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Local residents share stories of Freedom Summer [The Virginian-Pilot :: ]
[August 25, 2014]

Local residents share stories of Freedom Summer [The Virginian-Pilot :: ]


(Virginian-Pilot (Norfolk, VA) Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) Aug. 25--Barry Clemson and Louis Miller were too young to know any better.

It was 1964, and they were two of the hundreds of volunteers who took part in a bold experiment that became known as Freedom Summer. They caravanned willingly into Mississippi, which, like Virginia and a handful of other Southern states, still resisted integration and equal rights for its black citizens.



But the magnolia state was more sinister. There, the beatings and murders of blacks did not receive police attention and weren't expected to. Members of the Ku Klux Klan and law enforcement often were one and the same.

Mississippi was among the poorest states, and 85 percent of blacks there subsisted below the poverty line.


Members of several civil rights organizations -- including the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC, and the Congress of Racial Equality, or CORE -- planned a summer of change.

The goals: Establish a new political party because blacks were barred from joining existing ones, get more blacks registered to vote, and open Freedom Schools to teach young African Americans reading, math and black history.

The groups wanted to focus the nation's attention on the plight of blacks in the Deep South, so the volunteers they sent into the fray were often America's privileged children. Almost two-thirds were white college students, who could afford the $500 each person was required to carry for bail.

Freedom Summer would prove pivotal. The volunteers' work helped push the passage of the Civil Rights Act that July and the Voting Rights Act the following year. But, by summer's end, students would endure or witness random shootings, more than 1,000 arrests and 80 serious beatings. At least three would be dead.

The events would leave a lasting impression on Clemson and Miller and others who played a role in that long, hot summer 50 years ago.

____ Barry Clemson and three others climbed into his light blue Saab around 3 a.m. on Wednesday, June 24.

They were leaving Western College for Women in Oxford, Ohio, where they'd spent the past week training and learning Mississippi voting laws and nonviolent techniques. They were schooled in basic survival tactics: Carry a jacket to wrap around their heads in case of attack; avoid standing near lit windows, which could make them shooting targets; be wary of cars with no license plates and policemen with no badges.

The mood among the 300 or so students was somber. Two days earlier, Rita Schwerner had stood in front of them and told them that her husband, Michael "Mickey" Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman, both white, and James Chaney, a black staffer, were missing.

The three had arrived in Mississippi, been picked up by police and let go. Then they had vanished.

Clemson's first thought: "They're dead." Clemson, who had turned 23 two weeks earlier, was a student at Penn State when he learned about the voting project. He'd grown up in Alaska, and his family had moved to Pennsylvania when he was 16. He'd appreciated the idea of nonviolence and had become president of the college's peace club.

The civil disobedience cast of the Mississippi project appealed to him, but he had other motivations for volunteering. He was shy, knew more about dogsleds than girls and thought the idea of spending a summer with coeds sounded like a grand adventure.

His group left in the middle of the night so that most miles could be covered during daylight. No one wanted to be driving in Mississippi after dark.

They were a mixed bunch -- three whites and Herbert Randall, an African American photographer -- and that invited them to be stopped by police once they hit the south.

They got lost in the sticks of Kentucky, and Clemson, who was driving, stopped along a rural road so that Randall could pull out a map.

Randall held up a small flashlight. They had taken the bulb out of the overhead dome light so that it wouldn't click on and illuminate people in the car.

Then one of the two women in the back seat gasped.

"Oh my God," she whispered. "There's a police car." Everyone was still. Randall cursed himself. He hadn't wanted to come. He'd told friends that he didn't have to leave his home in New York City to get assaulted. But he'd won a fellowship and was on the trip to document events with his camera.

Now, he thought, "We are going to get killed or beaten before we get to Mississippi." He became frighteningly aware that his door window was partially open and someone was standing a few inches away.

"Is there something wrong?" a voice asked through the window.

No one in the car answered. Randall was too afraid to even take his eyes from the map. He knew he had to respond but did not want to sound terrified.

"We're lost and trying to find the right road." A white arm shot through the window. A finger pointed to where they were and how to get back on the highway.

"Do you understand?" the voice asked. Randall nodded. The officer spoke louder and asked the group: "Do you understand?" They all said yes, and the policeman walked back to his car. All four seemed to exhale in unison.

"OK," Clemson asked, "which way do we go?" Randall was still shaken: "How in the hell do I know?" ____ They arrived on Wednesday afternoon in the southern Mississippi town of Hattiesburg, where Randall was dropped off to stay with a family. Clemson and the others reported to the Freedom House, which was the headquarters of the Council of Federated Organizations, the collection of civil rights groups behind the project.

