Witness to History - The Freedom Riders Remembered

The civil rights movement began to gain strength after WWII, when black servicemen came home to find that they didn’t have the freedoms they had been fighting for in other countries. A few key events included President Truman’s desegregation of the armed forces in 1948, Brown vs. Board of Education in 1954, Rosa Parks’ refusal to move to the back of the bus in 1957, and the “Freedom Riders” of 1961. (PBS airs a documentary tonight on the 50th anniversary of the Freedom Rides).

It could be argued that the main turning point, however, was Mississippi in 1964—something I witnessed during November/December as an assistant to the lawyer in Jackson who was coordinating civil rights legal activities in the state. (One of my more interesting occasional jobs was to call the local sheriff when one of our people was arrested—not that we could do anything, but just to let him know that someone on the outside was watching.)

After Dr. King’s ’”I Have a Dream” speech in 1963, the NAACP and three other civil rights groups decided to mount a joint effort in Mississippi—regarded as the strongest bastion of segregation. During “Freedom Summer” of 1964 over 1,000 young people from around the country came to Mississippi, mainly to get blacks registered to vote—something that only a few thousand had managed until then. In the very first week, however, three volunteers were abducted and murdered by Klansmen led by the sheriff of Philadelphia, MS. While the other volunteers were not deterred, their task proved almost impossible—local Blacks were intimidated from even attempting to register by threats of reprisals, and those who did try encountered an insurmountable obstacle—the “literacy test” which required the applicant to interpret a section of the state constitution “to the satisfaction" of the examiner.

But if the battle was lost, the war was won. The national outrage over the triple murder in Philadelphia helped LBJ win passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which banned discrimination on the basis of race, religion, or gender (the latter provision inserted by opponents who hoped the idea of equal rights for women would kill the whole bill), and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which finally got large numbers of Blacks past the registration barrier. These landmark laws became the foundation for decades of civil rights progress although they also—as LBJ predicted—helped turn the Democrats’ “Solid South” over to the Republicans.

My personal recollection is that Mississippi in 1964 was a strange place, likeable in many ways but utterly intolerant of the threat of change posed by the “outside agitators” or “miscegenationists” (as the local press always referred to us). I thought at the time that local whites were evil but most of them were just decent people who had been taught from birth that segregation was the natural order, and this view was backed by all the power centers of society—the police, of course, but also the schools, newspapers, civic organizations, and even the churches. (See “Mississippi: The Closed Society” by a very brave Ole Miss professor for a detailed analysis.)

Finally, it must be noted that the real heroes of 1964 were the local blacks who participated because they were at far greater risk than the outsiders, particularly after the murders. These attracted nationwide attention—and a swarm of FBI agents—only because two of the victims were northern whites, and even die-hard segregationists realized that killing such people was counter-productive. As for the murderers, they were identified by an FBI informant, and a number of them served prison time—for the federal crime of violating the civil rights of the victims.