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Book Review: Freedom Summer
Oct. 24th, 2020 03:21 pmThis car, a new model Plymouth, had a sticker in the rear window: YOU ARE IN OCCUPIED MISSISSIPPI. PROCEED WITH CAUTION.
This bumper sticker might serve as a thesis statement for Sally Belfrage’s Freedom Summer, a memoir about her time with the Mississippi Summer Project. Belfrage worked in the section of the project focused on Black voter registration and general education, but the project is best remembered today for the Freedom Riders, who boarded interstate buses in integrated groups. Three of the Riders disappeared at the beginning of the summer; the agonizing wait for the discovery of the bodies (because everyone knows they must be dead) forms a thread of dread throughout the book.
Fear is very much at the center of the book. An exchange at the beginning of the book, when the volunteers are still at orientation in Ohio, sets the tone.
Belfrage expands on this later: “The emphasis of the orientation in Ohio had been to teach us to live with fear as a condition, like heat or night or blue eyes. You had to learn to arrange your fear as a parallel element in the day and night, to exist beside it and try to function without its interference.”
The question is not only how the volunteers will live and work in this constant atmosphere of fear, but how they can help change a society that is absolutely saturated with it. How to convince Black potential voters to try to register, even though this exposes them to the risk of violence and the near-certainty of workplace repercussions? (Belfrage mentions a number of registrants who were fired within the week.) But how, also, to convince white Mississippians to see past their own fear to the potential benefits of a less crushingly repressive society?
The office where Belfrage worked was besieged with crank callers, many of whom ranted about how the Freedom Project workers were harbingers of Communism intent on destroying Mississippi’s freedom. What’s striking is the extent to which Mississippi resembles the USSR, as recounted in Belfrage's earlier memoir A Room in Moscow: a respected newspaper editor who deviates from the ideological party line (in Mississippi, that party line was white supremacy rather than Communism, but the mechanism is similar) is driven from his job and his hometown for being insufficiently critical of attempts to integrate.
Anyone interested in reading James Silver’s Mississippi: The Closed Society (then a best-seller in the North) had to seek it out underground. (This was in fact done, I was told later by a native Mississippi woman who left the state years ago and had recently returned for a visit. Although she had never engaged in political or civil rights activity, her mail was opened for the first two weeks of her visit. A friend of hers confessed to receiving a subscription to the Saturday Review by way of New Orleans, where it was readdressed and forwarded in plain wrapper…)
They’re secretly acquiring forbidden literature from abroad! “Abroad” being, in this case, another state within what is technically the same country…
The sense is overpowering that white Misssissippians in the 1960s did see themselves as their own country, occupied by the foreign invaders from the United States, and operated on the principle that it is better to reign in hell than to serve in heaven.
***
One last quote, which didn’t really fit with my mini-essay, but is too good to lose:
“[Bayard Rustin] suggested that our difficulties in connecting with white Mississippi might not be insurmountable. “One can evaluate others in the light of one’s own experience, see them in one’s self, understand how one can become bestial.” He smiled and bummed a cigarette off a volunteer in the first row. “Last week I was smoking and wondering why a white Southerner can’t act on what he believes. Then I took another puff. I know cigarettes will give me lung cancer. Well, I can understand him. In this we are one. We are both intensely stupid.”
This bumper sticker might serve as a thesis statement for Sally Belfrage’s Freedom Summer, a memoir about her time with the Mississippi Summer Project. Belfrage worked in the section of the project focused on Black voter registration and general education, but the project is best remembered today for the Freedom Riders, who boarded interstate buses in integrated groups. Three of the Riders disappeared at the beginning of the summer; the agonizing wait for the discovery of the bodies (because everyone knows they must be dead) forms a thread of dread throughout the book.
Fear is very much at the center of the book. An exchange at the beginning of the book, when the volunteers are still at orientation in Ohio, sets the tone.
”You talk about fear - it’s like the heat down there, it’s continually oppressive. You think they’re rational. But, you know, you suddenly realize they want to kill you.”
Giggles (nervous).
“And the thing is, it’s not funny. That’s why I’m laughing.”
Belfrage expands on this later: “The emphasis of the orientation in Ohio had been to teach us to live with fear as a condition, like heat or night or blue eyes. You had to learn to arrange your fear as a parallel element in the day and night, to exist beside it and try to function without its interference.”
The question is not only how the volunteers will live and work in this constant atmosphere of fear, but how they can help change a society that is absolutely saturated with it. How to convince Black potential voters to try to register, even though this exposes them to the risk of violence and the near-certainty of workplace repercussions? (Belfrage mentions a number of registrants who were fired within the week.) But how, also, to convince white Mississippians to see past their own fear to the potential benefits of a less crushingly repressive society?
The office where Belfrage worked was besieged with crank callers, many of whom ranted about how the Freedom Project workers were harbingers of Communism intent on destroying Mississippi’s freedom. What’s striking is the extent to which Mississippi resembles the USSR, as recounted in Belfrage's earlier memoir A Room in Moscow: a respected newspaper editor who deviates from the ideological party line (in Mississippi, that party line was white supremacy rather than Communism, but the mechanism is similar) is driven from his job and his hometown for being insufficiently critical of attempts to integrate.
Anyone interested in reading James Silver’s Mississippi: The Closed Society (then a best-seller in the North) had to seek it out underground. (This was in fact done, I was told later by a native Mississippi woman who left the state years ago and had recently returned for a visit. Although she had never engaged in political or civil rights activity, her mail was opened for the first two weeks of her visit. A friend of hers confessed to receiving a subscription to the Saturday Review by way of New Orleans, where it was readdressed and forwarded in plain wrapper…)
They’re secretly acquiring forbidden literature from abroad! “Abroad” being, in this case, another state within what is technically the same country…
“Oh come on,” Ed Bauer complained. “It’s still - ”
“The United States of America,” someone finished. (Was it? A peculiar condition is induced by one’s first view of the Confederate flag flying.)
The sense is overpowering that white Misssissippians in the 1960s did see themselves as their own country, occupied by the foreign invaders from the United States, and operated on the principle that it is better to reign in hell than to serve in heaven.
***
One last quote, which didn’t really fit with my mini-essay, but is too good to lose:
“[Bayard Rustin] suggested that our difficulties in connecting with white Mississippi might not be insurmountable. “One can evaluate others in the light of one’s own experience, see them in one’s self, understand how one can become bestial.” He smiled and bummed a cigarette off a volunteer in the first row. “Last week I was smoking and wondering why a white Southerner can’t act on what he believes. Then I took another puff. I know cigarettes will give me lung cancer. Well, I can understand him. In this we are one. We are both intensely stupid.”
