Freedom Riders, Feb. 7-13, 2014
In the summer of 1961, a group of students boarded buses to challenge segregation. This journey
began a revolution in the civil rights movement. Creating a “force” that spanned the divisions of
race, these young people fought for one common goal – equality. This event and others that
followed inspired thousands from across the country to gather for the Freedom Summer Project of
1964. Travel back to meet these brave students who earned their place in history as… the Freedom
Riders.
EDUCATOR’S GUIDE AND SUGGESTIONS FOR ACTIVITIES:
YOUTH PERFORMANCE COMPANY PRODUCTION OF
FREEDOM RIDERS
February, 2014
Dear Teacher,
YPC invites you and your students to celebrate and learn about one of the Civil Rights
Movement’s important events. The Mississippi Freedom Summer Project (which included the
Freedom Rides) took place 40 years ago.
These educational materials have been prepared by Betty Johnson to help your class enjoy and
benefit from the Youth Performance Company performance of the musical play, Freedom Riders.
Included in the resources section at the end are personal accounts and reminiscences of people
who were there, several excellent websites with more information (including audio), and lists of
other and recorded written materials. The major themes of the story include courage and
heroism, prejudice and stereotypes.
These suggested activities will help your students understand what they experienced at the show
and possibly apply it to their own lives; insights can be gained by kids of all ages, as well as
adults. There are lots of ideas here. We know you won’t be able to do everything; you can make
this a richer experience by picking a combination of in-depth discussion questions, personal and
group reflection and writing, research, and other activities which will enable youngsters to explore
several facets of the production and the story told in the play. The discussion questions may be
engaged in by the entire class, in small groups that then share their ideas with the class, or
pursued as ideas for individual writing or other creative expression that may or may not be
shared. (A tip: Before an all-class discussion begins, have students write down a few of their
responses so they will be prepared to contribute to the oral discussion.) Choose those that are
appropriate for your students’ interests and age level and the amount of time you have.
For those of you who have been to other YPC productions, you’ve seen some of these ideas (or
variations of them) before in the guides for previous shows, but either you may not have used
them then and might now, or you found them to be meaningful activities and would use them
again in the context of a different play. And some of them may be useful at later times in the year
for those teachable moments when you can refer back to the play as the basis for a group
discussion of a particular situation or curricular subject in your classroom or school.
SYNOPSIS OF THE STORY TOLD IN THE PLAY
In the summer of 1961, a group of students boarded buses to challenge segregation. This
journey began a revolution in the civil rights movement. Creating a “force” that spanned the
divisions of race, these young people fought for one common goal – equality. This event and
others that followed inspired thousands from across the country to gather for the Freedom
Summer Project of 1964.
Some of the most famous Civil Rights protests were the Freedom Rides. The Supreme Court had
ruled that buses traveling interstate could not be segregated, nor could waiting rooms and
restaurants. Blacks and whites together challenged Southern states which chose to ignore this
law. Through their rides, segregation was broken. And hereafter, Civil Rights workers throughout
the south were called Freedom Riders - a badge of honor in the movement.
Freedom Riders, an original drama written about the historical events that occurred in America
during the Civil Rights Movement in the early 1960s, focuses on the Mississippi Freedom
Summer Project of 1964.
The 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer Project was an attempt to see whether the Southern Civil
Rights Movement could in three months make a dent in a century of white oppression of black
citizens. Mississippi was chosen as the state where white resistance was the greatest, and
where any small victories would have the greatest effect. Students from across the country were
recruited, interviewed, and selected to participate in this project. They would register voters, run
Freedom Schools, and build an independent political party that would challenge the all-white state
Democratic party.
The play opens with the Summer Volunteers sharing their reasons for participating in the
Mississippi Summer Project. Then you’ll see and hear a very brief overview of the Civil Rights
Movement from 1960-1963, including the beginning of non-violent protests (i.e. sit-ins), the
creation of the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and the Freedom Rides.
Bob Moses, a member of SNCC and a Freedom Rider, was one of the coordinators of Freedom
Summer. He lead the week-long training sessions at the Western College for Women in Oxford,
Ohio. It was here that the volunteers begin to find out about the challenges and dangers they
would face in Mississippi.
Once in Mississippi you will see: what it was like for a local family that took in volunteers for the
summer; the challenge of getting African-Americans registered to vote; the excitement of the
African-American children as they learned about their own heritage and culture in the Freedom
Schools; and the triumphs and tragedies that the people involved in this movement faced every
day.
BEFORE YOU GO TO THE PLAY
It is very important that your students are appropriately prepared for the play. Some of these
suggested activities could be done after your students see the play, but the play will be more
meaningful for them if you can plan to do them before.
1) Freedom Riders is about racial relations in America in 1964. It is a chronicle of a particular
place and time. There are racial epithets contained in this production that reflect the mood of the
events and the time in which it is set. The playwright and director feel it is necessary to have
these racial epithets in the play to accurately portray the events and the people that were involved
in the civil rights struggle.
a) Discuss the racial epithets (nigger, coon, sambo, etc.) that students will hear in this
YPC production. YPC neither condones nor supports their use, but, when reconstructing a slice
of history, they are important to recapturing the mood of the event and the time in which it is set.
b) Why do people do name calling? Have you ever been called names? How did it make
you feel?
2)
a) Think of a time when you felt like an outsider, like someone quite different who didn’t fit
in or seem to belong there. Write an essay, story, or poem about it. If students agree, those
could be shared with the class and discussed.
b) After listening to the poems or stories that have been written, discuss the common
themes that have been reflected in these pieces. What are the common feelings? How do these
feelings make us alike? How do they make us different?
3) Set the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer Project into a cultural and historical context of the
time. As a class, research and prepare a time line of events in the United States and in the world
from about 1954 to 1974. Include politics, sports, arts (movies, songs, TV, etc.) economics,
international relations, government, etc.
