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1 The Call to Action It was after 4:00 a.m. when we heard truck doors slam as booted feet quickly surrounded Antioch Baptist Church where our exhausted group of newly trained civil rights recruits was trying to get some sleep. “Get down and stay down till I say,” shouted our leader, Major Johns. Then there were shots— unmistakable shotgun shots. I moved closer to Bob, a fellow civil rights field worker I had met only ten hours earlier. “They won’t kill us tonight,” he whispered as I shivered in fear. “Not likely anyway. I’ve only been cattle prodded once and never been arrested yet. Welcome to Wilcox County, Ala­ bama, that’s all.” I held my breath and prayed. How could white men who called themselves Christians come onto this sacred ground with the intent to scare us away when we were only here to help ensure that all Ameri­ cans had the right to vote? How dare they? Well, I’ll show them, I thought to myself. I won’t be afraid. After a while they stopped shooting. My heart was racing as I heard the sound of heavy boots retreating to trucks that roared off down the dark tree-­ lined highway. It was the summer of 1965. I had joined hundreds of other college students in a voter education and registration drive aimed at supporting disenfranchised black people in segregated counties across the Deep South in their long struggle to register to vote. The Fifteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, ratified in 1870, gave all citizens the right to vote, regardless of race or creed. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 augmented this right by requiring equal application procedures for all voters. However, lawmakers and law enforcers in the South not only ignored these rights, they also fought them with every legal and illegal weapon in their vast racist arsenal. I had just turned nineteen and was full of optimism. We student civil rights volunteers believed we could make a difference, force the law to work for instead of against the people, and maybe change some minds, too. De- 8 / My Freedom Summer 1965 spite excellent briefings in Berkeley and orientation in Atlanta, I had only a vague idea of what awaited us until that first fearful night as I crouched on the hardwood floor of historic Antioch Baptist Church in Camden, Ala­ bama. San Francisco, California, and Selma, Ala­ bama In the spring semester of 1965, I was a freshman at San Francisco State College . On March 8, I saw Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on television for the first time. In my youthful imagination I believed he pointed his finger directly at me and said: “We need you to come down and join our nonviolent ­ struggle, become part of the movement and help our people fight for our rights.” In an era when there were only three channels, the images on the small black-­ and-­ white TV at my friend Jeff Freed’s parents’ house were grainy, but unforgettable. Jeff tried to explain the po­ liti­ cal situation, but I could only watch in horror as masses of white Ala­ bama state troopers and Selma policemen attacked unarmed peaceful protesters from the safety of their horses. They launched tear gas canisters from huge guns, and troopers beat hundreds of people, in­ clud­ ing young children as they scrambled for safety, just because they had tried to march to Montgomery for voting rights. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was not among the marchers on that Sunday, March 7, when the unprovoked attack took place, but he rapidly responded with a compelling national call to nonviolent arms. What I had witnessed became known as Bloody Sunday. The series of attempted marches and an ultimately successful march commonly referred to as the Selma to Montgomery March actually began a month earlier. In Marion, some thirty miles from Selma, Ala­ bama, a white state policeman shot and killed twenty-­ six-­ year-­ old Jimmy Lee Jackson who was trying to protect his mother and grandfather from being attacked by state police during a peaceful voting rights march. Jimmy Lee Jackson’s murder inspired the first attempted march from Selma to Montgomery. That Sunday, March 7, march was organized and led by Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) chairman John Lewis and South­ ern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) project director Hosea Williams and others. More than five hundred peaceful protesters assembled with plans to walk the fifty-­ four miles...

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