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Freedom Summer: The Savage Season That Made Mississippi Burn and Made America a Democracy Review

Before We Were Free
"Freedom Summer" by Bruce Watson

Those of us over forty remember a time in this country when African-Americans were second-class citizens -- by institutional decree in certain sections of the country and under conditions we called "de facto" elsewhere. It was a time when many citizens of the white majority -- north and south -- worried about protecting their neighborhoods from folks of a different color and/or culture. "There goes the neighborhood" became first a rallying cry among white racists and then, fortunately, a punch line of a half-memory from a forgotten age.
In "Freedom Summer" author Bruce Watson ("Bread & Roses" and "Sacco & Vanzetti") takes his readers back to the hot, muggy, violent Mississippi summer of 1964, a time when several hundred college students descended on the Magnolia state and worked with members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in a concerted effort to break the hundred-year-old Civil War-era stranglehold whites held over their black fellow citizens. It was a movement that helped begin to shift this nation toward racial neutrality, if not equality, and, according to Watson, ultimately set the national stage for the election of Barack Obama.
Trained for the battle against Mississippi's generations-old, ingrained, institutionalized segregation, fewer than a thousand young people traveled, mostly by bus, to the state to register new voters, build "freedom schools" and educate black children in the real history of their people. Theirs was not a protest movement, Watson points out; it was an action movement.
Steeled through Ohio training sessions for the vitriol, hatred and even violence they would encounter in the hearts and at the hands of white Mississippians, the Freedom Riders were surprised by the overwhelmingly warm welcome they received from blacks in some of the most depressed economic areas in the United States.
"I've waited eighty years for you to come," the son of a former slave told a volunteer. But most blacks, terrified of the white power structure in the state, were at first reluctant to risk their lives for the "freedom" these students and black activists promised. Memories of beatings, lynchings and other results of white mob violence had kept the vast majority of Mississippi blacks cowed and silent for generations. And "freedom summer" re-invigorated the white mob mentality. Black citizens knew that the simple act of walking into the courthouse with the intent of registering to vote could lead to civic ostracism and, often, violence.
Determined to change, among other things, the deeply ingrained sense of inferiority they found among blacks, the volunteers lived side-by-side with locals in tumbledown shacks without running water, air-conditioning or any of the comforts they had left behind. They reached out especially to the young and to voting-age citizens, determined to teach one group about the black history they'd never learned and to help members of the other group register to vote, a civil right denied them by Jim Crow regulations devised by the white power structure and rigorously, even fanatically, enforced for nearly one hundred years.
Watson's book re-creates in vivid, unforgettable detail the difficulties the Freedom Riders faced in attempting to tolerate the numbing heat and humidity of July and August, as well as living with the physical discomfort caused by the swarms of mosquitoes, chiggers, June bugs and other pests of the southern summer season. But those physical miseries paled beside the psychological difficulties they faced every day and, more particularly and more intensely, every night. The volunteers came to dread the shadows of those muggy, slow-moving hours of darkness, aware that the next act of violence against them might occur at any time.
"Freedom Summer," as suspenseful as a good novel and as informative as the best non-fiction, is in the end the story of heroes, men and women who fought long odds for what they believed was a worthy outcome. Bob Moses, Fanny Lou Hamer and John Lewis, legends of the Civil Rights movement, were active leaders before, during and after the summer of 1964, but the in-the-trenches volunteers, from carpenter Fred Winn to teacher Fran O'Brien to Chris Williams -- a young man who walked into some of the most hostile communities in his tireless efforts to register blacks to vote -- made "freedom summer" the success it ultimately was.
The early summer disappearance of volunteers Andrew Goodman, James Chaney and Michael Schwerner underlies much of the action in Watson's narrative. After tense weeks of search by a reluctant FBI, amid loud contentions by white leaders that the three civil rights volunteers had just packed up and gone home, that their disappearance was a hoax -- when their bodies are discovered, completing the evolving indictment of white Mississippi in its century of injustice toward blacks, "Freedom Summer" reaches its climax. The subsequent decades-long search for justice in the case of the murdered youngsters leads to frustration, then, finally, a kind of reckoning.
In careful, exact prose, Watson concludes "Freedom Summer" with a description of the Mississippi-wide reconciliation between races that has taken place in the state in the years since the mid-1960s. In the end, he writes, "...sidewalks, though no wider than before, had room for black and white, sometimes side by side."
If American citizens are finally and totally to "overcome" the results of a century of imbalance and injustice that has kept black and white brothers and sisters separated, each and every one of us needs to read, discuss and absorb the lessons of "Freedom Summer."