4) Name some groups that are, or have been, discriminated against. (Try to go beyond racial
and ethnic groups.) What causes discrimination? Why do people discriminate against other
people? Are there any benefits to a group that is the object of discrimination?
5) To gain some understanding of the cultural and political “climate” in Mississippi in 1964, view
the section of the video “Eye on the Prize” that is titled “Mississippi - Is this America?” (a Public
Broadcasting System [PBS] documentary series). An accompanying book was also published.
Read selections about the Mississippi Summer Project out loud from any of the books listed on
the resource sheet, as well as the personal firsthand recollections in this guide which were
retrieved from several websites.
6) Several acronyms used during the play refer to organizations and agencies that were
significant to the Civil Rights Movement and the Mississippi Freedom Summer Project. Find out
why each of them was significant and in what way.
COFO - Council of Federated Organizations
NAACP - National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
CORE - Congress of Racial Equality
MFDP - Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party
FBI - Federal Bureau of Investigation
SCLC - Southern Christian Leadership Conference
KKK - Ku Klux Klan
SNCC - Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
7) Talk about how a play is different, as well as being the same, as a book, a TV program, a
movie, a video and a documentary. (This can include the medium itself -- written or audiovisual;
the format -- factual, realistic, fictional; the way it is told -- from the point of view of one or more
characters or by an observer; the control you have -- read as much or as little and as fast or as
slow as you choose, turn the TV on or off, stop or rewind or fast forward the video, just watch the
movie or walk out; etc.)
AFTER THE PLAY
1) Discussion: What made the biggest impression or what will you remember the most about the
play. Why?
2) Besides the actors themselves, a theatrical production includes many others things that help
the audience enjoy and understand the play, make it believable or “real,” or create a sense of
another place or time. How did each of the following do that for you? Did some seem more
important than others?
A. Costumes
D. Lighting
G. Music
B. Dance or movement
E. The set
H. Props
C. Sound
F. Visual effects
I. Other ______________
3) How did the music and the songs affect or match your mood at different points in the play as
you watched and listened? Think of other times and places when music affected or reflected your
feelings or mood.
4) Often, stories and plays explore subjects that rouse strong emotions or memories in the
reader or spectator. Though they may be important for individuals to acknowledge, that may be
difficult or felt to be risky in a group discussion. Sometimes it’s easier to sort out your feelings by
writing in a journal or diary. This may be an activity students would prefer to not share. Some
ideas to explore in this way might be:
a) Pretend you are one of the characters. Write entries in your “personal” diary about what
has happened to you, what you’re are going through and how you really felt as each event in the
story unfolded. Write, too, what you think of the other characters.
5) Write or draw whichever character you would most like to meet? Why? Where would you
meet? What would you talk about? What would you do together?
6) Writing/reflection. Fill in the blanks:
This play made me realize that ____________________________________________________
This play made me decide that ____________________________________________________
This play made me believe that ____________________________________________________
This play made me wish that _____________________________________________________
This play made me wonder about __________________________________________________
This play made me feel that ______________________________________________________
This play made me hope that _____________________________________________________
7) Create a patchwork quilt, with contributions from the entire class, using events, personalities,
objects, and themes from the play and book. This can be done in fabric (such as on a sheet,
using scraps of material) or with paper. Use interesting shapes and textures that can be pieced
together in either a regular pattern or in a crazy quilt sort of overlapping pattern. (This could lead
to a discussion about the inter-relationships between the characters in the story.)
8) In the play, when did you see examples of characters being courageous or brave. How did
you know? (This can include acting on one’s convictions, sticking up for someone else,
supporting an unpopular view, etc.) Describe a time when you were courageous or brave and
what you did.
9) In the play, when did you see examples of characters being afraid or fearful. Why were they
afraid or fearful? (This can include fear of the unknown by both minority and majority citizens,
fear of losing one’s status or place, feeling threatened, etc.) How did they overcome their fear?
Describe a time when you were afraid or fearful and what you did.
10) What are the characteristics of a hero?
a) There are many kinds of heroes. Some are make-believe (ask for examples). Some
are heroes by acts of courage (ask for examples). Some are more idols that heroes (ask for
examples). Can you name other types of heroes?
b) Heroes often encounter and overcome obstacles. What were the obstacles
encountered by the summer volunteers and local Mississippians? Do you think they felt like
heroes throughout the play? Did they act like heroes?
c) Being a hero is sometimes thrust upon people. Often these are everyday people who
don’t feel they are doing anything out of the ordinary, that anyone or everyone would do the same
thing. Has that ever been your experience, or do you know (or have read about) someone like
that?
d) What are the drawbacks to being thought of as a hero? What are the rewards? What
were the drawbacks and rewards for the characters in the play?
11)
a) Segregation still exists. Why? (Don’t just give the simple answers.) Think of as many
examples of segregation as you can. How have things changed in the last 40 years? Why have
they changed?
b) Imagine it is the year 2020. Describe the social “climate” in America, including the
increased numbers of racial and ethnic minorities, education, job opportunities, attitudes, etc. Tell
how the situation you are describing came about and what happens between now and then.
12) What is a stereotype? What is prejudice? What is the relationship between prejudice and
stereotypes? What stereotypes of a racial nature did you see and hear in the play and in your
research before going to the theatre? How are stereotypes bad for both racial minorities and
majorities and for other groups?
a) Stereotypes “happen” for many reasons. One need only to watch TV for a steady diet
of stereotypes. Keep a log for one week in which you keep track of the roles portrayed by
women, men, children, ethnic groups, different ages, etc. Include the day, time and title of the
programs you watch. (This log can be done individually or as a compilation added to each day by
the class.) Indicate what type of show it is: comedy, drama, police/crime, “reality” show, soap
opera, game show, etc. Don’t forget to watch the commercials and include them in the log.
