Training for Freedom

(gentle music) Down in Mississippi I'm gonna let it shine - [Narrator] These are college students from every corner of the nation.

They volunteered for active service to help the black people of Mississippi learn their rights and get their names on a voters list.

On a quiet campus in Ohio the volunteers trained for their Freedom Summer.

- Very few of the volunteers had ever been in the south.

They didn't know very much of its history.

They didn't know the history of the Civil Rights Movement other than what they had seen on television.

(TV audio) - The students did not have a sense of what it meant to be and live around Black people and they certainly didn't have a sense that there was a place in the United States where anything could happen to them, and that they could even die.

They certainly weren't prepared for that.

- The police are gonna harass you.

- A lotta people were conflicted.

How many times have any of us had worked with whites on a equal basis and for the same goal, especially voter registration, tryin' to end segregation?

- But, one of the most interesting things is not tensions, but the way all those are resolved, because underneath and beyond it all was everyone saying, if we are going to do this we need to learn and be together and work together.

Keep on a talkin' Keep on a walkin' Keep on a talkin' Marchin' out to Freedom Land - In this town more than 68% of the population are Negroes and yet, they are less than 1% of those people who can vote, and if you continue to attend these meetings you're sayin' that you will no longer be satisfied with having Negroes beat.

- It was like I got religion.

It was like I got the Holy Ghost.

It just lifted off of me because I saw Black people standin' up doin' somethin' about the conditions that we found ourselves in.

And I knew then it wasn't gonna be long before I was gonna be right with 'em.

So, I became an organizer before I joined SNCC, and they wanted me on their staff to be an organizer with Bob Moses in Mississippi.

- When Bob Moses first came to Mississippi on his own in 1960, he was just sent on a sort of a fact finding mission for SNCC.

He met a man named Amzie Moore and he told Moses the idea of sit-ins won't work here.

Black people don't even have enough money to go to counters.

The vote is the key, the vote is the key in Mississippi.

Throughout the Delta, 60 to 70% of the population was Black.

And so, if you gave them the vote you would've been surrendering power.

- No Jennings, you didn't pass it.

You see there, you didn't fill out but just, you just filled out that part and look, you didn't write anything in there.

You didn't pass it.

You have to fill it out complete before you pass.

- So, the idea of disenfranchising Blacks went all the way back to Reconstruction where Blacks were given the vote by federal law.

And what happened was you have your first Black Congressman ever.

You had several city councils and town councils controlled by Blacks, and when the federal troops left, the era of Jim Crow began.

By the 1890s Mississippi enacted all of these various laws about interpreting the Constitution and poll taxes, et cetera, that decimated or stripped the black vote away.

By 1963, Bob Moses and SNCC, they were doing what they could to get people to realize that they could come down to the courthouse and register.

But, they were having a tremendously difficult time.

Moses' car was shot into.

One guy took the bullets in the neck, the driver.

They sicked dogs on them and dragged people to jail singing and chanting and things like that.

And it was starting to look like this wasn't going to really make any progress for a long time.

- We hope to send into Mississippi this summer upwards of 1000 teachers, ministers, lawyers, and students from all around the country who will engage in what we are calling Freedom Schools, Community Center programs, voter registration activity, a program designed to open up Mississippi to the country.

- Freedom Summer was bold.

It was original and daring, and it got the nation's attention and got the Civil Rights Movement going again.

- This quiet, peaceful lagoon could be found most anywhere in the state of Mississippi.

But, this is not Mississippi.

This is the Western Woman's College in Oxford, Ohio.

- They would never have been able to do the training in Mississippi.

Whatever facility they had would've been bombed or burned within a day or two.

And it was originally gonna be Berea College, but there were some trustees at Berea College that said, no, you're not gonna do that here.

So, the Western College of Women in Oxford, Ohio, volunteered to host the training, really pretty close to the last minute.

- They might not have know how deep the consequences would be, but I think people felt good about it, because it was one of those defining moments that changed the course of America.

- [Reporter] Before these students were allowed to come here, they were interviewed, screened, and in some cases, rejected.

- They got more than 1000 applicants and they quickly said, we need to interview as many people as we can, and we need to ask some serious questions about why they're going down.

- Now, Phil, let's say you're in Mississippi and Bob Moses, who's the director of the project, comes over to you and says, Phil, will you spend the next four weeks typing index cards, or some?