NOTE: A few years ago, in Southern California, Bruce Watson served as editor-in-chief of a high school newspaper staff of which I was adviser.

Reviewed by Saylor D Smith, author of Serpent's Tooth and Stealing First

Freedom Summer: The Savage Season That Made Mississippi Burn and Made America a Democracy Feature

ISBN13: 9780670021703
Condition: New
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Freedom Summer: The Savage Season That Made Mississippi Burn and Made America a Democracy Overview

A majestic history of the summer of '64, which forever changed race relations in America

In the summer of 1964, with the civil rights movement stalled, seven hundred college students descended on Mississippi to register black voters, teach in Freedom Schools, and live in sharecroppers' shacks. But by the time their first night in the state had ended, three volunteers were dead, black churches had burned, and America had a new definition of freedom.

This remarkable chapter in American history, the basis for the controversial film Mississippi Burning, is now the subject of Bruce Watson's thoughtful and riveting historical narrative. Using in- depth interviews with participants and residents, Watson brilliantly captures the tottering legacy of Jim Crow in Mississippi and the chaos that brought such national figures as Martin Luther King Jr. and Pete Seeger to the state. Freedom Summer presents finely rendered portraits of the courageous black citizens-and Northern volunteers-who refused to be intimidated in their struggle for justice, and the white Mississippians who would kill to protect a dying way of life. Few books have provided such an intimate look at race relations during the deadliest days of the Civil Rights movement, and Freedom Summer will appeal to readers of Taylor Branch and Doug Blackmon.

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Customer Reviews

Should be in every lending library - Midwest Book Review - Oregon, WI USA
Bruce Watson's FREEDOM SUMMER; THE SAVAGE SEASON THAT MADE MISSISSIPPI BURN AND MADE AMERICA A DEMOCRACY provides a fine survey of racial tensions and the civil rights movement and considers 1964 events, when over seven hundred American college students descended upon Mississippi to register black voters and teach in Freedom schools. Freedom Summer changed American politics and civil rights: this provides important keys to understanding the chain of events central to American history, and should be in every lending library.

Memories Brought Alive - Patti Miller -
I eagerly awaited the publishing of this book, wondering how someone who was not in Mississippi that summer of '64 could possibly tell the story accurately. But before I had finished the first chapter of Bruce Watson's account of Freedom Summer, I was already back in Mississippi, feeling the stifling heat and smelling the Mississippi air.

I was a volunteer that summer and think about it often. But only after reading this account was I able to remember many details that had remained hidden beneath the conscious level. I couldn't put the book down. It reads like a novel, but having been there myself, I can assure the reader that the book is accurate and riveting. Mr. Watson captures the sights and sounds and most importantly, the emotions of that never-to-be forgotten summer.

I highly recommend this book as a must-read to any teacher or student wanting to understand the civil rights movement of the sixties. It tells it like it was and allows the reader to feel that they were there.

Congratulations to Bruce Watson on his important contribution in keeping this important time in history alive.

Freedom Summer As It Really Was - James Marshall - Brookline, MA
Freedom Summer: The Savage Season That Made Mississippi Burn and Made America a Democracy by Bruce Watson

Off the top, this is the best new examination of the Mississippi Summer Project of 1964. It brings the strengths of Sally Belfrage's Freedom Summer (1965) and Elizabeth Sutherland Martinez's Letters from Mississippi (1965) and avoids trumpeting the FBI's heroic efforts to locate the bodies of Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman. Rather Watson ably recreates the atmosphere of terror and tension the civil rights activists and volunteers lived through during the long hot summer.

He does this through his interviews with volunteers and civil rights workers and focuses the readers' attention on their personal experiences in a land which was barely comprehensible to America of the 1960's. Mississippi's "Closed Society" is revealed as a world constructed to keep the African American in his place or take his life if he chose to throw off those restraints.

Although Watson's book is not an academic study, he makes use of established source materials and truly provides the reader with a bottom-up look at Freedom Summer, rather than what the political establishment considered it. Those who wish to reexamine the period would make good use of this work to help them understand the civil rights movement as it was in 1964 in Mississippi.

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Wednesday, August 25, 2010