The Admirable Radical: Staughton Lynd and Cold War Dissent, 1945-1970

3. It Is a Blessed Community: Civil Rights and Mississippi Freedom Summer

It Is a Blessed Community 49 Chapter Three ✴ ✴ ✴ It Is a Blessed Community Civil Rights and Mississippi Freedom Summer It has been a most moving time . . . On the trip up I spent about 1–3 am driving through the curvy Tennessee hills singing all the songs I could remember to keep awake. There was a feeling of relaxation in the car, heavily loaded with the freedom-school curricula and handling more like a truck than a car . . . Vincent [Harding] arrived Sunday . . . Gwen Robinson, Barbara Walker, Dan Wood (all coordinators) . . . are all here. Of the 21 coordinators, 9 are Negroes, of whom I recruited 5. These are wonderful people. Over and over again I have been reminded of Macedonia. —Staughton Lynd, letter to Alice, 24 June 1964 [I remember images of] SNCC workers standing on a porch in some Mississippi backwater trying to convince a family of sharecroppers to register to vote. A county jail bursting with children, their hands clasped together, singing freedom songs. Such images became a form of prayer for me, bolstering my spirits, channeling my emotions in a way that words never could. They told me . . . that I wasn’t alone in my particular struggles , and that communities had never been a given in this country . . . Communities had to be created, fought for, and tended like gardens. —President Barack Obama In Freedom Summer, published by Oxford University Press in 1988, Doug McAdam concludes that “[t]o an extraordinary extent, the Mississippi veterans still bear quiet allegiance to the politics that they espoused” during the 49 50 The Admirable Radical Freedom Summer campaign.1 It was “exciting and transformative,” SNCC2 activist Stokely Carmichael later reflected, “a unique moment in American history, and we were changed by it.” Jonathan Steele, a summer project volunteer , likewise reports that it “may have done more for the volunteers who took part in it than for the people they tried to help . . . A few became lifelong radicals . . . None remained untouched.” Freedom School teacher Sandra Adickes called it a “life-shaping event.”3 Perhaps one reason for Staughton Lynd’s not so quiet commitment to radical politics stems from his immersion in the Mississippi Freedom Schools. Lynd was accompanied by two Spelman faculty members in Mississippi, Howard Zinn and English professor Gloria Wade Bishop (later Wade-Gayles). According to scholar Harry Lafever, “at least” five Spelman students participated in the Freedom Summer campaign, including Gwen Robinson (now Zoharah Simmons), Ruby Doris Smith Robinson, Gloria Wise, Marian Wright, and an exchange student, Karen Haberman. They were all a bit anxious and uncertain. Gloria Bishop wrote a series of letters to colleagues and friends before leaving in case she never returned, and Lynd drafted a will.4 The civil rights spirit at Spelman naturally led Lynd and the others to Mississippi in 1964. One way to view how Freedom Summer altered Lynd is to recognize that it placed him within a uniquely North American liberation theology. Putting his body on the line required an ethical commitment that surely had a profound impact on Lynd. Although the cooperative community in Georgia in the mid-1950s may have formed the foundation for Lynd’s beliefs, his involvement in the civil rights movement arguably exerted a nearly equal spiritual influence. Indeed, it can be argued that Freedom Summer signifies the most potent political expression of Lynd’s liberation spirituality. Civil rights activist and historian Vincent Harding has counted Lynd among those dedicated activists—the “powerful witnesses”—who “lived through the repression .”5 Harding’s description of the movement captures its possible effect on someone like Lynd, who embraced local activism and communal bonds that were connected to a broader vision: The Black-led movement for the expansion of American democracy had become a powerful source of religious awakening, offering revival to all those people of faith who wanted to be revived. (At the same time it was also offering encouragement to millions overseas—from Nicaragua to Vietnam—who were deeply moved and encouraged by our struggle.) Those spiritually charged gatherings of nuns, rabbis, priests and Protestant lay and clerical forces, singing, shouting, “We Want It Is a Blessed Community 51 Freedom” . . . were unforgettable experiences . . . the movement that inspired such new life among the churches was recognized by many members as a blessing . . . some of the religiously based white participants in the freedom movement’s far-flung struggles actually went back to their local settings and began to...