Clemson emerged from his Saab into a thicket of heat the likes he'd never felt before. He eventually headed to a building where cots were set up for workers. There, he fell asleep.

The next morning, he started his car and thought it sounded odd. It seemed to be misfiring. Maybe the engine needed to get used to the Mississippi climate, too.

He drove to the Freedom House, where a guy eventually told him: "Your car's been shot!" Clemson hadn't noticed it, but a small hole punctured the car's grill. He popped the hood and saw that a bullet had sliced through the cap of his intake manifold. Another worker's car had been shot during the night.

The local papers for months had been running stories about the "invasion" of Northern agitators, and Clemson's car bore licenses plates from Pennsylvania.

That was his welcome to Mississippi.

____ Clemson left that day for Biloxi, where many of the newer volunteers were sent. The town hugged the Gulf Coast, where money seemed to trump even the Klan. Businessmen didn't want violence scaring away tourists.

Clemson shared a bed with a black volunteer in an upstairs room of an older black woman, one of hundreds to house and feed the workers that summer.

Clemson was soon in charge of cataloging the forms that came in from volunteers going door to door to talk about voter registration. He went canvassing for a few days and, like many volunteers, did not know poverty until that summer. Or how afraid the locals were.

Older blacks wouldn't look white volunteers in the eye and deferred to them meekly -- likely as their ancestors did when they worked on plantations a century before. They called the whites "sir" and "ma'am," even though the volunteers were decades younger. They said "yes" obediently, agreeing to go to the courthouse to register even though the workers knew they likely wouldn't.

But the volunteers still wrote down their names and invited them to come to meetings to learn more about voting.

"If you could get people to go to a meeting," Clemson said recently, "they would see 50 other people there, and they would know they were not alone." ____ While Clemson settled in Biloxi, Tom Barnes worked about 2½ hours north as an enlisted air traffic controller at the Naval Auxiliary Air Station outside Meridian.

Barnes, who grew up in Virginia Beach, was counting down the last months of his four-year enlistment when he and several other sailors got an assignment: join the feds in searching for the three missing civil rights workers.

The workers had been arrested Sunday afternoon after leaving a black church that had been burned. Chaney, the driver, was charged with speeding, and his companions were being held for "investigation" and jailed in Philadelphia.

The three were released around 10:30 p.m. and headed back to Meridian, not knowing that carloads of armed men had been called by the sheriff to intercept their station wagon.

That Tuesday, the burnt shell of a '63 Ford was found outside Philadelphia. The case caught the attention of the White House, and federal resources were called in to comb the county's red clay backroads.

Barnes and other sailors left the air-conditioning of the air traffic tower and boarded buses to the area around the Bogue Chitto swamp, where the car had been discovered. The sailors doused themselves with insect repellent and carried walking sticks to ward off water moccasins and copperheads as they waded through rivers and thick brush.

Barnes' group worked for two or three weeks but never found any clue of the missing civil rights workers.

Other parties discovered the bodies of several blacks -- men who had gone missing but had never been searched for.

Then, one day, Barnes and his group were told their work was done. He wasn't sure if the workers had been found, but he was glad to get out of the heat.

____ Louis Miller was 18 that summer, but already an old hand of the movement. Born in Nashville, he attended his first civil rights rally when he was around 12 or 13. The adults looked at the scrawny youngster and told him he was too young to help.

He didn't usually talk back to his elders, but he felt it was necessary.

"I don't need you to fight for me," he said. "I want to fight for my own freedom." Nashville was rife with student-led protests in the early 1960s, and the police started to know Miller from sit-ins, trying to integrate lunch counters. The police would arrest him, his mom would pick him up, and he would be back the next day.

He felt compelled to be involved, and he dropped out of high school for the cause.

When Miller heard of Freedom Summer, he hitched a ride to Selma, Ala., where others were conducting voter registration drives. When he heard about the missing men in Mississippi, he caught a ride to Clarksdale, about three hours north of Philadelphia. Miller had grown up in the church and did skits there, so he volunteered to help teach drama at Clarksdale's Freedom School.

He was told when he arrived in the small town that blacks should be inside by nighttime, when Klansmen started roaming the streets.

One evening, Miller and some of the workers lost track of time and stayed too late at the school. Night greeted him as he stepped outside.

