer Project Workers Arrested," 1964). Red-baiting flourished in Brazil
as well. At about the time the Summer Project was being planned for
Mississippi, uncomfortable estate owners in Brazil accused Freire of trying
to "Bolchevize the country" with his literacy method:
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In fact, my actual crime was that I treated literacy as more than a
mechanical problem, and linked it to conscientizacao, which was
"dangerous." It was that I viewed education as an effort to liberate
men, not as yet another instrument to dominate them. (Freire, 1973,
p. 57)
To the dismay of the red-baiters, COFO also saw beyond the mere "mechanical problem" of learning one's letters, expanding the Citizenship Education
Program and proposing in February a "literacy program used to teach the
people the facts of democracy" ("Summer Project—Involving Negro College
Students," 1964). In fashioning an education promoting what Freire would
call critical consciousness, COFO, like the Popular Culture Movement in
Brazil, subverted the banking education that Senator Eastland so admired in
his interview with Walter Cronkite and that Mayor Dorrough happily trusted
to teach "the democratic way of doing things."
Even with all the unintentional application of Freirean principles and
the quite intentional, but not always successful, avoidance of conventional
didacticism, any assessment of the adult educational aspects of Freedom
Summer must acknowledge COFO's disappointment with the numbers in
the adult educational activities. Already mentioned were the stigma of being
ill-educated, rural folks' long work hours, the fear of retribution, the
psychological slavery, and the efforts of authorities to impede Summer
Project goals, all of which inhibited participation. Despite COFO emphases
on discussion and questioning, situation-based learning, and a problemposing orientation, inevitably slippage from the intent and advice of some
of the COFO documents occurred in actual practice. Perhaps more so than
in Brazil, elements of a top-down pedagogy and mind-set crept in, as White
staffer Rubin (1995) and volunteer Clemson (1995) attested. Evidence of
substantial community involvement in needs assessment and curriculum
planning is elusive, despite the goal of promoting indigenous leadership. A
SNCC document from late summer or fall acknowledged the need for
community input:
So far, in the Mississippi project, we have not achieved any real
breakthrough in adult education, but we are continuing to experiment
with new ideas and materials, and increased efforts to involve the
adult students in the planning of the program. ("Proposal for a
Freedom Education Program," c. 1964)
Lower participation in adult classes also resulted from, inevitably, some
teachers or facilitators being less gifted than others. Then there was the
blurring of youth education and adult education curricula. Unlike Brazil,
COFO classes offered for youth were sometimes simply carried over for
adults in the evening. Finally, no longer was reading forbidden and thus the
alluring talisman that the Gideonites among the freedmen of Port Royal,
South Carolina, had found it to be a century before (Rachal, 1986). As
Belfrage noted simply in her richly descriptive memoir of the summer,
"Reading was not an item in life" (1965, p. 100).
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The Freirean paradigm is perhaps the most comprehensive pedagogical
lens through which Freedom Summer can be viewed, as well as the most
parallel in historical circumstance. Yet other adult education writers also
suggest points of comparison. Lindeman (1926, 1956), for example, distanced adult education from the classroom, saw "situations, not subjects"
(1926, p. 6) as starting points for learning, embraced discussion groups as
the primary methodology of adult education, and advocated adult education
as a critical instrument of social change. Mezirow's concept of perspective
transformation (1994) is also useful because it applies not only to the Black
Mississippians whose perspectives changed but also to the mostly White,
well-heeled, and well-educated volunteers whom SNCC recruited. The
disturbing reality of Mississippi's caste system suddenly confounded the
comfortable reality of the volunteers' college and home existence, and
especially their comparatively naive view of American democracy, causing
what Mezirow calls a disorienting dilemma. The resolution of this dilemma
can only occur if the new reality is acknowledged and accepted and the old
one modified or dispelled, resulting in a perspective transformation that
changes and reformulates one's understanding. A recurrent theme in the
observations of the White volunteers was what they had learned, how they
had changed.
Lindeman and Mezirow—and most notably Freire—all recognized a
political role for adult education, and all would have seen some of their ideas
reflected in the plans and events of Freedom Summer. But Freire made the
connection between the problems of Mississippi and Brazil himself. Attending a conference in the United States in the early 1970s, Freire specifically
wanted to see some of the Mississippi Delta. He and tour guide Rims Barber
(1995) left Jackson's airport by car for Greenville, experiencing the Delta's
flatness and expanse of cotton fields. Freire remarked to Barber that the
contrasting lavish plantations and grinding poverty of the Delta reminded
him of northeast Brazil and its estates. One might speculate that he found
critical consciousness still to be a distant goal.
