I. The history of the South has been fundamentally different from the history of the North. The North historically has been overwhelmingly white. Until 1900, three-fourths (about 75%) of all Afro-Americans lived in the South. In 1916 the First Great Migration began, and in the span of only 2 years 450,000 Afro-Americans moved to the North. But in the South the black population was huge. In 1708 the black population in South Carolina was equal to the white population, and surpassed it. White people in SC were, for almost 300 years, an armed minority living in the midst of a sea of black people. Today, after decades of outmigration, Afro-Americans comprise about one-third of the population of SC. By 1860, in Mississippi, the majority of the population was black. In Louisiana, it was 50-50. In Alabama it was also almost equal. Across the South there was a swath of counties called the Black Belt. The consequence of slavery was to leave many counties that were 50% or more black in the Deep South. An excellent example of this pattern, post Civil war, was Lowndes County, Alabama. It was 80% black and 20% white. But the 20% that was white owned all of the land. The numerical majority consisted of black serfs called sharecroppers. Sharecropping persisted in the Miss. delta and Alabama even down into the 1960s!  Whites in the Black Belt rejected democracy and majority rule. Their religion was white supremacy. They believed that America was a "white man's country," and white people had a God-given right to rule over nonwhite people--even when they were in the minority in a county, municipality or state. One white man has the right to rule over 99 nonwhites. In the Black Belt, voting rights were an even more explosive threat than efforts to end segregation. If democracy means that the majority rules, then in these Black Belt counties blacks would rule, and whites would be subordinated to the black majority. This of course was a fate worse than death. It was "okay" for white people to control and rule over black people. But God forbid that white people should have to be subject to the control and power of black people. God forbid that whites should have to SHARE POWER with blacks. Thus, in the Black Belt, blacks could NOT be allowed to vote because if they did they would have the political power and might elect black people as mayors, city councilpersons, sheriffs, deputies, judges,  and tax assessors. They might even elect black people to sit on school boards, and white people who were accused of crimes would have to be judged by juries that included black people. It was okay for white juries to judge black people. But God forbid that blacks should participate on  a jury that sat in judgment of, and decided the guilt or innocence of, a white man. God forbid that a white man should be subject to the authority of a black sheriff or police officer, in the same way that blacks for 400 years have been subject to the authority of whites. Voting in the Black Belt would destroy the white monopoly on political power. And so the white minority in the Black Belt resisted efforts by blacks to vote, to the point of murder.

The white North, historically, could afford the luxury of being liberal when it came to allowing Afro-Americans to vote. In most of the North, except for a few cities, the number of Afro-Americans was small. It would not make any difference to power relations if blacks voted.

It was also the case that the North had been inundated with immigrants. White Protestant British Americans had been forced to learn to tolerate ethnic diversity and how to get along with the Irish (Catholics), Germans, Swedes, Norwegians, Italians, Poles, Russians, Jews, etc. The South had received relatively few "immigrants." It remained overwhelmingly British American. Southerners never really learned how to accept diversity, because they had so little of it.

VOTER REGISTRATION EFFORTS

SNCC had begun to try to organize voter registration in Mississippi back in 1961. This grew out of the same time period as the Freedom Rides, in 1961. Septima Clark trained activists in how to organize voter education classes. Robert Moses began voter registration classes in McComb, in Amite County in Mississippi in 1961. The people who came to his classes were threatened and intimidated and beaten. Moses himself was beaten, many times. Herbert Lee, a native of Miss., drove Robert Moses around. As retaliation, State Rep. E.H. Hurst shot and killed Lee in Sept. 1961. Hurst alleged that Lee had tried to attack him with a tire iron (Parting The Waters, p. 509), and that Hurst had hit Lee in the head with his gun and it accidentally discharged. The coroner's jury ruled the death "justifiable homicide." Only registered voters could serve on juries, and so since the 1890s any jury in the South was almost by definition an all-white jury. Therefore whites could literally murder blacks with impunity, with the certainty that they would not be convicted or held accountable. This invites abuse of power.

