By Bruce Watson

In the summer of 1964, the civil rights movement was stalled.

A decade had passed since the team of attorneys from NAACP’s Legal Defense and Educational Fund had won Brown v. Board of Education, yet much of the South was still defying the landmark decision. Bombs, police dogs, and fire hoses had repelled marchers from Birmingham to St. Augustine, Florida. Martin Luther King, Jr. was reaching new heights of eloquence but he could not be everywhere at once. Something startling was needed to revive the movement. That something was Freedom Summer.

During the first week of summer in 1964, 700 college students poured into Mississippi. In nightclubs up north, singer Nina Simone was crooning, “Everyone knows about Mississippi, god damn!” Mississippi was where 14-year-old Emmett Till had been lynched in 1955 for allegedly whistling at a white woman. Mississippi was where NAACP leader Medgar Evers had been gunned down in his driveway in 1963. “There is no state with a record which approaches that of Mississippi in inhumanity, murder, brutality, and racial hatred,” NAACP chairman Roy Wilkins said. Who would volunteer to go to Mississippi, god damn?

The volunteers of Freedom Summer came from every corner of America. Ninety percent were white, and all were fiercely committed to civil rights. They had been in grade school during the Montgomery Bus Boycott and in high school during the first sit-ins. The previous summer, they had been stirred by King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, only to be shocked weeks later when four little girls were killed in the Birmingham church bombing. That spring, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) had combed college campuses, asking for “an army” of volunteers. Now it was their turn.

After a one-week training in Ohio where they studied Southern history, learned how to take a beating, and heard harrowing tales about “the closed society” where they were headed, volunteers rode buses into the Deep South. On June 21, 1964, they fanned out to small towns and hamlets across the Magnolia State. Neither Mississippi nor America would ever be the same.

Though SNCC had announced – again and again – that volunteers would be teaching school and registering voters, not marching or protesting, Mississippi was on a hair trigger. Rumors said 30,000 “invaders” were on their way. Police had taken riot training. Wild stories of roving Negro gangs led to a run on gun shops in Jackson. And in rural enclaves, the Klan recruited hundreds to fight off what its Imperial Wizard called “the nigger-communist invasion of Mississippi.” But before they even met white Mississippi, volunteers were overwhelmed by folks on “the other side of the tracks.”

On the first morning of Freedom Summer, volunteers moving in with their black hosts were paraded along gravel streets, displayed like finery. “Have you seen my girls yet?” one woman asked neighbors. Old women stopped young “girls” and touched their skin, calling them “skinny” or “pretty.” Children ran to the newcomers, asking their names, or whispered behind cupped hands: “There they is!” And from every soul crushed into the Mississippi soil, the same feeling emerged. “I’ve waited eighty years for you to come,” the white-haired son of a slave told one volunteer.

But that same afternoon, three men set out to investigate a church burning in central Mississippi. When darkness descended, the three had not returned. Calls went out to sheriffs, jailers, and the FBI, but there was no trace of the men. After another day passed, President Lyndon Johnson ordered the FBI and 200 sailors to wade into swamps and drag muddy rivers. The search went on into July, putting Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, and James Chaney on front pages and FBI posters nationwide.

While the search continued, Freedom Summer volunteers soldiered on. By day, Mississippi’s sweltering heat baked them. Each night, the threat of violence made them jump at the slightest noise. “Violence hangs overhead like dead air,” a volunteer wrote from Ruleville. “Something is in the air, something is going to happen, somewhere, sometime, to someone.” Soon black churches began going up in flames. Eighty volunteers were beaten, nearly a thousand arrested. Pickups with gun racks circled Freedom Houses where phone threats came in daily. Yet nothing could dampen the spirit of Freedom Summer.

That spirit shone brightest in the Freedom Schools. With an enrollment of 2,000, the schools introduced students to black history and literature and encouraged them to question, question, question. Why were they so poor? Why couldn’t their parents vote? Why had they all heard of Booker T. Washington but none had heard of W.E.B. DuBois? Freedom Schools met in cluttered basements, refurbished shacks, and when a few were bombed, outside under trees. “We’re giving these kids a start,” one teacher said. “They’ll never be the same again. This isn’t something anyone can just snap off when the summer ends.”

Other volunteers went shack to shack, sowing seeds of democracy. Just 6.7 percent of blacks in Mississippi could vote and those who tried to register were thrown off plantations or targeted by shotguns fired into their shacks. Volunteers urging black to register sensed the terror behind every excuse.

“I just can’t get my mind on all that. I just never voted and I’m too old now.”

“I don’t want to mess with that mess.”

Gradually, patiently, the spirit of Freedom Summer wore down a century of fear. “It’s the best thing that ’s happened since there ever was a Mississippi,” one man said. “I just love the students like I love to eat. . . . They’re doing things we couldn’t do for ourselves in years on end. . . . It’s all changing, it is sure enough changing, right this summer.”

In early August, the bodies of Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney were found buried beneath an earthen dam. No longer able to pretend that the disappearance was “a hoax,” Mississippians saw their beloved state subjected to nationwide scorn. “I favor dropping an atom bomb on the state of Mississippi,” an Ohio man wrote Time. “I am ashamed that such a savage state exists in the country.” Yet white Mississippi remained unrepentant.

A few weeks after the bodies were found, the state sent an all-white delegation to the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City. There they faced the future, as embodied by Freedom Summer’s final innovation – the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party.

Chosen in their own state convention, backed by 63,000 registration forms, the Freedom Democrats had come to Atlantic City to lay down a challenge. They, not the lily-white delegation, were the rightful representatives from Mississippi. Throwing the convention into turmoil, Freedom Democrats brought their challenge to national TV where SNCC stalwart Fannie Lou Hamer graphically described being beaten and shot at for daring to register to vote. “And if the Freedom Democrats are not seated – NOW,” Hamer boomed, “I question America. Is this America? The land of the free and the home of the brave?”

The challenge was on the verge of succeeding when President Johnson intervened. Fearing a full Southern walkout, LBJ brokered a compromise. Freedom Democrats were offered two seats “at large.” “We didn’t come all this way for no two seats,” Hamer said, and the Freedom Democrats returned to Mississippi where all but a few volunteers had gone home.

Freedom Summer was over. Few of its objectives had been met, yet its daring methods and nationwide headlines made it a resounding success. That summer, shortly after signing the Civil Rights Bill, LBJ asked his attorney general “to write me the goddamn best, toughest voting rights act that you can devise.” Inspired by Freedom Summer, bolstered by the 1965 Selma march, the Voting Rights Act passed the following summer. By the end of the year, 60 percent of blacks in Mississippi were registered voters.

The legacy of Freedom Summer is mixed. Overshadowed by the heroism of King and Rosa Parks, it is rarely taught in schools. The murders of Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney, dramatized in the film “Mississippi Burning,” have obscured the summer’s accomplishments. Undaunted idealism. Startling inter-racial harmony. The joy of learning in Freedom Schools. As much as the right to vote, these are the legacy of that amazing summer. “Nobody never come out into the country and talked to real farmers and things. . . “ Fannie Lou Hamer remembered. “And it was these kids what broke a lot of this down. They treated us like we were special and we loved ‘em.”

Bruce Watson’s most recent book, Freedom Summer: The Savage Season That Made Mississippi Burn and Made America A Democracy, has just been published by Viking Adult books.