Freedom Summer in the segregated South

When Karen Duncanwood was a very young woman, she spent a summer in a very dangerous place. If you were to see her ahead of you in line at the post office or the supermarket, you almost certainly wouldn’t know you were standing in proximity to a person of rare courage, a woman who played a part in one of the nation’s epic struggles.

Duncanwood lives in mobile-home park in Paradise these days, but the fire that was struck in her when she was young still burns bright.

Her name isn’t known to history, nor are the names of hundreds of men and women like her, people whose belief in the principles this country was founded upon was so strong that they risked injury and even death to stand for those principles. Even the names of those who did make the news back in the struggles of the early 1960s are being forgotten.

Who remembers Stokely Carmichael, the fiery leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, for instance? And would any American high school students recognize the names Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney, or have any idea why those names should not be forgotten? It’s unlikely that even one person in a thousand still remembers the name of Viola Liuzzo, a woman who paid for her belief in racial equality with her life.

“The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” is not one of the songs Bob Dylan is ever likely to perform on any night of the endless tour he’s on, nor would most of his audience know the story that inspired that song if he were to sing it. And all but the most devoted fans of the old Simon and Garfunkel oeuvre have forgotten or never knew the lyrics to “He Was My Brother,” a song commemorating the courage of freedom riders that appeared on Simon and Garfunkel’s debut album in 1964.

In fact, even the phrase “freedom riders” is largely being forgotten in a nation with a very short memory and a very brief attention span.

But Karen Duncanwood was a freedom rider back in the summer of 1964, and she does remember Stokely Carmichael, and a whole lot of other people, too, people with whom she went to Mississippi when riding those buses was likely to be accompanied by spitting, taunts and the threat of getting beaten up by Southern rednecks who were similar to and different from the slightly more subtle racists who are still in our midst even in an America some optimists defined as a “post-racial society” after we elected our first African-American president.

For our interview, we sat on the deck in my back yard in Magalia, drinking coffee on a pleasant summer morning nearly a half-century after her Mississippi summer. She shows me a copy of her high-school yearbook, and as she talked it was easy to see flashes of the young girl who’d just finished her first year of college at San Francisco State. She was barely 20 years old, about to board a bus headed to the heart of Mississippi darkness to confront what she now refers to as “American apartheid.”

“It began when I was walking past a table that SNCC [the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee] had set up on campus,” she said. “I glanced at pictures of church burnings and people getting sprayed with fire hoses, but I wasn’t immediately in sympathy with the SNCC people. I saw them as protesters, and I didn’t want anything to do with it. I was the daughter of a blue-collar family, and up until then I thought the policeman was your friend. But something about those pictures kept calling me back again and again, to look and to learn.”

Those pictures—and the literature on that SNCC table—aroused her conscience. “I thought it was appalling that people got killed for wanting to vote,” she explained. “I didn’t know that much.”

But she was about to learn. She signed up to take part in what came to be called “Freedom Summer,” traveling from the Bay Area to Ohio for training in the techniques of nonviolence. It was all in the interest of registering black people to vote.

“When we arrived [in Ohio],” she recalled, “our first training orientation session began with words from Rita Schwerner, Mickey Schwerner’s wife. She told us that her husband and two others had been missing 16 hours in Mississippi and would probably not be found alive. I remember being utterly astounded that a murder could have already taken place. I was in the second group of volunteers; Mickey Schwerner had been in the first. They went into Mississippi a week before us.”

(For readers who did not know or may have forgotten, Schwerner was brutally murdered on June 21 of that year, along with James Chaney and Andrew Goodman. Their deaths provided context for the 1988 movie Mississippi Burning, a film many people believe gives too much credit to the FBI’s role in tracking down the murderers of the slain civil-rights workers, and too little credit to the people in the black community, who were, in Duncanwood’s words, “the real agents of change.”)

Rita Schwerner was followed on that orientation program by Fannie Lou Hamer, a woman whose name would take a place in the history of the civil-rights movement.