At the funeral of Herbert Lee, father of nine, his wife was utterly inconsolable. She screamed at Bob Moses, and shouted "You killed my husband, you killed my husband." Her point was that had it not been for her husband driving Bob Moses around, he would still have been alive. He was killed by the white supremacists BECAUSE he was cooperating with Moses in trying to get Afro-Americans in Miss. to register to vote. And white supremacists felt THREATENED by this. Moses could not say that the death of Herbert Lee was a necessary sacrifice for the cause of achieving voting rights for Afro-Americans in Miss. He realized that in fact he was partly to blame for Lee's death. For a black Mississippian to be seen collaborating with Moses was to become a "marked man," and to invite assassination.

REIGN OF TERROR

The reign of terror against civil rights activists continued. During 1961 300 Freedom Riders were imprisoned. In June 1963 Annell Ponder and Fannie Lou Hamer were brutally beaten by police officers. Ponder went into the "white" waiting room at a bus station in Winona. She and Hamer were severely beaten in prison (Pillar of Fire, 109, Parting the Waters, p. 819).

Also in the summer of 1963 Lawrence Guyot, Hollis Watkins and Willie Carnell were arrested and imprisoned for their involvement in voter registration efforts in Greenwood, Miss. (see movie, Freedom Song).The guards tortured civil rights activists. Not only were activists attacked with cattle prods and beaten, but they were degraded in an effort to break their spirits. As Taylor Branch describes, prisoners would be shackled in handcuffs, and lifted up onto a horizontal bar and left to dangle, with their feet not touching the floor. They were left like this for 30 hours (Pillar of Fire, p. 117). Under these conditions it was impossible for anyone to "hold their bladder" or control their bowels, and eventually their "wastes fell down their prison-issue trouser legs." Later, activists such as Stokely Carmichael and Marion Barry endured similar mistreatment.

MLK was a celebrity. The media followed him wherever he went. If he was in prison it was big news, and the authorities kept him in solitary confinement. Unknown native black Mississippians and Georgians were shoved into cells, with 60 people in a cell designed to hold ten, with toilets that did not work, in the stifling heat of summer. No one knew of their torture and inhuman treatment. The Kennedy and Johnson administrations did little to intervene on their behalf.

The brutality and mistreatment that the SNCC workers suffered at the hands of sadists and sociopaths in the South made them angry and bitter. It tested and eventually destroyed their faith in nonviolence. And when the terrorists resorted to murder, again and again, and got away with it, SNCC was pushed beyond its breaking point. What infuriated SNCC was not only the terrrorism of the South, but the indifference of the Federal Government and the North. By June 1966, after James Meredith was shot (but fortunately not killed), SNCC would officially reject nonviolence.

SEEKING HELP FROM WHITE ALLIES: WHITE ALLIES AS HUMAN SHIELDS OR EVEN SACRIFICIAL LAMBS?

The murder of Herbert Lee deeply moved Robert Moses. He came to suspect that Mississippi could only be changed if the North paid more attention and put pressure on the Federal Government to use its power to FORCE Miss. to change and allow black people to vote.

Robert Moses and some others in SNCC came to the conclusion that white America, which was at that time more than  80% of the population, seems to value a white life more than  a black life. America responds to the affluent middle class in ways that it does not respond to poor people. Moses thought that if SNCC and CORE  could get 1,000 college students (black and white) from the North to come to Mississippi to help to try to register Afro-Americans to vote,  this would force the nation to pay attention to the conditions of oppression and terrorism that Afro-Americans faced in Mississippi. The hope was that Southern white Klans-folk would think twice about harming white Northerners, but  if anything happened to the students (from middle-class backgrounds), especially white students, and if the white supremacists did harm them, then this would dramatize the plight of Afro-Americans and draw national attention and indignation and ACTION.

The movement felt ambivalent about this, though. Even though the students were aware of the potential dangers and made a voluntary choice to accept the risks and the dangers, in a way the students were like "human shields" (Klanfolk will not attack Afro-Americans trying to register to vote if white Northerners are there with them) or sacrificial lambs. It was almost as if the Northern students, especially the white ones, were "bait" (Pillar of Fire, p. 275). Activists such as Bob Moses agonized over the sense of "leading lambs to the slaughter" (Pillar of Fire, p. 331).