- Anybody who had what Moses called a John Brown complex, named after the self-righteous savior of pre-Civil War era, they wanted to weed out right away.

- I do hope that I can participate more actively in the movement.

If this is where he wants me to be, of course, that's what I'll do.

- Once they chose the 700 people to come to the training, then that type of message was hammered home.

You're not going down to save the Mississippi Negro.

Only go down, Moses said, if you understand that his freedom and your freedom are one.

- My parents were pretty staunch republicans, the extend, the whole extended family, and certainly not liberal, and certainly very prejudiced.

Then when I got to college I became very interested and actually passionate about particularly racial injustice.

And there were a lotta news stories what was going on in the South, but I never really even thought about going South.

But, I was just super idealistic, wanting to change the world, kind of person.

- My folk were dead set against it.

They thought, these folk are gonna kill you all, but I kinda thought because a lot of white students, I thought maybe we'd have some kinda protection.

I don't think if it had been an all Black project, I'm not at all sure I would've thought we would survive at all.

But, I kept sayin', well, are they really gonna kill white kids from the North, you know.

I said, the government, the federal government's not gonna let them do that.

Well, I read in the paper Just the other day That Freedom Fighters They are on their way - [Reporter] Some 700 college students from as far away as Boston and southern California, ranging in age from 19 to 26, have come here to take part in a program called Freedom, Freedom for Mississippi.

All paid their own way and they were all required to have a sponsor agree in advance to provide bail funds should they be arrested in Mississippi.

Don't know why this is Segregation's 'bout to fall - The vast majority came from Ivy League or from upper tier private schools and they were the sons and daughters of success.

Lawyers and doctors, one congressman, and as they would say in the South, they didn't have a dog in this fight.

But, they could not stand by and watch it happen once they heard about it without getting involved.

Music, singing When they came here there were two very, very different groups.

They were from different classes, different races for the most part.

Most of the SNCC trainers were Black.

90% of the volunteers were white.

Here were hundreds of naive kids from all around the country, mostly white, some not, mostly middle class 'cause who could afford to take off a summer, some more working class.

And we come to Ohio, we meet each other, we have to figure out our relationships with the field staff that had come.

And I guess for all of us that was very new.

- They had such different lives, you know.

I had come from a very poor, working class family, first person in my immediate family to even finish high school.

And for us all to be thrown together, you know, because they had never had interactions with Black people before.

- We came here having no idea what Mississippi was like, no idea what working with other people was like, what even the kind of work was like.

And, among other things, is how do you learn to listen to and obey people who don't talk as well as you do?

Which is a very powerful thing that's not easy to learn.

- This was an important entry point for all of us, but particularly for the white students because immediately they have Black, often Mississippian, or other Black folk who are the SNCC staff, who are giving them direction.

This is a first for them, right.

I mean, they've never had any of this before.

So, here are people saying to you, you'd better listen to me because what I'm telling you and I'm gonna explain to you is going to keep you alive.

- Most of us didn't have any real skills and we were expected to be teachers or encourage people to take the risk of registering to vote or building community organization.

How do you do those things?

There was a substantial curriculum.

- We work for the Capital Federated Organization and we're here concerning voter registration.

If you have a minute or two, I'd like to talk to you about that.

- I am aware that you all (garbled audio).

- [Reporter] They practice in classrooms for their main job, which will be to help Mississippi Negroes get registered to vote.

Doing it they will face hazards and their training must prepare them for those also.

- Well, you should be prepared to go to jail and you should be prepared to stay there for a while and you should be prepared to live.

- [Reporter] During the day they attended classes, classes offering subjects never before taught at this Oxford, Ohio campus.

They were taught Negro history, the voter registration laws of Mississippi.

Time and time again, they were warned of what lay ahead, hardship and perhaps personal danger.

- I'm just wondering if people in this room understand one, that people should be expected to get beaten.

They should expect to spend in jail and it may go beyond the summer when they're in jail, depending upon what the bond is, and that they should expect possibly somebody to get killed.

- Because the project these young people have come here to be trained for is unorthodox, some of the training is unorthodox.

- Yell it out, get outta here, nigger.

Nigger lovers coming from the North, go home Yankees.

You know, go home you Yankees.

- I have a very clear memory of the role playing.