“Fannie Lou Hamer was an astoundingly strong woman, a black sharecropper from the Mississippi Delta,” Duncanwood said, “and when she got up on the stage and started singing ‘Go Tell It on the Mountain,’ the walls rocked. That’s when I first learned the power of gospel music in fighting fear.”

Next came Robert Moses, a man Duncanwood remembered in vividly reverential tones, calling him a “Gandhian figure.” Moses, one of those people being too rapidly forgotten, was the field coordinator for SNCC and co-director of the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO), which was made up of SCLC, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the NAACP, and C.O.R.E. (the Congress of Racial Equality).

In Duncanwood’s memory, Robert Moses was “a very conflicted man at that particular moment because he was worried that some of the people he was training might die. Even at the last minute, he was having second thoughts about it. He said that any of us who wanted to quit the project could return to our safe homes, and he pledged there would be no condemnation of us at all.”

A few people did leave, but the overwhelming majority stayed, comprising a delegation of 400 to 500 volunteers.

Then the training began in earnest, five or six days of preparation for the mission they’d taken on.

“We spent a lot of time being trained in nonviolent resistance,” she said. They were taught how to fall to the ground, roll up in a ball, protect their stomachs, and put their hands over their necks and heads so that if hit by billy clubs, it would do less damage.

“This was quite sobering to students from the Northern and Western states,” Duncanwood said. “We’d never been bullied by the police. It took a while to get used to the reality of all this, and to learn how to not respond sarcastically or violently to aggression.”

They also learned that the local black population was terrified of attempting to register to vote. People had lost their jobs, been kicked off of land they’d been sharecropping for generations, then had no home all of a sudden. Some had been murdered for merely attempting to register to vote, not even for voting.

They also learned that a poll tax was in place, in which dirt-poor people who lived on a couple hundred dollars a year had to pay a fee in order to register to vote. These were people who didn’t even have cars to get to the county courthouse to register.

“I think back to the training now, and how the police operated with impunity, doing whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted, to whomever they wanted,” Duncanwood said. “They functioned like a private army in some South American dictatorship.”

When the training was completed, the freedom riders boarded a bus to Memphis, where they slept on a church floor, then boarded a train for Jackson, Miss.

“We boarded trains because buses weren’t safe to take us to Mississippi at that time,” Duncanwood said. “There was so much publicity about our coming that we were very visible targets for shotguns and Molotov cocktails, and people who wanted to flatten the tires of the buses so they could be attacked. It’s harder to stop and burn a train.”

Ironically, her contingent was destined for a town that bore the same name as the one they’d departed from in Ohio—Canton. Awaiting them first was a delegation of very angry white folks.

“Canton was a town of 10,000 people,” Duncanwood recalled, “about 10 miles from Jackson. There were more blacks than whites in that county, but they had not been able to elect a single black official in the nearly hundred years since Reconstruction because people were being kept from voting, suppressing the majority. It was segregation and apartheid kept in place by a system of terror.”

That terror was part of Karen Duncanwood’s welcome to Mississippi, the crowd of whites shouting “go home, outside agitators, you’re not wanted here,” and other less polite taunts and epithets.

“But a little farther up the road a bigger crowd of black people was waiting to welcome us,” she remembered. “We were taken in private cars to a black church. We were barely inside and there was a loud pounding on the church door. It was the sheriff. He told us we were unwanted guests of the county, that we’d not been invited, that we should leave right away. He warned us that the men among us would be beaten up by the ‘Nigra’ men, and that the women would be violated.”

At the beginning of his remarks, the sheriff had said he’d take questions at the end. “Naïve me,” Duncanwood said, “I asked him that since the crowd that welcomed us was bigger than the crowd that said we weren’t welcome, could it maybe be that we were, in fact, invited? The sheriff glared at me, and a black woman, older and wiser, whispered that maybe I’d better just keep quiet.”

