Publisher recalls her days in Freedom Summer school in Mississippi in 1964

Anne-Gerard Flynn | By Anne-Gerard Flynn |
Email the author | Follow on Twitter
on February 08, 2008 at 6:51 AM, updated February 08, 2008 at 7:01 AM

Arelya J. Mitchell, who today is publisher and editor-in-chief of The Mid-South Tribune in Memphis, Tenn., and of the Black Information Highway (, attended a Freedom Summer school in Holly Springs, Miss.

One of her poems, written on the day President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, is published in "Letters from Mississippi: Reports from Civil Rights Volunteers & Poetry of the 1964 Freedom Summer" published by Zephyr Press (

What has become known as "Freedom Summer" refers to the effort by a coalition of organizations to help blacks register to vote in Mississippi in the face of what amounted to state sanctioned discrimination and harassment.

This coalition, which resulted in some 1,000 mostly white volunteers from northern colleges helping with the voter registration in Mississippi, included the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Congress of Racial Equality, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

Recently, Mitchell responded to the following questions from Anne-Gerard Flynn, Newspaper in Education editor for The Republican.

What was the atmosphere of the Freedom Summer classrooms?

These classrooms were stimulating. Most of those I participated in were outside (August heat!) on the college campus under some beautiful ancient trees that must have seen the Civil War or Ulysses Grant coming in to conquer the town).

There were also two white wood frame houses across the street from the campus (These houses were owned by the college and used by faculty members) and many of the classes took place there, as well.

What was life like back then in Holly Springs?

Life in my community was wonderful to me. Even though the depiction in the "The Great Debaters" movie was long before my time, it pretty much pictures what growing up in black academia in a historic small college town was like.

We were taught that 'education' was what everything was about. To knock what some might view as stereotypical in Mississippi, I neither grew up in poverty nor did many of those African American kids I hung about.

Most of them were children of what would be considered the "middle class" (or I should say the "middle class" was the upper class in a peculiar sense) in that microcosm.

Though, I am a baby boomer, I am part of that 'transitional' portion of it: You're old enough to remember some things but not everything, but by the time you got to wherever you were going, integration had come.

My father, the late Professor W. B. Mitchell, was head of the business department at Rust College (which was founded right after the Civil War).

He received his degrees from Lincoln University in Jefferson City, MO and the University of Kansas in Lawrence, Kan.

He taught economics and was indeed a genius in math. He could work calculus at the snap of a finger and spoke German and Italian fluently.

He worked in the Civil Rights Movement and helped to register African Americans to vote and was one of the founders of the North Mississippi Progressive Voters League.

He was one of those responsible for bringing in the first Head Start programs in the state. Many times we would have the Freedom Riders over to the house where they, my father with me among them, would sit on the living room floor to discuss the movement, argue automation, Communism, socialism, Vietnam, etc. It was stimulating.

As a kid, my father introduced me Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (If I knew then what I know now, wow!) while we were in Birmingham, Ala. (not too far from my second hometown).

Because my father was treasurer of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and participated in the movement, we had some noted civil rights activists here and there, such as Medgar Evers who would spend weekends (though I have no real memory of that), James Meredith (who was a cousin of one of the kids and one of my father's colleagues), Aaron Henry, president of Mississippi NAACP, etc.

Since my father was head of the business Department and extremely strict with education, African American businesses from around the country sought out his students. Again, I make reference to "The Great Debaters" as one could say my father was more like the Denzel Washington character.

Most African American teachers were at that time.

I went to private school most of my life.

What as it like having the Freedom Summer volunteers there?

The Freedom Riders came down I believe in the summer of 1964. Because some (perhaps most of them) stayed in college dorms on campus and because my father and others who sought to make change were involved in bringing them in, I got involved because he told go to the Freedom School.

There, I really became aware of the black and white world, and it was where I first heard the word 'inferior' and that blacks were supposed to be 'inferior to Whites."

That was surprising to me and stupid at most.

To reiterate, that was the first time I'd heard this superiority theory.

Like many African American children we were taught we could do anything we wanted once we got our education.

Unlike today perhaps, the value of education was a prized commodity among blacks of all walks of life.

Even those who did not formally have it had such a value for it that it bordered on obsession.

My father inspired me to write, as he wrote a lot himself, including poetry, a piece on why African American colleges and universities must exist and on how African Americans are denied economic access in our capitalistic society.

He also wrote articles in the St. Louis Argus, an African American newspaper founded in St. Louis, Mo. in 1913 by my great, great uncle.

Long story short -- I became a journalist later and among those I have interviewed are: President Bill Clinton, Sen. Hillary Clinton, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, Rev. Jesse Jackson and I was invited to the White House with 12 other African American journalists and editors to have lunch in the Roosevelt Room with the first President George Bush.

I have also covered national conventions of both political parties.

How did the Freedom School experience impact your life?

The Freedom Riders Summer made an impact on my being politicized (though I was taught from day one to look at politics). I was editor of the newsletter that we 'youngsters' put out that summer.

I had called the mayor a racist in an article.

He got a hold of the newsletter and called my neighbor, a venerable school teacher, to tell her to tell my parents that I had done this. She did, and I was called into the living room, whereupon I confessed that I had done it. That was the end of that, because my parents didn't bother to tell me to stop.

One of my father's college students later became the first African American mayor of the city.

The most haunting emotion of that summer was the murder of the three civil rights workers in Philadelphia, Miss.

I remember the talk, how the news broke, picking up a Newsweek magazine with the article, and how I was just devastated that such murders could happen.

That realization made me the editor I am today (as we had to break the color barrier of getting Memphis its first African American mayor--but that's another story).

Of course, as things began to escalate in the Civil Rights Movement, I saw via television the attacks on black Americans and on many of those who would be my big sisters or brothers.

I feel very privileged to have lived in a time where we were going from human and civil rights to "Star Trek."

I am so grateful to those who truly paved the way for the Freedom Schools and the Freedom Riders.

Indeed, I remember writing my second novel that summer entitled "Jargon Street" (wished I knew where it was, as it depicted much of that summer in fiction).

As members of the younger set coming out of our cocoons that Freedom Summer, we became more cognizant of what those who came before us had gone through, such as Emmett Till.

Just as Jewish children are made to learn about the Holocaust, African American children (and Americans period) should be made to learn about Black History.

If I were to drop dead right now, I can truly say that my experience that summer was enlightening, but I dare say I don't think it would have been that way had I not been taught that one's mind came first, because getting into the 'race' issue secondly made me less tolerable of white people who equated their brains with their skin color.

My philosophy today is that the movement should be about economic parity. We (The Mid-South Tribune) have led some strong editorial fights on this matter.

In 2001, we were among six honored by The National Order of Women Legislators at the National Press Club in Washington D.C.

Among the six were: Greta Van Susteren then with CNN), Dave Marash of ABC's Nightline, and Bill O'Reilly of Fox's "The O'Reilly Factor."

The Mid-South Tribune, a newspaper I founded, received the National Media Excellence Award.

We became the first African American-owned newspaper to have received such an honor.

Being publisher of a newspaper is not easy, but it is invigorating. I love it!