Freedom Summer: The Savage Season of 1964 That Made Mississippi Burn and Made America a Democracy

This grim relation of the 1964 Mississippi Project to enfranchise African-Americans is straightforward in its depiction of the horrific course of that summer; but it is ultimately hopeful and inspiring. Residing temporarily in Illinois, I was barely in my teens when these events took place, but all I had heard of was the murder of three young men who were murdered by a motley band of sheriffs/deputies, Klansmen, and ne’er do wells. Over the years, reading almost weekly accounts of African-Americans being arrested and mistreated by police, lynched, beaten, and otherwise discriminated against by society in general, I finally realized how difficult it have been just surviving in this by and large inimical polity.Reading this book was necessary, for me, and the author did not disappoint me. One reviewer complained that the book was “melo-dramatic” (sic). Not so: it is harrowing, frightening, and eye-opening. The Northern college volunteers were met by non-black denizens seemingly from another, darker, era. However, despite some distrust of these students by the black community, the reader will be inspired by the quest to register black voters, to learn of the schools set up for children, most often in appalling settings, beset by arson, drive by shootings, and any number of perilous indignities. The stories of the African-Americans who hosted the students when their own needs were deferred, who worked in offices set up by the Project, who braved the bigots, and who set up their own organizations, are beyond inspiring, heroic, and instructive. Melodramatic is not the word to use here.Beyond this the author tells the shameful story of the 1964 Democratic presidential convention, where a delegation of mostly African-Americans chosen by the newly enfranchised voters contested the sitting of the official Mississippi delegation. Sad, depressing, and outrageous was the result. He closes with a number of stories about the post-Project careers of prominent actors.The author has a gift for setting the scene in Mississippi: the heat and humidity, the poverty, the malevolence of many of its citizens. Just remember though, Mississippi has itself come a long way since 1964; however, in 2020, everywhere there are still nooses hanging in trees, the KKK is still with us, African-Americans are disproportionately arrested by police in every part of this country (and too many still die in custody), and sometimes it seems like we’re going backwards, despite the seeming progress. BTW I’m not a bleeding heart Liberal; I’m guilty of being a believer in justice in all cases.

"Freedom Summer" is likely to be recognized as the definitive account of a seemingly all-but-forgotten but nevertheless enduringly transformative episode in American history. That I myself was a volunteer in the Mississippi Summer Project necessarily colors my perception, but I little doubt that a reader more objective of mind will draw the same conclusion. Bruce Watson, a meticulous journalist, takes you into every nook and cranny of Mississippi with an abundance of crackling anecdotage recounting the actualities that transpired during this unprecedented surge into a higher level of American democracy, and he does so with an imagination suggestive of the gift one expects of a novelist; so much so that, on the one hand, I found myself reading his compelling narrative as if I were entering Mississippi for the very first time, while on the other I was able to locate myself in the there-and-then of my actual experience as I was never able to do heretofore. He tells his story so empathically that, did I not know otherwise, I'd be thinking he himself was a Mississippi volunteer.Watson gives his tale luminous specificity by threading it through the experiences of four particular volunteers. We find out why they came to Mississippi, what they were thinking and feeling as they were either teaching in a freedom school or canvassing door-to-door for voter registrants, and how their Freedom Summer experience impacted their lives thereafter. Lurking with a tumescent tension behind the accounts of their unique travails is the tragic story of the disappearance and murder of the three advance-guard civil rights workers whose names--Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman--will forever be paradigmatic for the savageness that permeated Missssippi not only that summer but for all-too-many prior years as well.As an engaging counterpoint to the goings-on within Mississippi, Watson keeps us abreast of how the nation is responding to all that it's seeing and hearing, and how the federal government--J. Edgar Hoover, RFK, LBJ--struggles to cope with it, all of which adds to the tale a welcome historical perspective.

I recommend this book to anyone who has ever participated in or questioned a movement of a marginalized minority standing up to be heard by the greater public. The parallels, the rhetoric that still exists today despite being so clearly disproved by the sentiments of yesterday... It is truly a reminder that history repeats itself and that no battle is ever truly won.

Loved this book, really captured the atmosphere of the times and what went on. I knew the story but this is so much more with first hand accounts. Couldn't put it down

This is essential reading for all time. Brilliant from start to finish with many worrying events. This is like being there fifty years ago.