The sheriff then demanded that the new arrivals go with him to the station to be registered and have their mug shots taken. “We had our pictures taken,” Duncanwood said, “with numbers in front of us, as though we were criminals.”

After the local constabulary had made an official record of their presence, they were released.

“Later that night, we went out to Valley View, a cluster of 20-25 houses with a little grocery store and two gas pumps another 10 miles past Canton. Extremely rural. At first we slept on the floor of what we called The Freedom House, a house someone had donated to the project. We couldn’t get a phone there because the phone company was racist and wouldn’t install one. In the back room was a CB radio that allowed us to communicate with the Canton office.

“The house was unfurnished, so every night at dusk we nailed up blankets in front of the windows and turned out the lights so we wouldn’t be shotgun targets. We crawled on our hands and knees to the back room so they couldn’t tell when we were using the CB radio. There were probably six or seven or us staying there. Some of the others had moved out to live with families in the community.”

I mentioned how brave those local black people must have been to take them in. After all, they would still be there when the freedom riders had come and gone.

“Amen to that,” Duncanwood said. “It took amazing courage. A white grocery store owner had her store firebombed simply because she sold us cold sodas.”

Then the work Duncanwood had come to do began.

“I was assigned to be a freedom school teacher for the project, and several of us met at the black church out in Valley View. We were to teach remedial skills that would prepare people to register to vote, and black history to help people gain the courage and the self-respect that would make them want to vote.

“The irony was that I didn’t know any black history, so I was reading black history about two chapters ahead of what I was teaching, hoping against hope that my students wouldn’t ask me any questions I couldn’t answer. I had gone to a white high school in Novato, and my teacher taught us that slaves had been happy in slavery because they sat around all day eating watermelon. Learning about the slave rebellions was eye opening to me.”

Eyes were being opened on both sides of the racial divide.

“The kids sort of worshipped us because they had never been around white people,” Duncanwood explained. “Our delegation was mixed-race, but overwhelmingly white. The strategy of the summer project had been that if a bunch of primarily white college students came to Mississippi, the press would follow, and the racism, brutality and degradation would be exposed because now it was happening to white people.”

She stayed for a while with some older people who had five acres of land, a vegetable garden and some chickens. “Talking to them was like talking across centuries,” Duncanwood said. “They were in their 70s, and they’d never shaken hands with a white person in their lives. We realized how strong and effective this internalized discrimination had become, this ingrained sense that they were seen as inferior.

“The grandmother said to us one day, ‘I’m going to the market to go buy some chickens.’ They probably had 25 chickens. We looked at her and said, ‘Why are you buying chickens when you raise chickens?’ She said, ‘Oh, we eat those chickens, but we didn’t think you would.’ They thought because they’d raised them, they weren’t good enough for us.”

Duncanwood then moved in with a sharecropper and her children for a month or two.

“When I got there, the only thing in her kitchen was flour, salt, lard, pepper and baking powder. The first expense stipend check I got from a support group in Ohio seemed like Christmas to the family because we went to the store and bought groceries. … I’ll never forget going to the store with that family.”

The expansion of Karen Duncanwood’s cultural horizons extended to picking cotton, a chore she hated.

“It just tore up your hands,” she said. “There’s no way you can avoid getting pricked. I tried picking cotton for only one day, and I couldn’t do it for more than an hour. The sharecroppers worked from dawn to dusk and they lived in shacks with no heat. The sacks you dragged behind you could hold up to a hundred pounds of cotton. The stamina required for that back-breaking work was amazing.”

Not only was the work hard, but the system also was thoroughly rigged against the sharecroppers.

“It was a white power structure that determined everything,” she explained. “The first time I ever understood institutional racism was when I saw how they doled out the fertilizers and the pesticides that determined how well you did with your crop. White farmers got richer and richer, and black farmers got poorer and poorer, and they began to shrink the crop allotments because the only way you could gain growing permission for more acreage was through attending meetings, but only the white farmers received notice of when those meetings were taking place. Racism isn’t about individual bigotry; it’s about a policy and a network of white community control of every avenue of advancement.”