But what irritated some of the Afro-Americans was the thought that it should not be necessary for Afro-Americans to have to hide behind white shields. And is it manly to have to depend on white protectors and benefactors and "saviors?" How does one feel like an equal when one is dependent on the protection, "help" and generosity  of patrons? And how do others RESPECT YOU AS AN EQUAL when they know that you are dependent on them and they are protecting you? Ultimately, Afro-Americans did not want white liberals to "help" them forever. Afro-Americans wanted to develop t the point where they would be in  a position to help themselves, and do for themselves, and take care of themselves, without needing anyone's help. Ultimately, "help" breeds dependency. The challenge is to overcome dependency.

The Freedom Summer project of 1964 was to utilize the voluntary assistance of Northern students to help Afro-Americans in Mississippi to register to vote.

VIOLENT BACKLASH IN SOUTH (first four papragraphs repeat CR Act)

James Chaney was a native Afro-American Mississippian (21). Michael Schwerner (24) and Andrew Goodman (20) were Northern, white, Jews from New York. They were civil rights workers taking part in the Freedom Summer, in 1964, organized by SNCC and CORE and a federation of civil rights organizations. The objective was to pursue voter registration. A church had been burned, and they stopped to visit the site on June 21st. Goodman and Schwerner were members of CORE. The three men were in a blue Ford station wagon, and were arrested by deputy Cecil Price on charges of speeding. They were "released" at about 10 pm that evening, and "disappeared."

The passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by the Senate on June 19, 1964 had enraged Mississippians like Cecil Price, who was involved in the murder of  Schwerner, Goodman and Chaney on the night of June 21, 1964.

However, it is important to repeat  that the murder of Schwerner and Goodman did not CAUSE the civil rights bill to pass. It had ALREADY passed the Senate on June 19, and merely needed to be reconciled with the House version, which was a minor, technical process. The murder of the night of June 21-22 was an act of retaliation or revenge, lashing out in anger against the passage of the bill. And the murders were yet another act of terrorism, designed to frighten and intimidate blacks and nonracist whites and deter nonracist whites from coming to Missisisippi. It was not "necessary" for white to be killed in order for the civil rights act to be passed. It is true, however, that the murder of a Northern white minister in Selma in 1965 was critical to the national uproar over the Voting Rights Act.
 

But part of the pattern of the Civil Rights movement is that every gain in the movement was followed by a backlash, by some type of violent retaliation designed to punish the movement for its success. Thus, the very same night June 11-June 12, 1963, that Kennedy went on television to announce he would ask the Congress for a civil rights bill, a white supremacist (Byron de la Beckwith)  killed Medgar Evers in Mississippi. Two weeks after the March on Washington, the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham was firebombed. And the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by the Senate on June 19, 1964 enraged Mississippians like Cecil Price, who was involved in the murder of  Schwerner, Goodman and Chaney the following night, June 20, 1964. Likewise, after the Selma campaign in 1965, Mrs, Viola Gregg-Liuzzo was murdered. Every success of the movement was followed by a violent backlash by white supremacists.

However, it is important to clarify that the murder of Schwerner and Goodman did not CAUSE the civil rights bill to pass. It had ALREADY passed the Senate on June 19, and merely needed to be reconciled with the House version, which was a minor, technical process. The murder of the night of June 21-22 was an act of retaliation or revenge, lashing out in anger against the passage of the bill. And the murders were yet another act of terrorism. It was designed to frighten and intimidate AAs and nonracist Caucasians and to deter nonracist whites from coming to Missisisippi.

The disappearance captured the attention of the national media. President Johnson met with the parents of Schwerner and Goodman at the White House. The FBI investigated, and LBJ sent 200 sailors to search for them. Everyone knew that they were probably dead. Rita Schwerner, the wife of Mickey, lamented that if Chaney had disappeared alone, or if three Afro-Americans had disappeared, the country would not be in an uproar searching for them. Sources within the Klan (paid informants, who reportedly received $30,000) revealed the location of the bodies, buried beneath an earthen dam near Philadelphia, Miss.

