Although Roy DeBerry was not waiting for white folks to come down to Mississippi and “save” him — a teenager growing up in a segregated society in the summer of 1964 — the factory worker’s son welcomed people like Aviva Futorian.
The young white history teacher from the affluent Chicago suburbs was among hundreds of volunteers — mostly white Northern college students — who descended on Mississippi during what came to be known as “Freedom Summer.” They came to register blacks to vote and to establish “Freedom Schools” and community centers to help prepare those long disenfranchised for participation in what they hoped would be a new political order.
Opposition was brutal. Churches were bombed, volunteers were arrested, beaten and murdered.
“There was real terror in Mississippi,” DeBerry said during a recent visit to his hometown, Holly Springs.
Fifty years later, Freedom Summer stands out as a watershed moment in the long drive for civil rights in the US. Mass resistance to integration started to crumble. Congress took a monumental step toward equal rights.
And scores of young, idealistic volunteers embarked on careers of activism that continue to shape US politics and policy today.
In this vortex of history, lifelong friendships formed between people from vastly different worlds, like a black 16-year-old from Mississippi and a 26-year-old daughter of a Jewish furniture mogul.
Sitting together recently in Futorian’s Chicago condominium, the friends reminisced about taboos that prevented a white woman and black man from sitting next to each other in a car.
“I probably didn’t have as much trepidation as I should have,” said Futorian, now a 76-year-old lawyer. “Because it’s hard to imagine your own death.”
Years of demonstrations by determined local blacks, boycotts, legislative campaigns and bloody pitched battles had not dislodged US segregation.
On March 20, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which had been fighting for integration, announced the “Mississippi Summer Project.” The group concluded it needed a dramatic tactic to draw national attention to the injustices — and putting Northern whites in harm’s way seemed sure to accomplish that.
Volunteers converged for training at a college in Ohio. On June 21, chilling word spread: Three young volunteers — New Yorkers Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner and Mississippi native James Chaney — had vanished while investigating the burning of a black church.
DeBerry had “an independent streak, so when a Freedom School opened, he found his way there.
When Futorian met with a group of black teenage boys, she asked them who were the richest blacks in town, how they earned their living, whether they were involved in the Civil Rights Movement and if not, why not.
“Roy was the only one who knew the answers,” she recalls.
DeBerry says this was his first interaction with a white person “on a social level.”
Through donated books, Futorian introduced him to James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright and other “subversive” black authors. They shared sandwiches at Modena’s Cafe in the “colored” section of town. They worked on voter registration.
They were well aware of the risks they were taking even before Aug. 4, when searchers dug the bodies of the three missing civil rights workers from an earthen dam.
By fall, most of the Northern volunteers had returned home. Aviva Futorian remained. She worked as a field organizer for SNCC and held a college preparatory study group for a few particularly promising students, including DeBerry.
That long, hot summer brought the beginnings of change in Mississippi and beyond. Systematic resistance to integration began fading in the state. Congress passed the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which became law July 2.
The Freedom Summer effort helped create momentum for the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Some believe this activism planted the seeds for history-making events generations later.
“If it hadn’t been for the veterans of Freedom Summer, there would be no [US President Barack] Barack Obama,” longtime US congressman and former SNCC coordinator John Lewis wrote in a memoir.
Michael Schwerner’s widow, Rita Bender, is less optimistic.
She says a refusal by some to recognize past inequities is partly to blame for today’s social ills. Now an attorney in Seattle, she’s dismayed at recent developments — a Supreme Court decision that nullified portions of the Voting Rights Act, voter identification laws. The country, she says, is “moving backward.”
Following a 1995 SNCC reunion in Holly Springs, DeBerry and Futorian began collecting oral histories of those who had lived under Jim Crow in two Mississippi counties. In 2004, they formally launched the Hill Country Project, which has since grown to include education support and economic development.
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