As Miller began walking toward the home of the family that boarded him, he and his friends noticed a car of whites following. They remembered what his host family had told him: If in trouble, head for the tracks.

The railroad tracks, Miller said, were on an embankment, too high for people to see them from below. They scampered up the hill and fell onto their bellies. Miller had been in Mississippi only a short time, but he realized that racism in the Deep South was scarier than anything he'd known in Nashville.

Mississippi felt like a different country.

Miller crawled along the rails until he saw the safety of home.

____ Bob Brown, a law student at the University of Virginia, spent the summer working at a public relations firm in Washington, D.C. The company had the prized task of creating the campaign materials for the Democratic National Convention that August.

The convention, in Atlantic City, N.J., would be a treat for Brown, who was a progressive Democrat and felt that times needed changing, particularly in Virginia. The Portsmouth native had been an undergrad at U.Va. in 1958 when the commonwealth shut several schools in the state, including some in Norfolk, rather than allow blacks and whites to take classes together. He thought it was an egregious abuse of state power.

From D.C., Brown followed the events in Mississippi.

On the morning of Aug. 4, after an informant's tip, FBI agents drove to an earthen dam being built on a farm southwest of Philadelphia. The agents called in earth movers and bulldozers. As the machinery plunged deeper into the earth, swarms of greenish-blue blowflies grew thicker in the 106-degree heat and buzzards began circling nearby trees.

About 15 feet down, the heel of a man's boot appeared. The wedding ring on his left finger matched the description of one worn by Schwer- ner. He had one bullet hole in his chest. More digging revealed Goodman's body, one hand balled around a fistful of red clay, suggesting that he was still alive when buried. He also had a bullet hole in his chest. Chaney lay underneath; he'd been shot three times, once in the head.

During the Democratic convention, Brown was busy with campaign materials but knew that a group called the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party was the buzz of the convention.

The group of blacks and whites was demanding to be seated as delegates instead of the whites-only Democrats from their state. Though they eventually were refused, their public appeal drew national attention and helped change the way delegates were chosen.

Brown, a John F. Kennedy devotee, had known before the summer that he wanted his work to be in voting and civil rights. He left the convention more energized than ever.

____ Change began to happen in Mississippi, and the work done that summer altered the lives of the volunteers who were there.

In 1962, fewer than 7 percent of the state's blacks were registered to vote. Seven years later, close to 67 percent were. That year, Charles Evers -- the older brother of Medgar Evers, an NAACP voting rights activist who'd been gunned down in 1963 -- was elected mayor of Fayette. He was the first black mayor in the state since Reconstruction.

Brown graduated from U.Va. in 1965, moved to Norfolk to join a law practice and worked for years pushing voting rights in Hampton Roads. He helped create nonpartisan, multiracial groups that increased voter registration in Norfolk.

Barnes got out of the Navy in 1964, returned to Virginia, graduated from Old Dominion University and began coaching and teaching history. He retired from Kellam High in 2005 and lives in Virginia Beach.

Miller remained active in civil rights, joining marches in Selma that helped precipitate the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which banned discriminatory voting practices.

Many of the movement's leaders were ministers, and Miller believes working with them set him on his ultimate path. He got his high school equivalency diploma, and he, too, became a preacher. He now pastors the Unity Lutheran Church in Norfolk.

"People like C.T. Vivian, and Rev. Andrew White, they were very compassionate and caring, educated ministers," Miller said recently. "They made me want to be a better person." Barry Clemson, now 73 and living in Norfolk, stayed in the south until 1965, working in Mississippi and Alabama, getting jailed along the way. He graduated from Penn State, collected other degrees, taught and immersed himself in academia. He settled in Norfolk with his second wife, Mary, who pastors a Norfolk church.

The summer of 1964 was a watershed for him. He still remembers, at the training sessions, hearing the singing of Fannie Lou Hamer, a Mississippi farmhand who lost her job, was jailed and tortured for trying to register to vote.

And listening to Jimmy Travis, who was shot in the neck in 1963 after attending a voters' registration meeting in Mississippi.

"What I learned is that the idea of freedom has nothing to do with your external circumstances," Clemson said recently, sitting in his home.

"That doesn't mean you can't be scared though; there were moments when I felt like crapping in my pants. But freedom is a choice. The people in Mississippi were discovering that." Denise M. Watson, 757-446-2504, [email protected] ___ (c)2014 The Virginian-Pilot (Norfolk, Va.) Visit The Virginian-Pilot (Norfolk, Va.) at pilotonline.com Distributed by MCT Information Services

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