Legacy
Based on a tip, on Tuesday, August 5, 1964, the FBI found the bodies of
James Earl Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman buried in an
earthen dam on private property a few miles from where they had disappeared. Eventually, 18 men, including Sheriff Rainey and Deputy Sheriff
Price, would be convicted in federal court of conspiracy to deprive the three
victims of their civil rights under the due process clause of the Fourteenth
Amendment ("Autopsy Shows," 1964; United States v. Price et al., 1965). In
the curious way that our deepest prejudices blind us to the obvious, one
farmer explained that "it was those integration groups that got rid of them.
They couldn't let them live after they disappeared for fear everyone would
find out it was a hoax" ("FBI Agent Thinks of Killers," 1964). Rather than spin
the hoax theory to this next level of absurdity, many other erstwhile hoax
theorists simply remained silent. The shocking announcement of the discov189
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ery of the bodies and the end to the mysterious disappearance, however,
was not the announcement that Percy Greene, editor of Jackson's Black
weekly newspaper, the Jackson Advocate, was interested in. Greene's paper
had virtually ignored the disappearance all summer, and he was far more
interested in "welcomting] the announcement" that most of the summer
workers would leave August 24. The workers had accomplished nothing, he
claimed, except "arousing the bitter memories of the carpetbaggers . . . and
leading the Negroes of the state down the road into another post-civil wartype tragic era. It is going to require tremendous effort to overcome the harm
they have done" ("Summer Project Workers to Leave," 1964).
By contrast, Greenville's Delta Democrat Times editor, Hodding Carter,
praised his city for its absence of violence and found progress in the
summer. Not only were more Blacks involved in voter registration, but also
"some changes of attitude were effected in at least part of the Negro
community which will not be altered now that the volunteer contingent is
gone" ("Long Cool Summer," 1964). For Greene, the burden of guilt was on
COFO for having challenged the caste system, inviting the wrath of politicians and Klansmen; for Carter, the burden rested on the politicians and
Klansmen themselves, alternately pining and bellowing about "our way of
life." However differently the two editors assigned blame, their concerns
over continuing harassment and violence proved correct; 50 incidents were
reported in a "Running Summary" (1964) between October 8 and November
2, when COFO was conducting another fall Freedom vote campaign.
Numerically, Freedom Summer's immediate results were modest, lending plausibility to Greene's assertion of "a very low estimate of the accomplishments of the Summer Project" ("Summer Project Workers to Leave,"
1964). McAdam's research yielded 1,600 African Americans who successfully
registered; perhaps more importantly, 17,000 had attempted to do so. He
concluded that over 3,000 students of varying ages participated in the
educational programs offered by 23 community centers (envisioned as
permanent fixtures in the community) and over 30 Freedom Schools in as
many towns. A SNCC follow-up report in 1965 yielded somewhat different
numbers: 47 Freedom Schools, with an average daily attendance of 2,500,
and 13 community centers ("Mississippi Summer Project One Year Later,"
c. 1965). The discrepancy in the number of community centers may be
attributable to overlapping functions of the different facilities—the Freedom
Schools, the local headquarters or freedom house, and the community
centers themselves. In any case, Freedom Summer's ultimate numbers are
elusive; even the estimate of volunteers who were accepted and came to the
state ranges from 700 (Dittmer, 1994) to 900 (McAdam, 1988), the latter
figure including doctors, lawyers, singers, and actors.
But the legacy of Freedom Summer does not reside in its statistics, as
Carter intuited. Despite the classes in reading, health, nutrition, sewing,
Black history, and civics, affective ends predominated over cognitive ones.
Hodding Carter's "changes of attitude . . . which will not be altered now that
the volunteer contingent is gone" ("Long Cool Summer," 1964) are more
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revealing of the summer's effects than the sometimes sparse numbers
attending those classes. Locals who had feared to have their names listed in
the newspaper for attempting to register to vote came to see the list as an
honor roll. How many lesser known Fannie Lou Hamers, Hartman Turnbows,
and Joyce Ladners the summer produced is impossible to say, but thousands
"got the light of freedom" and made quiet but bold claims for full citizenship.
Charlie Cobb (1996) concluded that for those who were involved the
Summer Project "expanded, extended, and changed their lives." Many
unlettered, rural, Black Mississippians saw out-of-state Whites face-to-face
for the first time; Black children would curiously feel volunteers' hair or rub
their skin, fascinated with their Whiteness. Most of COFO's clientele were
rural poor, but slowly some locals learned to drop the Sir, the Mister, and
the Miss and to keep their seats when talking to the volunteers, who were
disconcerted by such habits of deference.
