Davis W. Houck - Black Bodies in the River: Searching for Freedom Summer

RACE, RHETORIC, AND MEDIA SERIES

Davis W. Houck, General Editor

SEARCHING FOR FREEDOM SUMMER

Davis W. Houck

The University Press of Mississippi is the scholarly publishing agency of the Mississippi Institutions of Higher Learning: Alcorn State University, Delta State University, Jackson State University, Mississippi State University, Mississippi University for Women, Mississippi Valley State University, University of Mississippi, and University of Southern Mississippi.

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Portions of this work appeared in altered form in a forum section of Rhetoric Review 36, no. 4 (2017).

Any discriminatory or derogatory language or hate speech regarding race, ethnicity, religion, sex, gender, class, national origin, age, or disability that has been retained or appears in elided form is in no way an endorsement of the use of such language outside a scholarly context.

Copyright 2022 by University Press of Mississippi

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Manufactured in the United States of America

First printing 2022

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Houck, Davis W., author.

Title: Black bodies in the river : searching for Freedom Summer / Davis W. Houck.

Other titles: Race, rhetoric, and media series.

Description: Jackson : University Press of Mississippi, [2022] | Series: Race, rhetoric, and media series | Includes bibliographical references and index. |

Identifiers: LCCN 2021061607 (print) | LCCN 2021061608 (ebook) | ISBN 9781496840790 (hardback) | ISBN 9781496840783 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9781496840813 (epub) | ISBN 9781496840806 (epub) | ISBN 9781496840837 (pdf) | ISBN 9781496840820 (pdf)

Subjects: LCSH: Mississippi Freedom Project. | African AmericansCivil rightsMississippiHistory. | Civil rights movementsMississippiHistory20th century.

Classification: LCC E185.93.M6 H588 2022 (print) | LCC E185.93.M6 (ebook) | DDC 323.1196/07307620904dc23/eng/20220112

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021061607

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021061608

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

TO INGRID HOUCK

August 7, 1943April 16, 2021

Whose memory remains vibrant, in these pages and elsewhere.

And who is missed terribly.

This has been a hard project to complete. So hard in fact that I let it go for several years, content just to let it collect dust on my desk and remain unretrieved on my hard drive. I didnt send it out to colleagues, friends, or family for review. I didnt send anything in for a conference submission. Always there had been an urgency to get my work published, out in the public eye. But save for a quick colloquium in the pages of Rhetoric Review, I just ignored it, pretended it didnt really exist. I cant give you a good explanation why.

And then young Black men started dying (again) at the hands of police officers. Weekly, sometimes daily it seemed, video would surface of yet another Black man losing his life at the end of a police-issued pistol. Or a white knee. The excuse always seemed to be the same: I feared for my life

In the midst of the latest racial madness a friend called and asked, Hey, are you ever going to do anything with that Black Bodies in the River manuscript? Id let him, and pretty much only him, read it years earlier. At his instigation I dusted the manuscript off, read it again, and decided that it was worthy of a readership, that the cultural moment seemed right to have it participate in a much larger conversation. And so I set about to revise it, update it, and get feedback.

Three people in particular gave this project a lot of their critical energy. Ira Allen at Northern Arizona University didnt rest until hed read every sentence, every endnote, and raised questions accordingly. He did it the old-fashioned way, not with Microsoft. I had the privilege of teaching him back in 2013, but we both know whos teaching whom these days. Jack Selzer, recently retired from Penn State Universitys English department, also did some heavy lifting when it came to editing, reading, asking questions, and making suggestions. Jack is a fellow scholar of the movement in Mississippi and an enthusiastic traveler, and I am grateful for his patient counsel. And Mike Hogan, also recently retired from Penn State University and the Communication Arts program: nobody edits my work with his attention to detail. Nobody asks better questions. And so to Ira, Jack, and Mike, thank you.

I had many other superb readers: Wanda Lynn Fenimore, Ray Fleming, Brian Graves, Dave Tell, Devery Anderson, Amos Kiewe, Mary Ealey, Carol Weigle, Ed King, Fowler Skip Martin, Kyle Jones, and Beauvais McCaddon each added to whats in these pages. My thanks. As for the many eccentricities that remain, I take full ownership.

The unwieldy story that follows could not have been told well without careful attention to the 1963 Freedom Voteits aims, how it quickly evolved, its many audiences, and of course its politics; it was a political campaign, after all. Over many years of friendship, the lieutenant governor on that ticket, Rev. Ed King from Jackson, Mississippi, has guided my understanding of that critical five-week campaign in the fall of 1963. Without it, frankly, there is no Summer Project, no Freedom Summer. Rev. King sacrificed a lot to answer Bob Mosess call to create an interracial ticket, a ticket and a platform that Black Mississippians could rally behind and actually vote for. I am humbled to call him a good friend.

In telling the story of the Freedom Vote, though, I didnt want to rehash the existing narrative, one told expertly by Joseph Sinsheimer and Bill Lawson. Through the extant archival documents, and newspaper records maintained by Stanford and Yale, we have a pretty good idea of who actually traveled east and south to help organize that frenetic campaign. To my mind, these fifty to sixty undergraduates set the nation on a course that would forever change its racial history. I wanted to find them, if only to say thank you. Holt Ruffin opened up the Stanford part of the story for me, by returning a strangers odd Facebook Messenger query. Fowler Skip Martin let me in on his private stash of documents, his remarkable memory, and the inner workings of the Stanford Daily, where he and Ilene Strelitz ran a fairly sophisticated media operation, one that clearly had the president of the universitys attention. Frank Dubofsky, the erstwhile pulling guard on the football team, also shared memories from his few days racing across the country to help organize this quixotic political happening. He admitted that resisting the siren song of Al Lowenstein, his professor the year prior, was simply not in the cards. Dwight Clark, not the Dwight Clark of San Francisco 49ers fame, but dean-level fame at Stanford, also helped me understand the administrative dynamics at the university. The Yale side of the Freedom Vote story remains to be told in greater detail, even as the Yale Daily News is a terrific source of information. Frank Basler shared with me his memory of getting arrested for passing out campaign literature in Indianola, even as the Justice Department quickly arrived at the local jail to interview him. He was headed back to New Haven after only two days in state.