Some stereotypes will probably stand out. How many times are women involved in kitchen,
bathroom, or laundry activities or settings? How many times are men in similar situations? How
many times are women and minorities featured as significant or professional people? How are
children and older people dealt with? How did you feel or respond to the “messages” you
received? Ask adults if they think there are fewer stereotypes shown now than 10 or 20 years
ago, and why they have that opinion (with specific examples).
RECOLLECTIONS OF FREEDOM SUMMER
The Mississippi Freedom Summer Twenty Years Later
by Edward McNulty
Retrieved from the web at
www.religion-online.org/cgi-bin/relsearchd.dll/showarticle?item_id=1424
( Mr. McNulty is pastor of First Presbyterian Church in Westfield, New York. This article appeared
in the Christian Century October 17, 1984, p. 959. Copyright by the Christian Century Foundation
and used by permission. Current articles and subscription information can be found at
www.christiancentury.org. This material was prepared for Religion Online by Ted & Winnie
Brock.)
The 40th anniversary of the invasion of Normandy was grandly celebrated and widely reported
by the media. This year also marked the 20th anniversary of another invasion, but this one was
little noted. Few of its veterans returned either to celebrate or to relive the harsh experiences of
the summer of 1964. Those who did were not besieged by representatives of the press. I was a
small part of that exciting “Freedom Summer,” when hundreds of students, lawyers, teachers,
doctors and clergy descended on Mississippi. “the last bastion of segregation.” My return exactly
20 years later, in August 1984, was even briefer: it was just a pass through the state on the way
to deposit our youngest son (he wasn’t even born in 1964!) at his college in New Orleans and to
see an old friend and comrade-in-arms in Greenville.
We entered Mississippi in broad daylight, traveling south from Memphis down U.S. 62. What
a contrast to our night crossing at Vicksburg in August of ‘64. President Lyndon Johnson had
spoken to the nation over radio and television about the Gulf of Tonkin incident near North
Vietnam. As we were on the bridge over Old Man River, the announcement came that the
Federal Bureau of Investigation had found the bodies of the three missing civil rights workers. I
was traveling with my fellow pastor from a little town in upstate North Dakota. Roger Smith was
Methodist, I Presbyterian. As far as we knew, we were the only two pastors from our state to take
part in the Mississippi Project. Each of us, independently of the other, had responded to the
mimeographed National Council of Churches’ letter appealing to the clergy to join the students
and other professionals in voter registration work in “the most segregated state of the nation.”
Today the vast flat expanse of the delta cotton fields looks much the same as then. Gone, of
course, was the feeling that we were traveling through enemy territory. No need now to phone
ahead to our destination and, on arrival, to phone back to home base that we were safe. The
green fields stretched for miles. Few houses of any size were visible as we raced along the
straight highway, just clusters of dilapidated shacks. Now that machines had replaced hand
pickers, many of the falling- down houses were vacant.
Hours after entering the state we passed the small hamlet of Winstonville. Here was located
the headquarters of the COFO (Council of Federated Organizations, an alliance of several civil
rights groups that sponsored the Mississippi Summer Project) for Bolivar County, where Roger
and I had been assigned. We lived and worked at the Freedom Center in Shaw, a few miles
down the road, but came to Winstonville several times for meetings with project director John
Bradford. John was a young man with but a year or two of college -- very different from the
dozens of highly educated, articulate white volunteers working under him, who often chafed at his
direction. Roger and I sometimes served as buffers and interpreters between the critical white
students and the frustrated black director. Today Winstonville is a small collection of houses
barely discernible from the highway that curves around it.
U.S. 62 now bypasses Mound Bayou as well. I recall when the road led us right by the large
brick church where we had once attended a freedom rally. Mound Bayou was the largest allblack community in the state in 1964. You didn’t need to fear the local police here. No one stood
outside to take down the names of those who attended the night freedom rallies, as the civil rights
meetings were called. We came up here, too, to mail letters which we did not want the Shaw
postal people to open -- or when we thought we were being charged too much for our mailings, as
we were once or twice.
A few more hot minutes past Mound Bayou and we were approaching Cleveland. But my
thoughts turned to Ruleville as we waited for the light to change and I saw the sign pointing east
to the seat of Sunflower County, home of that great lover of liberty, Senator James Eastland. It
was also home to a genuine freedom fighter, Fannie Lou Hamer. We met her a number of times,
this fiery orator who could fill a church with her contralto voice leading us in a freedom song or
hymn. She was often in pain due to a back injury caused by a beating in jail. Her crime:
speaking out against injustice and trying to use a bathroom at a bus station.
There was a cadence to her speech that lifted the spirits of the ragged people who risked so
much to come to hear her. A few samples recorded in my journal: “If you see a preacher not
standing up [for civil rights], there’s something wrong with
him. . . . There’s something wrong with teachers who don’t teach citizenship and what it means.
There’s something wrong about not knowing about the history of Negroes.” She could be funny in
a barbed way, too: “When a preacher says he doesn’t want politics in his church, he’s telling a lie!
The pictures on those bills you pay him are of presidents -- he sure doesn’t keep them out!” We
were at the outdoor party to celebrate the second year of the Freedom Movement in Ruleville the
day that Hamer was served with an injunction by the sheriff. Long before the northern press was
interested in covering the beatings of the black Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
workers, Charles McClaron had come to Ruleville to begin voter registration work. There were too
many people and it was too hot to meet in the little church, so we ate our chicken outside. You
could still see the scorched area above the church door where local whites had hurled a fire
bomb. You could also see the cars slow as they passed, their white occupants scarcely believing
that whites and blacks would eat and socialize together. The sheriff’s injunction was an attempt
to scare Hamer from running for the U.S. Senate and from challenging the segregated delegation
at the Democratic Convention later that month. She read it and said, “it’s just a scrap of paper. It
don’t scare me or anything. I’ll be in Atlantic City, even if I have to go by myself.”