The volunteers experienced their own transformations: the cultural
exchange of living with Black families, confronting their own fears, organizing and working closely with others (not always so successfully), and finding
satisfaction (along with oppressive heat, humidity, cockroaches, and mosquitoes) in their daily work. Jan Handke's (1996) view that she "learned far
more that summer than anyone locally did" captures a widely felt view of
the volunteers. Setting a personal course for experiential learning rather than
formal academic instruction, another volunteer informed her unhappy
parents that "a year now at Swarthmore will make me hate education" and
that she needed "a year of directed learning" in Mississippi (Sutherland,
1965, p. 227). Many others agreed; Moses announced on August 19, 1964,
that 200 volunteers and 100 COFO staff would stay on into the fall ("COFO
Will Remain," 1964). Attitudes in parts of Mississippi's White community
inched toward change as well, epitomized by the conservative Hattiesburg
American's midsummer mea culpa: "It is time that Christians took sides for
justice and the elimination of discriminatory laws and customs. Our silence
does not become us as Christians, nor does it commend the faith we claim"
("On Taking Sides," 1964).
If the first two dimensions of Freedom Summer's legacy are the
numerical results and the intrapersonal transformations, the third dimension
is the political effect—and active learning is the lifeblood of all three.
Lawrence Guyot (1996), who learned as early as 1962 "that damn near
everything we are doing is educational," views Freedom Summer as "the
most exciting, creative, issue-oriented, self-propelling political activity in the
history of this section of America." Guyot ticks off the political accomplishments of the Project: the end of all-White, all-male, Mississippi delegations
to Democratic Party conventions; the passage of the Voting Rights Act of
1965; the recognition of illiterates' right to vote; and the simmering questions
from a few quarters about women's roles in political movements. Charlie
Cobb (1996), preferring to think of Mississippi in the personal terms of the
people and communities he knew, lacks a "grand political vision" of the state
but, even so, concludes that "after '64, Mississippi became part of America."
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The "closed society" that Ole Miss professor James Silver boldly dissected in
1964 began to open. That his book, Mississippi: The Closed Society, was
published the day after the disappearance which riveted the nation is an
ironic convergence of a narrative critique of the closed society and the
historical event which, more than any other, precipitated its opening. In the
wake of the murders, the book soon made Time magazine's and the New
York Times' best-seller lists and prompted state investigations into the career
of its author (Silver, 1984).
Against the gains of Freedom Summer must be measured the potentially
retardant effect of 700 out-of-state, mostly White, college students on the
goal of nurturing local Black leadership, one of the sticking points of the
November 1963 debates about the project. Watkins (1996) and Cobb (1996),
experienced and toughened veterans at the ages of 23 and 21 by the end
of summer, still felt over 30 years later that their view in those fall 1963 and
early 1964 debates had been right: The project had positive outcomes, but
it undermined the development of local leadership that was at the heart of
SNCC's philosophy. At least two White volunteers, Larry Rubin (1995) and
Barry Clemson (1995), acknowledged that that was exactly what happened.
To Rubin, "Our presence was hurting organizing because we were hurting
the building of that very self-esteem and self-empowerment that we needed
to organize. That is, being White in a Black situation." Looking back, a
reflective Clemson regretted that he "just sort of stepped, moved in and took
over" from a Mississippian who was a project director in Biloxi. "I seriously
undercut [him] and certainly kept him from developing the sort of leadership
skills he should have been developing. So my role was probably counterproductive; it was useful in the short term, [but] in the long term. . . ."
The disappearance of the three CORE workers, the scale of the "invasion," and the race of the majority of the "invaders" combined to galvanize
national attention—with the result that Freedom Summer tends to eclipse the
rest of the Mississippi movement in the national consciousness. But for
COFO staff like Watkins, Guyot, Cobb, Dennis, and Moses, and Freedom
Democratic Party candidates like Victoria Gray, Aaron Henry, and Fannie
Lou Hamer, the 9 weeks of Freedom Summer fit into the longer continuum
of the movement and must not be mistaken for the movement itself.
Overemphasizing the Summer Project at the expense of the longer Mississippi movement raises Payne's (1995) brutal question: Does history only
happen when White folks come? Or, less accusingly, is the movement in
Mississippi, both preceding and following Freedom Summer, an example of
Boorstin's (1987) "hidden history"? If so, scholars of the larger movement like
Payne (1995) and Dittmer (1994) have made it less hidden. For both the new
veterans, the ones active after 1961 (all of SNCC and CORE), and the old
veterans, organizing in the 1950s and earlier, the summer continued the
work on a grander, if Whiter, scale. Other than the increased logistical and
administrative challenges facing COFO staff due to the scale of the Project,
the biggest difference of the summer for the veterans was the Freedom
Democratic Party and the attempt, ultimately unsuccessful, to challenge the
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all-White Mississippi delegation to the Democratic Party Convention in
Atlantic City, New Jersey, in August. Yet if Atlantic City was a civil rights (and
Freedom Summer) defeat, it was also the last hurrah for White-only delegations to Democratic conventions.