Throughout our conversation, I kept wondering what the young Karen Duncanwood’s parents must have been going through as her daughter was spending that perilous time in Mississippi.

“My mother came from Scotland, through Ellis Island,” Duncanwood said. “And she was a believer in the American dream, like a lot of first-generation immigrants, believing that America was the land of opportunity. She believed in the goodness of the country, and she was patriotic in the uninitiated sense.

“My dad was a milkman. … When I told my dad I wanted to go to college, he got a pained look on his face. College was for people with money he didn’t have.”

In those days, though, state colleges were nearly free. Duncanwood worked part time and obtained grants. “As far as my going to Mississippi was concerned, he didn’t think it was a wise thing for me to do, but he already knew that I was pretty determined to go.”

Her dad may not have wanted her to go, but he was proud of her experience, as she learned much later.

“He carried clippings of stories about the civil-rights workers,” she said, “and he showed all his favorite customers on his milk route.”

In many ways, Freedom Summer was a failure. White segregationists effectively blocked efforts to register black voters, and the Mississippi Democratic Party banned them outright. In response, COFO focused on registering members of an alternative organization, the racially integrated Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, which was led by many of the same people Duncanwood had met during Freedom Summer. The goal was to challenge the all-white Mississippi delegation at the Democratic National Convention that fall in Atlantic City.

Duncanwood was on her way to the convention when she heard news of a Ku Klux Klan burning about 40 miles away from where she’d been staying in Mississippi. She broke into a cold sweat. “I couldn’t stop shaking for a full 10 minutes,” she says.

Although the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party delegation was not seated, the event marked a turning point in the history of democracy in America. The group’s challenge to Mississippi’s segregationist delegation was referred to the Credentials Committee, which televised its proceedings, allowing the nation to watch the MFDP delegates as they gave testimony. That’s when the aforementioned Fannie Lou Hamer became a household name, after she gave a powerfully moving portrayal of her brutalized life as a sharecropper on a cotton plantation and the retaliation inflicted on her for trying to register to vote.

Although members of the MFDP were devastated by their treatment at the convention, Americans in general were outraged by the injustice of it, and that gave great impetus to passage of the historic Voting Rights Act the following year. In that sense, Freedom Summer was a tremendous success.

During our conversation, Duncanwood had told me about her son, Ryan, now 40, who was born with cerebral palsy. She mentioned him again in a subsequent email message.

“Ryan uses a wheelchair and speaks through a communication device,” she wrote. “When he was growing up, I spoke in a few U.S. history classes in his school about my Freedom Summer experiences. Those experiences contributed in uncountable ways to the work he and I both did to help get the Americans with Disabilities Act passed.

“We always taught Ryan that the roots of his disability-rights movement are in the black South where the country learned that common people could band together and change things. Years ago, when my ex-husband had a teachers union convention in New Orleans, Ryan and I joined him for the last two days, and then we took Ryan on a tour of historic civil-rights sites in the South, visiting the church where the four little girls died when it was bombed in Birmingham, Ala., and the Rosa Parks Museum in Montgomery.”

They also visited the church where she had taught Freedom School. After she left the South, the church was “bombed and burned to the ground by sheriff’s deputies who wore uniforms by day and Klan robes by night,” she said. “We were so glad to see the congregation had somehow managed to rebuild their church—this time in brick, so it wouldn’t burn again.”

A few days after the interview in my back yard, I called her and asked if there was anything she wanted to add.

“That summer in Mississippi was the most soul-searing experience of my life,” she said. “It made me an activist. It taught me to ask questions and to challenge what I hear. It happened totally by accident when I walked by that SNCC table on campus in the spring of 1964. I’m from a very patriotic military family, a blue-collar kid who went to Mississippi and later to Cuba, and I had this rich collection of experiences that would never have happened if I hadn’t gotten on that bus. It was the fundamental education of my life.”