Summer of '64
From Social Justice Wiki
"Any feeling of security and preferment was long gone, Jack. This was no longer, if it had ever been to any of them, another chic undergraduate summer adventure. This was ugly. Is was real. It was life-threatening. It was a shock. Welcome to the movement."
When Stokely Carmichael graduated from Howard in 1964, he immediately rejoined SNCC for its Mississippi Summer Project, although he did have his reservations. He was concerned that the project was too big for SNCC: it was trying to accomplish too much and needed too much outside help. However, his loyalty to the movement and to Bob Moses (who had the idea for the summer project) compelled him to join them in Mississippi. The Summer Project involved opening community centers, freedom schools, libraries, and health and legal facilities. Most importantly, it sought to register black voters. However, this was not a normal SNCC voter registration drive; SNCC and other locals developed the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and ran their own election for registered black voters, as a means of showing how much influence the black vote could have. Stokely’s primary job during the Summer Project was to coordinate the voter registration for the Second Congressional (Delta) District, an area of central importance as its residents were 70% black. In total, nearly a thousand volunteers, black and white, arrived in Mississippi during Summer 1964 to participate in the project.
However, the southern media greatly exaggerated the scale and scope of the movement. Many news reports described thousands of irate terrorists who planned to enter the state and create total chaos. As a result, local mobs throught Mississippi burned down churches that were intended to become freedom schools, and even state officials were arming themselves and their cities. The mayor of Jackson increased his police force by fifty percent and bought a bulletproof tank to protect himself. Politics took on a completely militaristic tone, a thug element as Carmichael describes.
Despite the Mississippians’ violent measures, SNCC held strong to the non-violence to which they ascribed, even when the disappearance and presumed deaths of three volunteers—Mickey Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andy Goodman—rocked many SNCC representatives, including Moses and Carmichael, to the core. By the end of the turbulent “Freedom Summer,” Carmichael had registered thousands of voters and showed an ability to take on greater responsibility with SNCC.
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Additional source for this section:
Payne, Charles. I've Got the Light of Freedom. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995.
Quotations on this page taken from Ready for Revolution.