Another part of Freedom Summer's legacy is that it exemplifies the role
that adult education performs in social movements. At one level, adult
education is an undercurrent of the larger sociopolitical enterprise, a kind
of latent, informal education often recognized, if at all, after the fact, as in
the "informal teaching" ("Handbook for Political Programs," c. 1964) of the
voter registration work. Integral to the social or political goals, the informal
adult education plays an underlying but critical role in the achievement of
those goals and is characterized by informality, conversation, example, and
flexibility resulting from the absence of prescription. In Freedom Summer,
adult education also functioned at the more visible and more formal level,
through planning and structure, with classes and group learning again aimed
at achieving movement goals. This formal adult education, as opposed to the
informal, emerged from the familiar infrastructure of curriculum and prior
design. As with other movements, the curriculum of both the informal and
formal educations of Freedom Summer also contained, however, a de facto
countercurriculum, a liberating or critical education to challenge the domesticating or banking education. Its purpose was to subvert the prevailing
complacency and belief structure—in this case, the belief that African
Americans did not belong in the political process. Even the skill-based,
instrumental learning—the health education, the sewing classes—defied the
caste-bound curriculum, attempting to tilt the balance of power more toward
the learner. In the Summer Project, adult education took direct aim at the
curiosity-deadening, soul-numbing, intellectually vacuous pedagogy for the
status quo that passed for Black education in Mississippi.
The full extent of Freedom Summer's successes and failures has yet to
be played out. Each generation benefits from struggles fought by its
predecessors, even if it is ignorant of them or fails to acknowledge them. If
a piece of the legacy of Freedom Summer is the present simplicity and
uncontested freedom of registering and voting, that achievement must be
weighed against the fact that too many have not availed themselves of the
very opportunity their parents and grandparents exhibited such courage to
secure. If another piece of the legacy is the largest number of elected Black
officeholders of any state, it is equally true that too few African-American
Mississippi college students know (as a rigorously unscientific survey
suggests) of Freedom Summer or of Victoria Gray, Aaron Henry, and Fannie
Lou Hamer, who broke the ground. Schooled in a kind of obeisance to the
charismatic Martin Luther King (known whimsically to SNCC as "de Lawd"),
students Black and White risk repeating and updating what might be called
the "peanut fallacy"—the view of a few decades ago that the only contribution of African Americans to American history was George Washington
Carver and his peanuts. Freedom Summer proved that movements, implying
collective action, may be led but are not made by a single, lone individual,
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however long that individual's shadow. Rather, they are made of collections
of individuals, including the now-forgotten names of, for example, those
who walked to the courthouse. The legacy of what the Summer Project
actually accomplished is secure. Whether the men and women who made
Freedom Summer will be remembered by those who take its fruits for
granted is less certain.
Notes
This project was supported by a grant from the University of Southern Mississippi.
Note on References
Dates are preceded by c. (circa) when no date is given by the source, but there is
internal evidence for the author's conclusion. Due to archival materials' being contained
in boxes and files and rarely paginated, in-text pagination is not provided for quotations
from these materials. Nor is it provided for the Dent interviews, which are in tape format
only, or for the author's interviews, the final transcriptions of the tapes not yet being
complete. Pagination is also omitted from in-text citations when the source is a single
page, such as in newspapers, and is given in the references. References to the following
collections are all indicated by document author (or title where author is not indicated),
date (known, approximated, or n.d.), and title (or document type, e.g., letter or interview),
followed by abbreviated collection name, box number, and file folder number: The
Congress of Racial Equality Papers (CORE), the Southern Christian Leadership Conference
Papers (SCLC; both CORE and SCLC papers are at the Martin Luther King Library and
Archives of the Martin Luther King Center in Atlanta), the Paul B. Johnson Papers at the
McCain Library of the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg, and the Allard K.
Lowenstein Papers in the Southern Historical Collection at the Wilson Library of the
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The Student Non-violent Coordinating
Committee Papers (SNCC) are also housed at the Martin Luther King Library and Archives
and are also available on microfilm, which the author used. References to the SNCC
papers are cited thus: document author, date, title (where each is indicated), followed by
SNCC Papers, reel number, and inclusive frame numbers. All interviews are referenced
by the subject's name, date of interview, interviewer name, collection name, and location
of collection. In addition to his own interviews, the author utilized interviews from the
Tom Dent collection at the Amistad Research Center at Tulane University in New Orleans,
the Center for Oral History and Cultural Heritage at the University of Southern Mississippi
in Hattiesburg, the Anne Romaine Collection at the Mississippi Department of Archives
and History in Jackson, and the Southern Historical Collection at the Wilson Library of the
University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. All newspaper citations are to Mississippi
newspapers.
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Rachal
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Manuscript received July 10, 1997
Revision received October 30, 1997
Accepted December 8, 1997
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