Revisiting 'Freedom Summer'

Fifty years ago, civil rights activists began Freedom Summer. Or, I should say, some people who held themselves out as "civil rights activists" did so.

PJ Media's Ron Radosh recently referred to a PBS documentary on the event, which the public network described as the summer when "more than 700 student volunteers from around the country joined organizers and local African Americans in a historic effort to shatter the foundations of white supremacy in what was one of the nation’s most viciously racist, segregated states." More modestly stated, it was an effort to register black voters en masse.


A June 19 Politico Magazine remembrance by historian Josh Zeitz shed new light on its leaders' true intentions.

Zeitz apparently feels that he's now in the historical clear to acknowledge and even celebrate motivations which, if widely known at the time, would have outraged millions of Americans of good will who had been moved by the nonviolence of Martin Luther King Jr. and his followers to accept the need for landmark legislation — the Civil Rights Act of 1964 — to enforce the right to vote, and to formally outlaw segregation in schools, workplaces, and public accommodations based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. Though it wasn't formally passed by the House and signed by President Lyndon Baines Johnson until July 2, the legislation's passage had been certain since June 19 when it cleared the Senate.

Zeitz, an open Democrat, lays bare what he admiringly acknowledges "was in many ways a very cynical strategy."


The architects of Freedom Summer were shrewd, pragmatic veterans of a brutal street fight ... they wagered that if white students from prominent Northern families were arrested, beaten and illegally jailed—as they fully expected they would be—the federal government would finally recognize its responsibility to intervene in Mississippi.




Though Moses rejected the charge that ... (they) planned “to get some people killed so the federal government will move into Mississippi,” he also maintained that “no privileged group in history has ever given up anything without some kind of blood sacrifice.”

Zeitz's attempt to draw a parallel between Freedom Summer and the previous year's Birmingham Campaign led by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. falls flat. Of course, Birmingham organizer King knew that serious violence in what was then known as "Bombingham" was virtually guaranteed. But he didn't need to, and didn't, recruit naive white Northern guinea pigs who could not possibly have been prepared to fully protect themselves in an incredibly hostile environment to ramp up the national pressure which became the catalyst for achieving passage of the Civil Rights Act. It should also not be forgotten that Mississippi's culture of racial violence at the time was far worse than Alabama's, or that King was not involved with Freedom Summer.

Organizers got their "blood sacrifice" even before the white students from up north arrived, when on the night of June 21-22, 1964, James Earl Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael "Mickey" Schwerner were murdered. Two of the three were from the "privileged group" Moses and Freedom Summer organizers sought to endanger.

I'm not convinced that Freedom Summer needed to happen at all.