Freedom on my Mind: Mississippi Voter Registration in the 1960's
"A generation ago, Mississippi was a state like no other. Its blacks were free in name only, second class citizens in a system unchanged since the turn of the century."
Freedom on my Mind (1994) is a wonderful documentary about the Mississippi Freedom Summer of 1964, starting with events in 1960, and ending with the disillusion of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP). The stories of dozens of activists (some well-know, others forgotten) and reals of archival footage create a powerful story about racism, the civil rights movement, the dead-end of electoral politics, and the seeds of the Black Power movement and uprisings across the latter half of the decade.
The Thirteenth Amendment was ratified in 1865. In response, Mississippi becomes the first of the former Confederate states to enact laws (Black Codes) limiting the rights of blacks. Other Southern states followed, and the Ku Klux Klan (known to its members as "The Invisible Empire of the South") was formed in Pulaski, Tennessee. Slowly, state-by-state, former slaves were franchised, and in 1870 the Fifteenth Amendment was passed, giving black men the right to vote.
But the law was not enforced, and many southern states resisted under the banner of "state's rights."
The Supreme Court's infamous 'separate but equal' ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson encouraged the expansion of Jim Crow, and by 1910, every state in the former Confederacy had a system of legalized segregation and disfranchisement.
White southern democrats (Dixiecrats) had disfranchised Mississippi's blacks in their 1890 constitution, which required barriers like poll taxes, residency requirements, and subjective literacy tests. After decades of violence and repression under Jim Crow (upheld by the police and white citizens' councils), most blacks did not bother trying to register. "We, the south, will fight to the end," read the seal of one citizens' council.
(The KKK in Mississippi)
The film starts with Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground playing the background. The song was made by Blind Willie Johnson in 1927. Johnson was born in Pendleton, Texas, in 1897, and both of his parents were sharecroppers. Blinded by his stepmother at the age of seven, Johnson lived a tragic life. In 1977, Carl Segan selected Dark Was the Night for the Voyager Golden Record. Nothing, said Segan, evokes the human emotion of loneliness better than Johnson's song.
Bob Moses - field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and co-director of the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) (an umbrella organization for the major civil rights groups working in Mississippi that included SNCC, CORE, the NAACP, and SCLC) - was the main organizer for the Freedom Summer project. Mississippi, explains a young Moses, "was a kind of little South Africa enclave within the United States."
"You could be lynched for eye rape," explains black activist. Children laboring in the cotton fields weren't allowed to go to school, and many were raped by their white employers.
Why the Mississippi Freedom Summer? Only 5% of blacks in Mississippi were registered to vote. Why involve white college students in the struggle register black southerners to vote? Moses understood that "the law only covers certain people in America. It doesn't cover southern blacks. It covers northern blacks a little. It covers northern white a lot."
"People did things because someone they knew or someone from their community was involved. If one of us got arrested there would be senators and reporters on the phone," explains one white activist.
Certain contradictions are inevitably raised, explains Moses: "what does it say that you have to have a white body to protect a black body? Does America have any obligation to protect me, like they protect a senator's son from Harvard or Yale? I would be a statistic."
One of the most powerful elements in the film are the personal testimonies from those involved. Struggle changes people, gives them purpose and meaning. In the process of changing the world, we change ourselves; by changing ourselves, we change world.
"I had always wanted to be in a position where I could fight the white man and win. It was ordinary people who were challenging this. It was the call, the first time I had heard the call."
"The excitement was this feeling of comradery, was knowing that you had someone who would put their life on the line, just like you. And the belief that you were invincible, the belief that your cause was right."
"For the first time in my life I'm treated as an equal, as part of a community, as somebody to be listened to, who has something to contribute."
"The movement was the beginning of me finding myself."
"The movement said I was somebody."
"It unleashed yearning in me."
"I felt like I had come home."
" I grew up believing that the police were your friends."
"It was an incredible high to all the sudden to be with women, and hear them talk about experience similar to our own. that's when it dawned on is that it wasn't private, it wasn't person, it was political."
In September of 1961, E.H. Hurst, a Mississippi legislator, shot and killed a black man, Herbert Lee, involved in the registration campaign. Hurst claimed self-defense, and was acquitted. "Herbert Lee signed the struggle in blood," says Moses; "it was clear now they would have to kill us to get us out of here."
Scared but undeterred, the Freedom Summer movement made its way to Mississippi, and began registering voters and creating Freedom Schools.
On June 12, 1963 Medgar Evers, field secretary of the Mississippi NAACP, was assassinated at his home in Jackson by Byron De La Beckwith, a member of the white supremacist White Citizens' Council. An all-white jury failed to reach a verdict in Beckwith's trail (he was later convicted in 1994), and Evers' police escort (conspicuously absent the day of his murder) were believed to be members of the Klan.
(Medgar Evers)
One year later, in June of 1964, word started to spread that three Mississippi civil rights workers - James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner - were missing. First the burned-out car appeared, then the bodies were found on August 12, 1964. What many suspected was later revealed: the cops and Klan worked hand-in-hand to murder the three men.
In an attempt to reform the democratic party and maneuver within the political system, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) was formed in 1964. It was meant to challenge the establishment of the white-only Mississippi Democratic Party. It would be up to the national party to choose between the two groups at the National Democratic Party Convention. But president Johnson, Hubert Humfrey, and the entire political establishment used threats, lies, and deceit to stop the MFDP.
"We left Atlantic City with this profound sense of betrayal. It undermined my faith in what was called the democratic process in this country," explains one participant.
"If you'd done everything you could, where do you go next?"
"My hopes and dreams about being part of the democratic party were dead."
"There's room for these people to be recipients of programs, but not for power sharing."
While not everyone drew the same conclusions, Freedom Summer participants witnessed the pitfalls of electoral politics in a class-based society, and the power of the capitalist state. Neither political party was open to an insurgent campaign, and while a black man would be elected president in 2008, there is still not, and never will be, an opportunity for poor and working class people to control the two-party system.
But the Mississippi Freedom Summer can by no means be called a failure. The right to vote is a progressive demand that empowers the working class, and is something all socialists should support. In many ways the Freedom Summer was just the continuation of struggle that would inevitably hit certain limits within the framework of bourgeois democracy (that is, freedom only for the rich and property owners).
Furthermore, the Mississippi voter registration drive is one of many examples of people coming together across racial divisions. For any socialist movement to succeed, individuals will have to work together, and people once divided by race, sex, etc. must stand united.
Many of the rights won from the state in the civil rights era have been eroded, are under attack, or have been completely destroyed. While Jim Crow no longer exists in name, poor and working-class African-Americans are in many ways no better off than they were 50 years ago.
A straight line can be drawn from the dissolution and anger felt by black Americans in 1965, and the rise of the Black Power movement just one year later. The same can be said for white youth on universities and across the country. Having failed to work within the system, and soon to witness their heroes murdered, activists turned to Lenin, Mao, Stalin, Che, and the third world.
"We lost a group of black people who were looking at that process as a legitimate process. You also began to disillusion a whole generation of white people."
We end with the words of Curtis Hayes: "I wish it were possible for young people today to experience the kind of commitment and comradery that we were a part of...to hear of someone in danger, and see people run to that danger as hungry men would run to food, to give a hand, to give help...there aren't words truly to explain it...I still look for that experience...for that commitment to something greater than the individual."
The struggle gives purpose; long live the struggle.
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