James P. Marshall - Student Activism and Civil Rights in Mississippi: Protest Politics and the Struggle for Racial Justice, 1960-1965

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STUDENT ACTIVISM AND CIVIL RIGHTS IN MISSISSIPPI

STUDENT ACTIVISM
AND
CIVIL RIGHTS
IN
MISSISSIPPI

Protest Politics and the Struggle for Racial Justice, 19601965

JAMES P. MARSHALL

WITH A FOREWORD BY STAUGHTON LYND

Published by Louisiana State University Press
Copyright 2013 by Louisiana State University Press
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
First printing

DESIGNER: Michelle A. Neustrom
TYPEFACE: Chaparral Pro
PRINTER: McNaughton & Gunn, Inc.
BINDER: Dekker Bookbinding
MAPS: Mary Lee Eggert

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Marshall, James P., 1942
Student activism and civil rights in Mississippi : protest politics and the struggle for racial justice, 19601965 / James P. Marshall ; with a foreword by Staughton Lynd.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8071-4984-3 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-8071-4985-0 (pdf) ISBN 9780-8071-4986-7 (epub) ISBN 978-0-8071-4987-4 (mobi) 1. Civil rights movementsMississippiHistory20th century. 2. Student movementsMississippiHistory20th century. 3. African AmericansMississippiPolitics and government20th century. 4. College studentsPolitical activityMississippiHistory20th century. 5. African American college studentsPolitical activityMississippiHistory20th century. 6. African AmericansCivil rightsMississippiHistory20th century. 7. MississippiPolitics and government195158. Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. I. Title.
E185.93.M6M27 2013
323.1196'0730762dc23

2012026512

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

For Rev. Herbert Lee and those martyrs
of the Mississippi movement who gave their lives
to win freedom from racist oppression

For my wife, Esther, and my children, Dan, Gad, and Yael

For my parents who raised me to fight for civil rights and
to live believing that Justice Must Be Done

and

For Staughton Lynd, without whom this life project
would never have come to fruition

There is a street in Itta Bena called Freedom
There is a town in Mississippi called Liberty
There is a department in Washington called Justice
(Sign posted at many civil rights offices)

CONTENTS

FOREWORD

Staughton Lynd

J ames Marshall undertook this study in the 1960s, when he was a Yale undergraduate and I taught American history there.

I had been a teacher at Spelman College in Atlanta from 1961 to 1964 and, no doubt because of this experience, was invited to become the coordinator of Freedom Schools in the 1964 Mississippi Summer Project.

As I have reflected on that summers experience I have formulated certain questions that, so it appears to me, have yet to be fully answered. This process of reflection began when I was walking across the New Haven green in June 1967 and encountered Dave Dennis, who in 1964 had been the principal representative in Mississippi of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and assisted Bob Moses in directing the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO). At breakfast the next morning, Dave told me that the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and CORE staff had initially voted down the idea of inviting hundreds of white college students to Mississippi in summer 1964. The concern of those who opposed the idea was that a multitude of articulate white college students would disrupt the efforts of SNCC and CORE to nurture the self-confidence of Mississippi African Americans in beginning to play a public role as citizens.

Dave said that, after Mississippi staff of the two organizations rejected the idea, he and Bob Moses had insisted that there be another vote and that the project go forward. This was conduct completely uncharacteristic of the extremely democratic, self-effacing Bob Moses I knew. Years later, first in reading Taylor Branchs biography of Dr. King and then in consulting other sources, it became clear to me that the crucial staff meeting in Hattiesburg where these votes were taken about the Summer Project had been interrupted by a telephone call for Moses. He was informed that Louis Allen, who as an eyewitness to the murder of Herbert Lee had asked the FBI for protection and was about to leave the state, had himself been murdered. Bob left the meeting and drove to southwestern Mississippi, where he talked with Mrs. Allen. When he came back he told his colleagues that there had to be another vote. His conviction as I came to understand it was that the voter registration strategy then being pursued, besides leading to the registration of very few black voters, had brought about the deaths, not of civil rights staff workers, but of courageous black Mississippians like Lee and Allen.

I began to see the 1964 drama in which I had played a small part not as a melodrama in which Good triumphed over Evil, but as a tragedy in the classical Greek sense. Those who feared that the influx of white college students would have a chilling effect on the empowerment of blacks were right, especially when about eighty white volunteers stayed on in Mississippi after Freedom Summer ended, almost doubling the size of the Mississippi SNCC staff. But those who, like Bob Moses, were concerned that the civil rights movement could not responsibly continue a strategy that led to the deaths of the very persons the movement sought to assist, were right also. This, I now believe, was one of several existential dilemmas that the movement had confronted as best it could at the time, but which it was the business of responsible inquiry to assess in retrospect.

I

There are several questions the reader might wish to keep in mind that this book seeks to clarify.

The first is: Was the effort to seat Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) delegates at the Atlantic City convention of the national Democratic Party in August 1964 an organic outgrowth of the step-by-step process that had led to the Freedom Vote in November 1963? When Bob Moses first visited Mississippi at the suggestion of Ella Baker in 1960, he did not pursue a preconceived organizing strategy. Instead he talked with Amzie Moore in the Delta, E. W. Steptoe in Amite County, and other African American local leaders. They told him that they were more interested in voter registration than in equal access to public accommodations, as this was the established practice of NAACP activists in the 1950s.

Mr. Marshall describes how the first two years of organizing around voter registration (196163) led to stalemate, although black candidates had tested the waters by running in the 1962 Congressional primaries. Then he tells how movement organizers improvised an organic, step-by-step process that led to freedom votes in August and November 1963.

Frustrated in their persistent efforts to take Mississippians down to the courthouse to register, movement staff discovered an old Mississippi law that might make possible a process of parallel voting. The words of the statute indicated that a person who thought he was entitled to vote but was denied the opportunity to do so could make out an affidavit. Thousands of such affidavits, it was hoped, would demonstrate the intense desire of excluded African Americans to vote.

The first opportunity to apply the new tactic was the Democratic Party gubernatorial primary in early August. But, in contrast to organizers hope that something like 20,000 would-be-voters would take part, only about 1,000 persons braved hostility at the local polling place to participate in this vote-in.

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