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Toward the end of the summer of 1964, civil rights workers from all over Mississippi traveled to Neshoba County to attend a memorial service for James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman. These three civil rights activists, who had been working in the Magnolia State as part of the “Freedom Summer” project, had been abducted and brutally murdered on June 21 after traveling to Longdale, near Philadelphia, to investigate a Ku Klux Klan church-burning. Standing in the quiet sunny glen, amid the blackened rubble of the Mount Zion Baptist Church that had also functioned as a Freedom School, Bob Moses addressed the mourners. Radical historian and activist Howard Zinn recalled that the SNCC leader spoke “with a bitterness we were not accustomed to seeing in him.”1 Moses condemned the federal government for showing great willingness to send troops thousands of miles to Vietnam to defend “freedom ” while consistently refusing to provide civil rights workers protection from white violence.2 Referring to the headline of the morning newspaper, which read “President Johnson Says ‘Shoot to Kill’ in Gulf of Tonkin,” Moses said, “that is what we’re trying to do away with—the idea that whoever disagrees with us must be killed.”3 During the early 1960s, as civil rights workers strove to mobilize African Americans at the grass-roots level, they became radicalized by their experiences. This, in turn, helped shape their response to the war in Vietnam. Between June and August 1964, the SNCC-dominated Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) launched a major civil rights organizing drive in Mississippi. Known as “Freedom Summer,” it brought hundreds of white, middle-class northern college students to the Magnolia State to work with veteran black civil rights activists, in a bold and creative attempt to focus national attention on the problems facing Mississippi blacks and compel the federal government to intervene. The project’s Chapter 1 The Organizing Tradition Our criticism of Vietnam policy does not come from what we know of Vietnam, but from what we know of America. —Bob Moses, 1965 major strategies were voter registration drives (in Mississippi only 6.4 percent of eligible blacks were registered to vote); the promotion of black dignity and self-respect through the use of Freedom Schools that also taught African Americans vital skills; and the organization of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP). In organizing the MFDP, black activists were responding to the fact that the regular state party practiced systematic discrimination in order to exclude blacks from the political process. The civil rights movement hoped that the MFDP would undermine the state’s lily-white Democrats and help reshape the national party into a more effective force for social change. This would be achieved by pressing for MFDP delegates to be recognized as the ofWcial state delegation at the 1964 Democratic Convention, in Atlantic City.4 The level of violence encountered by Freedom Summer volunteers and those they worked with in Mississippi was horrifying. Four people were killed, 80 were beaten, 1,000 were arrested, and over 60 churches, homes, and businesses were burned or bombed.5 Civil rights workers constantly asked the federal government to provide them with protection and were consistently told that it did not have the power to do so. Indeed, the failure of the government to protect activists was an open sore in the movement. As civil rights workers in the early 1960s quickly discovered, the federal government was extremely reluctant to intervene to protect them even when local law enforcement was clearly inadequate . When SNCC activists intensiWed their voter registration efforts in Mississippi in 1962, for example, they believed that the Justice Department had promised protection—but none was forthcoming. This fact contributed signiWcantly to SNCC’s growing disenchantment with the federal government even before Freedom Summer. In his speech at the 1963 March on Washington, for example, SNCC chairman John Lewis addressed the lack of federal protection for civil rights workers when he asked, “what did the federal government do when Albany’s deputy sheriff beat attorney C. B. King and left him half-dead? What did the federal government do when local police ofWcials kicked and assaulted the pregnant wife of Slater King, and she lost her baby?”6 The answer to those questions was, at best, “very little.” The government took the position that law enforcement was the responsibility of the states and that the constitutional “balance of powers” prevented it from taking decisive action where local law enforcement was...

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