- Say it, you know, and get it outta your system.

- Had a great impact on me.

We practiced you know, non-violent self defense.

- Most likely, a cop won't try to chunk you in here, but he, he will hit you across here.

You can generally take those licks.

- This was not something you could just walk into.

I'm just gonna be non-violent.

That's not how it work.

You had to train your mind and you had to train your body, all right, to respond automatically through non-violence, in a non-violent way.

Otherwise, your more primal sense, your more natural sense would take over and will do what it does, which is either fight or flight.

Those are the two responses.

- Part of what you're learning is to trust and help each other.

You know, it's not just, what are you gonna feel if somebody starts beating your head?

It's like afterwards you have to talk about how did you feel?

What was happening to the person next to you?

Could you help protect the person next to you?

What would have happened if somebody had lost their cool?

So, it's not just training somebody not to hit back when they're hit.

It's much more understanding their feelings, motivations, and attitudes and your own and your own reactions.

- And everybody was in the same boat in terms that we were going into a very risky, possibly life threatening situations together.

That alone, I suppose like in war or anything, people fighting together going into dangerous situations together, is inevitably a means of bonding together.

(yelling) - [Reporter] A group of students portraying an angry mob.

They are supposed to jeer and curse and that's all.

But, a mob, even a friendly mob, play acting can get out of hand, and this becomes a lesson in itself.

(yelling) - That's very good, because you all got carried away, see.

I mean, you were just supposed to yell and you started hitting us so you got out your frustration.

- That was strange, you know.

Some of the SNCC staff didn't want the summer volunteers, thought they're just gonna get us killed down there, you know.

And so, there was a lot of trying to come together, and fear and anxiety on both sides.

- Not only was there regional and class clash very strong, the clash between the veterans and the new recruits was enormous.

And so, I think the veterans understood that you didn't undertake what they were about to do, the audaciousness of that, without seriously considering that maybe it would cost you your life.

- They looked for incidences that we would say something or do something that showed our, more of our naivety or our, or masked feeling of superiority, and they would call people on it.

They were confrontive, but in a very appropriate way, like questioning our motives, which I felt was good to force us to reflect on things.

- We tried to scare them, or at least scare reality into them by talking about the violence that they had undergone by describing beatings, but it really wasn't getting through.

- The police are gonna harass you.

They're gonna pick you up on a road, they're gonna put trumped up charges on you, you're gonna wind up in jail.

There's no doubt about it.

And another thing, I suggest you be a little more serious about this thing.

I know it don't even seem real to you now, but it will when you go down to Mississippi.

- There was one of the SNCC staff people that I did not like at all.

And he, at one point, turned to me and said, what freedom are you fighting for, boy?

And I looked back at him and I said, the freedom to not like you and not be called a racist.

This was about what it was, was not trying to pretend that we are all one, because it gets everything all wrong.

It gets non-violence wrong.

It gets what movements are about wrong.

It gets politics wrong and it trivializes very, very real efforts people make to work together, people who are different to work together.

- I think in some ways, the most important interfaces were happening in between us people, sizing each other up, really, and figuring out, can we do this?

So, so there's a very different, can we do this figuring out, going on on the part of the SNCC veterans and, can we do this figuring out, going on on the part of the volunteers.

Light music - There is something about the serenity of the setting and the opportunity to help people settle down and be reflective.

There was nothing to interfere with this opportunity to connect with one another and to be collaborative.

- It was easy to go inside and go outside.

It was easy to get into a circle of people and hang out and talk on the grass.

A lot of people brought guitars and there was a bunch of that kinda singing going on.

Everybody say, go tell it on the mountain Over the hills and everywhere Go tell it on the mountain - We were of the same generation and we were all Americans, no matter how different you know, our life experiences might have been.

There's a lot of similarities.

So, it wasn't like a gulf that couldn't be bridged.

And so, people became friends with one another, too.

I know I made friends.

- Well you see, people got a chance to know each other on a human level.

They had a chance to interact as human beings, and without that color thing.

They got a chance to see people as people.

Piano notes - (TV) The three civil rights workers that disappeared in Mississippi last Sunday night still have not been heard from.

A search has so far has produced only one clue, the burned out station wagon in which the three were last seen riding.

There is little hope that they are still alive.

