At Berkeley in the Sixties: The Making of an Activist

23 Freedom Summer

It’s those who come after—if they ride the winning horse of history— who are heralded as heroes. “Speech” in America is “free” only within limits; those who “speak” outside those limits inevitably pay for the privilege. But even knowing what I know today, I would still have done what I did. And I still think Socrates was right. Those who commit civil disobedience are deliberately breaking the law, good or bad, for a social good. However noble our motives, the state can and should judge us. And as long as we accept the legitimacy of the state—and I did—we must comply with that judgment, even when we think the punishment is unreasonable. I also think Socrates was guilty as charged. He did corrupt the youth. He certainly corrupted me. 23 Freedom Summer On the second of June, the sky fell. Alan Cranston lost the primary election for the Democratic Party nomination for U.S. Senate to Pierre Salinger.1 This not only poked a big hole in my political hopes but portended economic disaster for me. I no longer had a job, or much hope of getting another one. The few summer jobs around were already taken, and I knew I would have to go to court again sometime that summer, which made it hard to work regular hours. My lease ended June 15th. Berkeley partially depopulated during the summer, so it wasn’t feasible to keep the house and rent it out, even though rents went down between June 15th and September 15th. Toni and I moved down the block to 2006 Parker, where we rented the entire ¤rst ®oor for only $90 per month for the summer. The rent was cheap, but since neither of us had a job we weren’t sure how we were going to pay it after the ¤rst month. Freedom Summer l 117 My head was ¤lled with thoughts of Freedom Summer, the voter registration project in Mississippi which invited hundreds of northern students to break the back of white supremacy in the worst of the southern states. The Kennedy administration had been urging civil rights organizations to concentrate on voter registration of Negroes for some time. After Reconstruction ended, the southern states had slowly disenfranchised Negroes through intimidation and voter restrictions such as the white primary, voter registration, literacy requirements, and the poll tax. In 1960, only one-fourth of the eligible Negroes in the South were registered to vote, in Mississippi only 4 percent, and in some counties none at all. With ¤nancial assistance from private foundations, the civil rights organizations created a Voter Education Project in 1962 to register Negroes to vote in the southern states. Civil rights workers, whether outsiders or locals, met stiff resistance through harassment, arrests, and beatings . Particularly in Mississippi, the federal government seemed unable or unwilling to protect citizens trying to exercise the simple right to vote. In November 1963, the Voter Education Project withdrew its funding from the state because the results were so meager.2 The most active civil rights organization in Mississippi was SNCC. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee had formed in 1960 to coordinate sit-ins and other direct-action projects. Ella Baker, executive secretary of the SCLC, invited activist students from the Negro colleges to a spring conference at Shaw University, where she midwifed the birth of a new organization. For a while SNCC’s home was a desk in the SCLC of¤ce, but it wanted to be free of “adult” interference and soon moved out on its own.3 In 1961, SNCC staffer Robert Moses began a voter registration campaign in McComb, Mississippi. Registering to vote in Mississippi was no simple task. Each applicant had to appear before the county registrar , ¤ll out a long application, and interpret a section of the state constitution selected by the registrar, who then decided if the applicant was quali¤ed to vote. When Moses organized classes to teach Negroes to pass this exam, he and other SNCC workers were repeatedly beaten and jailed; one local farmer was murdered. In 1962, Moses joined with Aaron Henry of the NAACP and David Dennis of CORE to create COFO—the Council of Federated Organizations. COFO became the umbrella organization for the 1964 summer project, though it was mostly an SNCC endeavor .4 SNCC was unique among the major civil rights organizations. Created by students, it was run by its ¤eld staff, whose daring, dedication, 118 l At Berkeley in the...