The disappearance cast a pall over the entire Freedom Summer. Nevertheless 1000 brave, intrepid Northern students, some black, many white, came to Miss. in the full knowledge that they too might be killed, and they spent the summer trying to get native Mississippians to register to vote, and holding "Freedom Schools" that would offer alternative curricula and include black history. The Freedom School and teach-in model would be borrowed by the anti-war movement in 1965. In fact, two white veterans of the Mississippi Freedom Summer, Mario Savio and Jack Weinberg of CORE, went back to Berkeley and in the spring of 1965 helped to launch the antiwar movement. And William Gamson of CORE led the first "teach-in" against the Vietnam War in March 1965. In this way the civil rights movement cross-fertilized the infant anti-war movement (opposition to war in Vietnam).

One of the activities that grew out of the Freedom Schools was the Child Development Group of Mississippi (CDGM). It was the origin of Head Start, and was later embraced by the Office of Economic Opportunity.

On August 18, 1964 the three bodies were found. All three had been shot. Chaney's skull was fractured, possibly from a severe beating. By December the FBI had identified 21 Mississippians involved in the murder. It turned out that deputy Cecil Price was a Klansman. The state of Mississippi dropped the charges against them, but six of the men were tried on charges of violating the civil rights of the three victims, and sent to jail.

And on p. 176 (The Struggle for Black Equality) Harvard Sitkoff reports "That summer, in Mississippi, white terrorists bombed 30 homes, burned 35 churches and shot 30 civil rights workers."

And the murder of Schwerner and Goodman truly shocked and angered the white North, and even moderate white Southerners. As I have said before, it was like re-opening the scars from the Civil War all over again.

The murders illustrated that there was a violent terrorist element in the South that was prepared to murder people, whether black or white, to "defend" white supremacy. This was why King and the movement insisted upon nonviolence. The Klan element thought nothing of killing a black person. That element wanted an excuse to kill black people. As Larry Guyot said (Pillar of Fire, p. 331), "They'll shoot us faster [sooner] if we're armed." If the civil rights activists had openly carried weapons and engaged in armed resistance, this would only have fed and provoked the genocidal instincts of the terrorist-Klan element. The tactics advocated by Malcolm X would have led to mass murder in the South.

FANATICAL RESISTANCE

It is also important to note that even the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 did not eradicate the terrorist element or purge the hate in their hearts, or end all resistance to de-segregation. In Greenwood, MississippI, the authorities closed the swimming pools rather than integrate them (Pillar of Fire, p. 389). In some instances angry white Southerners literally pulled up the cement truck and filled in the pools with cement rather than desegregate them. In Hattiesburg, when the Afro-American children went to the local library to try to get a library card so that they could borow books, the mayor ordered the library closed for emergency inventory (Pillar of Fire, p. 449).

DOUBLE STANDARD

But the deaths of the civil rights workers also pushed the biracial civil rights movement toward a breaking point (which would come in 1966). Bob Moses, among others, saw that the white majority which holds the power in this country values a white life more than it values a black life. People respond differently when the person killed is "one of their own." White Americans responded differently when whites were killed than when blacks were killed, especially when it was Northern whites. Moses felt that if this was so, then maybe the movement had to use this as a tool. The white students from the north became almost like human shields. They entered into risks alongside blacks in Mississippi, and the leaders understood that if something happened to them it would bring attention in the way that the death of a black person would not. Rita Schwerner herself said that if Chancy had disappeared by himself, there would not have been 200 sailors looking for him. But this double standard sickened the young black students. Emotionally and psychologically they could not accept the brutal reality that their country did not care about them as much as it cared about whites. This brutal fact tore them up inside. In a sense, the white students were willing sacrificial lambs, or potential sacrifices. They were pawns, hostages, bait.

But the black students and Mississippi natives also resented the fact that the white students were just on summer vacation. The civil rights movement , for them, was a part-time activity. They would do their "good deed" over the summer, and then go back to college in the North. They would return to their comfortable lives of suburban safety and affluence and opportunity and good jobs and upward mobility. The blacks whom they were trying to help would still be in Mississippi, as poor as ever; as shut out of society as ever; as deprived of opportunity as ever. It was hard not to be jealous.

And the black college students from the North, such as Kwame Ture, would realize that they too were on the outside looking in at a society that did not really accept them as equal or recognize and value their humanity. They too were unwelcome strangers in the land of their birth, second class citizens in a country not quite their own. It was hard not to be bitter, and resentful. The passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 did nothing to change these hard realities in the South, and very little to change these realities in the ghettos of the North and the West.