We drove on by Cleveland. It was late and my wife and son were too hot and tired to make
the side trip to see the courthouse where we had fruitlessly brought people to register to vote.
One woman had been a schoolteacher with two years of college, yet she didn’t pass the same
test that hundreds of semiliterate whites were eased through. And what courage it took for the
registrants to brave the hate-filled stares and the insolence of the courthouse staff.
I wondered if the monument to the Confederate soldiers still stood, proclaiming that never had
so noble a cause and nation risen so cleanly. There would be no statue of Amsie Moore,
longtime National Association for the Advancement of Colored People leader who bravely carried
the torch for justice. His Amoco station no longer stood by the highway -- the only place where
we had been able to buy gasoline safely. He had been an eloquent speaker, lacing his speeches
with quotations from the Gospels and I John about loving and praying for our enemies.
I wondered too what had happened to the white Presbyterian minister whom Roger and I had
called on. He had many of the same books in his library as I, yet we were worlds apart. He knew
of no poverty in his area nor of any wrongs committed. Polite to us, he nevertheless regarded us
as outsiders, not fellow American Christians who could help each other. He urged us to tell the
students to shave and bathe more often. We refrained from telling him how difficult maintaining
one’s personal grooming was, when the only running water available for a square block was a
pump in the backyard of the shack we slept in.
Fifteen minutes later we were at Shaw, our home base for the two weeks and a few days we
had spent in Mississippi. This I couldn’t bypass, filled as I was with the memory of hot, nauseaproducing (if you moved too fast) days filled with knocking on doors, talking with adults, and
playing with and teaching children at the Freedom Center. The laundromat at the edge of town
where we were bawled out by the owner was gone. I still have the slide Roger took showing the
large “White” and “Colored” signs on each side. Downtown Shaw itself looked awful -- rundown
and seedy. Only a few blacks were out on the sidewalk as we drove along the main street. It
appeared so small now; surely it was not the home of 2,300 people! Back then, that street had
seemed so long as we walked down it while trying to ignore the hostile stares of the whites who
knew -- and disapproved of -- our reason for being in town. I looked in vain for the library which
“our” local youth had so proudly integrated. There was the railroad depot, however, where the
white bus had stood, together with hordes of white, helmeted state troopers with their riot guns at
the ready. I had cruised slowly down that same street 20 years ago to see how the three brave
teenagers who had won the right to integrate the library were faring, since none of us outsiders
could accompany them. Fear rode with me and my companions, for a large crowd of angry
whites stood on one side of the road. Held back by sheriff’s deputies, they made it clear that they
didn’t like what was happening. Even if black taxes also supported the facility, no “nigra” had
ever entered it, except to clean up. We had called the FBI to inform them of the planned
integration, and the Bureau in turn had notified the state and local authorities. All the chairs had
been removed from the little storefront library, but the youths were allowed to take out the books
they asked for, a small victory.
On our way back down the main street I saw the new library on the opposite side. It was still a
storefront, but neat and well painted, in marked contrast to the faded appearance of most of the
shops and stores in town. We passed the large Baptist church which we whites had attended
one Sunday. No warm greetings or ‘‘Y’all come back” for us. Nor did we want to, so irrelevant
and ‘‘spiritual’’ was the lifeless sermon. The big white church faced the bayou that divided Shaw.
Behind the row of fine homes on the other side was “Colored Town.” I was appalled at how
dilapidated the area looked, despite a large sign proclaiming the renovations taking place. A
closer look showed us that curbs had been put in. The open ditches that had served as a sewage
system were gone. Even blacks could have sewers and indoor plumbing now, apparently.
There were a few street lights. But the houses and the people seemed locked into a bygone
era. Could this be the prosperous America that Ronald Reagan extols so often? We felt like the
outsiders that we were, so I didn’t take time to find the churches where we had met to sing
freedom songs and make fervent speeches. No doubt the white policeman who had stood
outside taking down names had long since been pensioned off. When the black audience recited,
“Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow . . . ,” they meant it. When they chanted
prayers asking to be delivered from the “terror by night and the arrow that flieth by day,” we all
meant it. Those meetings -- so filled with joy and the hope of deliverance from Mr. Charlie -- and
our daily work with the local blacks came as close to the church of the Book of Acts as I’ve ever
been privileged to see. The people taught us so much about faith, hope and love. We found the
grocery where we often ate our breakfast of doughnuts and orange juice. I couldn’t be positive
about the present identity of what had been our Freedom Center: a three-room house stuffed with
library books, sports equipment, telephone (the only one in the black section) and mimeograph
machine and a thousand posters and handbills. There we had talked with people, written reports
and letters and kept in touch with the outside world. We drove out of the black area, crossing the
bayou bridge to head south again. Passing the cutoff that led to the settlement of Choctaw, I
thought of our forays into the country to register people for the Freedom Democratic Party -- and
of the fear that we felt each time a white-driven truck, rifle resting on the rear-window rack, had
slowed down to look us over. We had been stopped by one irate white and warned to get
moving. As he pulled away, the teens in my car got out to write down his license plate number so
we could report the incident to the FBI. The driver saw the kids, screeched to a stop, and backed
into a driveway, where he got stuck in the mud. The loud laughter of the teens didn’t help his
temper, I’m sure -- though we didn’t wait around to find out.
Our day ended in Greenville. That night we dined with my companion of two decades ago,
Roger Smith. Roger had returned to North Dakota for a year and then asked to be assigned to
the staff of the Delta Ministry. He was now the only white person on the staff of the Delta
Resources Committee, under the direction of native Mississippian Jean Phillips. This Greenvillebased group provides emergency assistance, counseling, advocacy and other services for the
poor blacks (and those whites who are beginning to see that they too are victims of an unjust
system) of a large portion of the Mississippi Delta.
