Growing Up Civil Rights: Youth Voices from Mississippi’s Freedom Summer

Mississippi’s past was characterized by a color line that “was drawn in the attitudes and habits of its people, black and white,” and was such a part of the society that its “canon of racial exclusion or separation . . . was in substantial part informal” (McMillen 3, 9). Mississippi in the Jim Crow South entrenched a de facto system of segregation so intense that it did not necessitate the same degree of de jure segregation as other Southern states (McMillen 3, 9). Parents and adults in the African American community educated their youth and equipped them with the tools they needed to face a virulently racist Mississippi. The lessons young adults learned were derived from either direct adult prescription or by reacting to what they saw as their elders’ compliance with entrenched social mores of white dominated society. Youth took their discontent with Mississippi society to the streets and institutions and infused the 1960s phase of the civil rights movement with their own brand of activism. Otha Burton described this experience as a recognition of “knowing not only who you are but the world you live in. And maybe understanding that world. Understanding that there was a black and white America” (16). This established an awareness of racism in the black community and an increasing intolerance for allowing this separation to exist. Just as children took their lessons about navigating Mississippi society, they also took hold of their parents’ and elders’ activist involvement as motivating factors that propelled them into the invigorating roles youth played during the movement.

As young people considered their role in the movement, they also sought to define their space and mark their contributions. Many youths viewed the traditional National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) as representing an old guard with different goals. Ella Baker capitalized on this shift in mentality, and in an effort to reinvigorate the movement through youth involvement, she founded the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, pronounced “snick”) which recruited many young people across the South. Its role in Mississippi was significant. Among SNCC’s most substantial organized efforts in the state were in the Freedom Rides and later, Freedom Summer, known colloquially as the Long Hot Summer.

Mississippi also relied on an intricate web of locally grown grassroots movements. Because the nature of the Mississippi theatre of the movement varied greatly from region to region, the movement necessitated different approaches with different focuses of activist effort. For instance, from Pass Christian on the Mississippi coast, Lawrence Guyot recalled that he “never experienced racial violence for the first seventeen years of my life,” further noting that “Anyone who I knew who was black who wanted to vote, they were registered” (3). This varied greatly from the intense violence of McComb in west Mississippi, the hotbed of the Mississippi Delta, and regions in central Mississippi. Each place had its own needs, and the youth helped to identify these individual needs and bring a renewal to activist efforts.

The youth so captured the zeitgeist of the movement that as the movement changed after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, so did the nature of their organization. In a defining meeting for SNCC held in Waveland, Mississippi, James Forman gave a speech in which he recognized this shift in mentality. However, he retained a constant hope for future activism. He encouraged, “All of us have our little histories within us, and I would wish that all of us could set them down on paper. But your deliberations this weekend . . . should take into account what it is that’s best for all of us, for there are people who are waiting on us right now . . . .” (qtd. in Hogan 272). As the movement changed, it became increasingly more important for veterans to recall their “little histories,” and the Center for Oral History and Cultural Heritage began capturing these stories at The University of Southern Mississippi beginning in 1971. The institution has built a formidable collection of civil rights stories and is the most comprehensive collection on civil...