- [Reporter] When news of their disappearance reached the campus some of these students who were just beginning their week of training began to have second thoughts about going to Mississippi, but none dropped out.

-(Dr. Momeyer):The second week it got very real very fast, because on the morning of the first day of orientation, Bob Moses stood in front of us in Leonard Theater telling us what to expect in the way of training when three veteran staff members came in from the back of the room and went up and took Bob aside and explained to him that for more than 15 hours James Chaney and Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman had not been heard from in Neshoba County, Mississippi.

- The question now was on the volunteers all of a sudden that they were in something they hadn't bargained for.

And so, now they had to reach into themselves to figure out whether they had within them what they needed to do this.

- [Reporter] Throughout the past week this bulletin board held an eery fascination for the students.

It carried daily bulletins concerning the activities of the students who left this campus only a week ago for Mississippi.

It told of progress being made and reports of two bombings.

On Friday, it carried a simple message, still no word on our three missing friends in Mississippi.

- And it wasn't til the last group meeting on Friday that Bob Moses was explicit in saying, the kids are dead.

They're really dead.

And he said, this is your last chance.

Nobody is gonna fault you or blame you if you don't get on that bus.

You don't have to go, but if you go now you know what you're facing.

Then there was this stunned silence until from the back of the room one person started, They say that freedom Is a constant struggle and then it carried on from there.

Yeah.

They say that freedom Is a constant struggle They say that freedom - And I don't think any of 'em made a decision to not to go.

And I think the most important thing to me, when I saw that, is that after they really got a concept of what was really goin' on and what they were gonna face, they made a decision to go.

Been strugglin' so long That we must be free We must be free They say that freedom - I don't think it could have come up and worked out as well as it did if it had not been for these orientations and sessions.

- Far as I'm concerned, it meant everything.

We got a chance to get together and know each other and know that they was goin' down there to shed blood together.

And when you shed blood together it takes on a whole 'nother meanin'.

- Freedom Summer has a remarkable record of people sticking it out.

Well about 95% stayed the whole summer, the whole time, despite the danger and the suffering and alienation and constant threats and constant danger.

That says a lot about the training.

Keep on a talkin' Marchin' up the freedom land Ain't gonna let no militia Turn me around - Freedom Summer tells us that the divides in the American life in terms of race and class and even gender are false, or that they can at least be broken down very quickly, not easily, but quickly, when people walk across the divide and reach out and try to understand.

And I can't think of a better message for America at any time for that, especially now.

- What concerns me now is how do we organize young people to really see what has happened to the rights that we fought for.

And you can see it in vote, you can see it in the bills, the civil rights bills that have been passed.

You can see all of it bein' eroded.

- We still have tremendous racial divides in this society.

We need to find ways to bring young people together across all of these barriers so they get to know each other.

But, you know, there isn't a commitment from the top in our society to deal with this.

So, you don't teach you know, the true history of the country.

- [Reporter] James Chaney, 23; Michael Schwerner, 24; Andrew Goodman, 20.

- We don't want to admit that we have that kind of violence in America.

- [Reporter] Acting on an informer's tip, agents find the bodies under 25 feet of clay.

- That kinda raw violence doesn't fit with the narrative of the Civil Rights Movement.

The narrative of the Civil Rights Movement is Rosa Parks sat down, Martin Luther King stood up, and within a few years or even a decade, everything was okay.

We got the Voting Rights Act and didn't take much more than that, a few more marches, that's the story in mainstream history.

But, Freedom Summer tells us differently, and it tells us that with that type of concentrated effort with people who ignore or defy the dangers and the fears that in many cases are used to preserve the status quo, that they can change things.

- And the most important thing I think, that comes out of what we learned here and did is that what we call history and what we call the past is made by ordinary people doing things one step at a time in ordinary ways.

And there's no reason that can't happen now.

That's not the past.

Ain't gonna let nobody Turn me around Turn me around Turn me around Ain't gonna let nobody Turn me around I'm gonna keep on a walkin' Keep on a talkin' Marchin' up to Freedom Land Ain't gonna let injustice Turn me around Turn me around Turn me around Ain't gonna let injustice Turn me around I'm gonna keep on a walkin' Keep on a talkin' Keep on a walkin' Keep on a talkin' Marchin' up to Freedom Land - All right, all right, we're ready to march again.

(group laughing)