I’ve often wondered if all the work, beatings, bombings and deaths of that 1964 summer were
worth it. The World War II veterans who returned to Normandy could be proud and satisfied that
their invasion had ended in total victory over the
most vicious system in human history. None of us Freedom Summer vets could make such a
claim. We succeeded in registering only about 8,000 new voters that summer. Fannie Lou
Hamer never made it to the Senate. And some of the people Roger and I knew have been killed.
Life still looks much the same: blacks are at the bottom of society and maybe even worse off than
before, since machines have taken over much of their work in the cotton fields. There is no
longer a government in Washington that cares whether they live or die. When Roger and I were
preparing to leave Shaw 20 years ago an old man told us, “You know why the whites here hate
you so? Because you all came down here and opened our eyes. Now we see that things don’t
have to stay the same!” (Today they call this process “conscientization.”) Two elderly women
thanked us as we came out of the church on our last night there. One said, “I’m old and won’t
see the day of freedom. But my grandchild will.” That day still hasn’t come. But as Roger and
Jean point out, there are now black mayors, council members and other county and state officials
in Mississippi. We could enjoy our dinner together in one of Greenville’s finest restaurants --
whereas once, just a few miles away, we had nearly been attacked because an integrated group
of us rode in the same car. Instead of the pitifully few thousand blacks registered to vote, there
are now tens of thousands. And there will soon be more, if the Delta Resources Committee staff
has anything to do with it. No monuments or celebrations commemorate the 1964 invasion of
Mississippi. Instead, there are dedicated people living and working here, resolved to carry on the
way begun then -- and largely abandoned by the rest of the country. Maybe someday, when
people can again sing, “We shall overcome” with integrity, there will be celebrations and
speeches commemorating slain civil rights workers Andy Goodman, Michael Schwerner and
James Chaney -- and all other who gave so much, yet received so much more from the quiet
courage and faith of the people whom they had come to help.
Anthropology professor recalls tense times of Freedom Summer
by K.C. Jaehnig, Southern Illinois University - Carbondale (February 20, 2002)
Retrieved from the web at news.siu.edu/windows/022002/janeadams.html
As the car without lights drove slowly past the house where the civil rights workers were
having a party, the people inside the house stopped dancing. Someone turned off the record
player. In the following silence, someone else turned out the lights. Two brothers got their
shotguns and stood by the door.
It was the summer of '64, this was Harmony, Miss., and just days earlier, three civil rights
workers named James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner had gone missing in
the next county over. No one was taking any chances.
"But it wasn't really tense -- it was more, This is just how we do things,'" said Jane
Adams, recalling her days as a Freedom Summer volunteer nearly 40 years ago.
"The car drove off, the lights and music came back on, and people started dancing again.
There was this tremendous normalcy at the same time all this weird stuff was going on. That's
always stayed with me."
Adams, now an associate professor of anthropology, was a 21-year-old Latin American
studies major at SIUC when
organizers sent out a call for volunteers to spend a summer in the Deep South. During what came
to be known as "Freedom Summer," these volunteers registered black voters, helped organize a
political party to challenge the traditional "whites-only" Democrats, opened community centers
and ran "freedom schools" where black children learned about black history and civil rights along
with reading and arithmetic.
Thousands of people, many of them college students, responded to the Freedom Summer
call, among them Adams, her brother and a number of friends.
"We had a very large contingent go from SIU," Adams said. "It was probably the largest
group from a non-elite university."
Before heading south, Adams spent seven days at a training center in Oxford, Ohio -- the
same one Goodman and Schwerner had attended just a week earlier. She was there when word
came that the three volunteers had disappeared.
"We knew they were dead," Adams said. "It wasn't official for another month or so, but we
knew."
Everyone felt afraid; few let that stop them.
"When you're 21 years old, you go into battle -- that's what youth is for," Adams said.
With their training behind them, Adams and a carload of volunteers hit the highway.
"When we saw that big sign that said, ‘Welcome to Mississippi,' we felt like we had just
crossed into enemy territory," she recalled.
"Mississippi had geared up for war. They saw us as invaders coming in for a complete
assault on their way of life. Everybody on both sides expected that there would be a bloodbath.
We all expected we could die."
There were some heart-stopping moments. The incident at the house took place her
second night there. Another time, in broad daylight, "guys with guns" in two pickup trucks chased
her and another female volunteer as they were driving back to Harmony, an encounter Adams
remembers chiefly for the amazing maneuvering skills of the woman who drove their car. Yet
these bits of terrorism did not terrorize her.
"It was a little breathtaking, but in this community I felt really safe," Adams said.
"I think I had an advantage over a lot of other volunteers, most of whom were from big
cities -- they had no idea what they were getting into. I grew up on a farm (near Ava) in a rural
region that is, in many ways, like the south, though not as violent. It gave me a much greater feel
for Mississippi and the codes that in rural areas restrain people in ways that don't restrain them in
urban areas."
When Adams thinks back to that summer so long ago, she remembers it best as "a unique
time when we discovered resources we didn't know we had. People with no education, who had
been agricultural workers all their lives, would say and do the most profound things. The true
story is one of ordinary people risking everything and how they changed the world."
Mississippi Project documents civil rights struggle
by K.C. Jaehnig, Southern Illinois University - Carbondale (February 20, 2002)
Retrieved from the web at news.siu.edu/windows/022002/missproject.html
Nearly four decades after taking part in a summerlong struggle to register black voters in
the Deep South, a University anthropologist and a former New York Times photographer have
returned to Mississippi.
This time around, though, they're registering recollections. Using a digital camera, scanner
and Macintosh field computer, they're creating an archive of memory and musing about that
tumultuous time and its aftermath, told from the standpoint of folks who were there.
"One of the tragedies of the way history is received is that it gets thinned into mythological
renderings of great events -- good guys, bad guys, epic battles, all frozen in time," says associate
professor Jane H. Adams.
"With the Mississippi Project, we aim to apply the unique knowledge and access provided
by our personal histories to more fully understand the civil rights movement and to create an
account that is more complete, one that includes civil rights activists and segregationists, as well
as people who were not active but whose lives were transformed through the movement," says
Adams.
"It's important to understand that this is a multi-ethnic region. The color line also affected
Catholics, Italians, Jews, Chinese, Syrians, and Choctaw. That's a key part of our project."
Adams and photographer D. Gorton, whom she married a year ago, first met in
Mississippi in 1964. Then a 21-year-old junior at SIUC, Adams was one of thousands of white
college students who went south that summer to help black
Americans register to vote. Gorton, an Ole Miss student when James Meredith became its first
black enrollee, was, in Adams' words, "the only white Mississippian to be a member of SNCC
(Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee)." A photographer for that organization, he spent
most of his time documenting the civil rights struggle outside of Mississippi because of SNCC
concerns for his parents' safety.
After Freedom Summer, Adams dropped out of school. She spent a year in Mississippi,
working in the movement's Jackson office and organizing in the southwestern part of the state,
then moved on to Chicago as an activist in the anti-Vietnam war movement. She later finished her
schooling at SIUC, earned a doctorate in anthropology at the University of Illinois and began
teaching in 1987 at her old alma mater, where her research has focused on rural life, history,
politics and the economy in Southern Illinois.
Gorton, meanwhile, parlayed his SNCC photo skills into a career, eventually becoming
staff photographer for The New York Times. He also photographed for Time-Life Inc. and the
Washington Post Magazine.
Though they hadn't seen each other for ages, a mutual friend from their old student-activist
days decided to do a little matchmaking a few years ago. "The rest is history," Adams says with a
laugh.
This new partnership led the couple to think about other ways they might work together.
"My work has centered on understanding transformations in rural life, and I use oral
histories as a part of that," Adams says. "D. has created extensive photo essays -- he was
managing editor for ‘Day in the Life of the Soviet Union' -- and he has the ability to talk to just
about anyone.
"We realized that the Southern civil rights movement was something we both knew a lot
about, and we're both interested in the Web as a medium for making information more
accessible, so we began looking at how we might put all that together."
The Mississippi Project grew from there. When complete, it will contain digital video
interviews, still photos, home movies and documents both private and public, all archived and
linked on the World Wide Web.
"In terms of the way we really learn -- sight, sound, music, experience -- the Web is the
only way I know to bring it all together," Adams says.
"It also is a way to allow everybody, not just serious scholars, to have access to original
source material -- it won't wind up buried somewhere in (a library's) Special Collections, with no
one knowing it's there."
So far, the project includes interviews with civil rights activist Alyene Quin, ChineseAmerican grocers Hoover and Freeda Lee, Jewish businessman Stanley Sherman and white
private school founder Betty Furniss. In what may be the project's most striking interviews to date,
Adams and Gorton focus on (white) Citizens Council leader Horace Harned, whose family owned
the Rice plantation in Starkville, and Ruth G. Brent, a descendant of Rice plantation slaves and
an acknowledged relative of Horace Harned.
"The color line was complex and ambiguous -- because of these complicated
relationships, everything wasn't just black and white," Adams says. "People usually knew who
their relatives were."
They also are focusing on the backdrop against which this struggle took place.
"The lens through which the civil rights era has been viewed is mostly urban, where the
south at the time was mostly rural," Adams says. "There are things city people don't understand
about rural life, kinship, land ownership, class antagonisms, gender roles and religion and how
these all shape local discourse and action.
"In addition, at the same time all this was occurring, the South's rural, agricultural economy
was beginning to come apart. That transformation of rural life, which is what my work so far has
been about, serves as the context for the civil rights era," she says.
"And then there's the fact that the state was ethnically and religiously diverse, which is
also rarely recognized. The whole nature of that society has been invisible in the larger
discourse."
Adams and Gorton are continuing to conduct interviews, make images and collect data -all with a sense of some urgency. Time is passing. One of the first people they interviewed,
Alyene Quinn, has since died. If thoughts, memories and vantage points are not preserved, they,
too, will die.
"We played a part in history in a direct way, something few people have the privilege of
doing," Adams says. "There's a responsibility that comes with that."
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES
ON THE WEB
(found by searching on Google for Mississippi Freedom Summer Project)
www.ibiblio.org/sncc/mfdp.html
Six years of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Council, 1960-1966. Includes sections
with links on issues, people (including Bob Moses), events, and timeline plus other links to online
resources for more information on SNCC and some of its members. (This site, which includes
audio selections, was put together in 2000 by four journalism & mass communications students
who attended the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill.)
www.watson.org/~lisa/blackhistory/civilrights-55-65/missippi.html
This article, “Civil Rights Movement, 1955-1965: Mississippi and Freedom Summer,” has
many links with more details.
www.americanradioworks.org/features/oh_freedom/story12.html
“Oh Freedom Over Me” is an American RadioWorks production put together in 2001 by
MN Public Radio. American RadioWorks correspondent John Biewen interviewed Freedom
Summer veterans. Though their stories, he revisits the dramatic events of the Mississippi
Summer and explores how the Summer helped shaped racial politics in America for years to
come. This site includes the story of that summer, selected interviews (some in audio), music (in
audio), and a slideshow.
global.wisc.edu/peace/readings/cambridge-civil-rights-for-kids.pdf
“The Civil Rights Movement for Kids: A History with 21 Activities,” by Mary Turck.
Excellent teacher’s guide which can be downloaded.
www.aera.net/pubs/aerj/abs/aerj3521.htm
Abstract of an article by John R. Rachal (from the University of Southern Mississippi).
“We'll Never Turn Back: Adult Education and the Struggle for Citizenship in Mississippi's Freedom
Summer,” which was published in American Educational Research Journal (AERJ), Vol. 35, No.
2 (Summer 1998).
www.uri.edu/mcc/programs/AnnualLectureMulticulturalism/bobmoses.html
An updated biography of Robert Parris (Bob) Moses on the occasion of a speech he gave
that was sponsored by the University of Rhode Island Multicultural Center on Feb. 4, 2001. He
was billed as Civil Rights Activist and Founder of the Algebra Project. His topic was “Civil Rights,
Human Rights, and Multiculturalism.
www.folkera.com/freedom/press.html
Describes an album of music, “Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Songs of the Mississippi
Civil Rights Movement,” recorded live (mostly more than 30 years ago) and released by the
Cultural Center for Social Change. Includes a letter from the organization’s executive director,
Susie Erenrich, about how the idea for the album originated (as a graduate school project
researching songs from the Civil Rights Movement) and was carried out.
f99.middlebury.edu/AC200A/civil_rights_songs.htm
Audio of eight songs of the Civil Rights Movement, recorded from 1960 to 1966: Fannie
Lou Hamer, "Wade in the Water"; "Freedom Now Chant"; Hollis Watkins, "Oh Freedom"; SNCC
Players, "We Shall Not Be Moved"; "In the Mississippi River"; "Nobody Turn Me Round"; "Woke
Up This Morning with My Mind on Freedom"; "We Shall Overcome".
SELECTED WRITTEN AND VIDEO MATERIALS ABOUT THE MISSISSIPPI FREEDOM
SUMMER PROJECT:
Belfrage, Sally. Freedom Summer. University Press of Virginia, 1990.
Cagin, Seth and Dray, Phillip. We Are Not Afraid: The Story of Goodman, Schwerner, and
Chaney on the Civil Rights Campaign for Mississippi. New York: Macmillan, 1988; Bantam,
1989.
Carson, Clayborne, editor. The Eyes on the Prize Civil Rights Reader - Documents, Speeches
and Firsthand Accounts from the Black Freedom Struggle, 1954-1900. New York, Penguin
Books, 1991.
Curry, Constance and Hudson, Winson. Mississippi Harmony: Memoirs of a Freedom Fighter.
Palgrave Macmillan, 2002.
Eyes on the Prize. Video produced by Public Broadcasting System (PBS) in 1995. Six hour set.
Highly recommended. (Look also for the sequel, Eyes on the Prize II: America at the Racial
Crossroads 1965-mid 1980s. An equally stirring, eight-hour history of the post-civil-rights years.)
Heath, William. The Children Bob Moses Led. 1995. (a novel about the events of summer,
1964, featuring real people as well as fictional ones.)
Honisberg, Peter Jan. Crossing Border Street: A Civil Rights Memoir. University of California
Press, 2000.
Holt, Len. The Summer That Didn’t End - The Story of the Mississippi Civil Rights Project of
1964. New York: DeCappo Press, Inc., 1992.
Martinez, Elizabeth, editor. Letters from Mississippi. Zephyr Press, 2002. (New edition, with
added photos, of letters written by Freedom Summer volunteers, originally published 30 years
ago.)
McAdam, Douglas. Freedom Summer. Oxford University Press, 1990. (The author tracked
down hundreds of the original project applicants, and includes their stories as he gauges the
impact of Freedom Summer on the project and the period we now call "the turbulent sixties, as
well as its influence on subsequent reforms.)
McCord, William. Mississippi: The Long Hot Summer. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1965.
Moody, Ann. Coming of Age in Mississippi. 1968; reprint, Laureleaf, 1997. (autobiography of an
African-American Civil Rights activist who was raised in Mississippi)
Mills, Kay. This Little Light of Mine - The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer. NY, Plume (reprint edition),
1994. (Written for young adults) (This Civil Rights activist was born into a black sharecroppers'
family in rural Mississippi.)
Randall, Herbert. Faces of Freedom Summer: The Photographs of Herbert Randall. University
of Alabama Press, 2001. (Chronicles the freedom movement in Hattiesburg, MS, during the
summer of 1964, a dangerous mission for a young black male from New York. Most of his nearly
1800 negatives had never been seen until 1997. For the book, Tusa, archivist at the University of
Southern Mississippi, wrote a stirring introduction and selected more than 100 black-and-white
photographs that depict the freedom schools, community centers, voter registration efforts,
nonviolent volunteers, activists such as PeteSeeger, and much more. )
Sugarman, Tracy. They had sneakers, we had guns: Kids who fought for civil rights in
Mississippi. Sugarman was an illustrator, with a varied career that included everything from jazz
album covers to action scenes of soldiers in battle and protestors marching. He was a Freedom
Rider, working in the Deep South in the early 1960s and illustrating this memoir on the
experience, which was published in 2009
Walter, Mildred Pitts. Mississippi Challenge. New York, Bradbury Press, 1992.
Williams, Juan. Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years, 1954-1965. New York: Viking
Penguin, 1987. (companion volume to Eyes on the Prize, the PBS documentary series produced
by Blackside)
And for and about younger readers:
Kent, Deborah. The Freedom Riders, Chicago: Children’s Press, 1993. (Ages 9-12). (Covers
the Civil Rights movement from the Montgomery Bus boycott started by Rosa Parks and ending
with President Lyndon Johnson signing the Voting Rights Act. Historic photographs show what
the situation was like before, during, and after the Freedom Riders. Young readers will
understand not only why this tactic was necessary, but also why it was successful.)
Levine, Ellen. Freedom's Children: Young Civil Rights Activists Tell Their Own Stories. Puffin,
2002. (ages 10-14) (The stories of 32 African-Americans who were children or teens in the
1950s and '60s.)
Littlesugar, Amy and Cooper, Floyd. Freedom School, Yes! Philomel, 2001. For ages 5-8.
(When their house is attacked
because her mother volunteered to take in the young white
woman who has come to teach black children at the Freedom School, Jolie is afraid, but she
overcomes her fear after learning the value of education, where she can also learn about black
poets and artists, historians and inventors.)
Wiles, Deborah. Freedom Summer. Atheneum, 2001. (This book takes place during the
Summer when the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed. Segregation, southern white retaliation to
the law, and the willingness to stand up for what you believe are exposed through the friendship
of two young boys, one white and one black.)
MORE RESOURCES
Anderson, Henry Clay. Separate, But Equal: The Mississippi Photographs of Henry Clay
Anderson. Public Affairs, 2002. (Rediscovered photographs document a proud community Greenville, Mississippi - of middle-class Southern blacks at the dawn of the civil rights
movement).
Archer, Jules. The Incredible Sixties: The Stormy Years That Changed America. New York:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Publishers, 1986.
Blaustein, Albert P., and Zangrando, Robert L., editors. Civil Rights and the American Negro: A
Documentary History. New York: Washington Square Press, 1968.
Branch, Taylor. Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-63. New York: Simon &
Schuster, 1988.
Branch, Taylor. Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years, 1963-65. Simon & Schuster, 1998.
Bullard, Sara, exec. ed. Free At Last: A History of the Civil Rights Movement and Those Who
Died in the Struggle. Montgomery, AL: The Southern Poverty Law Center. 1994.
Carson, Clayborne. In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s. Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1981.
Chalmers, David. And the Crooked Places Made Straight: The Struggle for Social Change in the
1960s. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991.
Garrow, David J. Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian
Leadership Conference. New York: William Morrow, 1968.
Gitlin, Todd. The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage. New York: Bantam Books, 1987.
Hampton, Henry and Fayer, Steve. Voices of Freedom: An Oral History of the Civil Rights
Movement from the 1950s through the 1980s. New York: Bantam Books, 1990.
Harris, Jacqueline L. History and Achievement of the NAACP. New York: The African-American
Experience. Franklin Watts, 1992.
Hornsby, Alton, Jr. Chronology of African-American History - Significant Events and People from
1619 to Present. Washington DC: Gale Research, 1991.
King, Casey and Osborne, Linda Barrett. Oh,Freedom!: Kids Talk About the Civil Rights
Movement With the People Who Made It Happen. Knopf, reprint 1997. (Written for ages 9-12.)
(A unique collection of 31 oral history interviews about the civil rights movement that grew out of a
fourth-grade assignment.)
King, Mary. Freedom Song: A Personal Story of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement. New York:
William Morrow, 1987.
Kosof, Anna. The Civil Rights Movement and Its Legacy. New York: Franklin Watts, 1989.
Laue, James H. Direct Action and Desegregation, 1960-1962: Toward a Theory of the
Rationalization of Protest. Brooklyn, NY: Carlson Publishing, Inc., 1989.
Levy, Peter B. Let Freedom Ring: A Documentary History of the Modern Civil Rights Movement.
New York: Praeger, 1992.
McKissack, Patricia C., and McKissack, Frederick L.. The Civil Rights Movement in America from
1865 to the Present. Scholastic, 2nd edition, 1991. (written for ages 9 and up) (From the
beginning of Reconstruction to the present, traces the struggle of blacks to gain their civil rights in
America, with a brief comparison of their problems to those of other minorities. This revised
edition includes expanded chapters, cameos, and photographic coverage on the struggle for civil
rights for Hispanic, Asian, and Native Americans, women, and children.)
Mendelsohn, Jack. The Martyrs: 16 Who Gave Their Lives for Justice. New York: Harper & Row,
1966.
Morris, Aldon. Origins of the Civil Rights Movement. Macmillan USA, 1987.
Powledge, Fred. Free at Last? The Civil Rights Movement and the People Who Made It.
Harperperennial Library; Reprint edition (February 1992).
Powledge, Fred. We Shall Overcome: Heroes of the Civil Rights Movement. NY: Charles
Scribners Sons, 1993.
Raines, Howell. My Soul is Rested: Movement Days in the Deep South Remembered. NY: G.P.
Putnam & Sons, 1977; Penguin, 1983.
Rochelle, Belinda. Witnesses to Freedom: Young People Who Fought for Civil Rights. NY:
Lodestar Books, 1993. (grades 5 and up)
Turck, Mary. The Civil Rights Movement for Kids: A History With 21 Activities. Chicago Review
Press, 2000.
(Written for ages 9-12) Surprisingly, kids were some of the key instigators in the Civil
Rights Movement. This book’s balanced discussion notes tactical differences between the
different groups and their actions. The text is tightly written with a strong voice that rings out in its
recounting of past injustices. The ultimate message is that while the movement witnessed
extraordinary accomplishments in the past 50 years, new challenges await young people of the
new century; knowledge of the past is the foundation of future action. ... The entire Voting Rights
Act of 1965 and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 are appended. Black-and-white photos
from newspapers, magazines, and the National Archives and a few drawings enhance the text.
Although independent students will find a wealth of information here, this enormous effort begs for
sensitive, knowledgeable adults to use it as a tool in guiding young people in the study of human
rights for all. - Excerpts from review by School Library Journal)
Webb, Sheyann. Selma, Lord, Selma: Girlhood Memories of the Civil-Rights Days. Tuscaloosa:
University of Alabama Press, 1980. (Two women remember their experiences as children in the
days of the Selma, Alabama, civil rights movement.)
Weisbrot, Robert. Freedom Bound: A History of America’s Civil Rights Movement. NY: W.W.
Norton & Co., 1990