Mississippi Notebook: Freedom Summer June-August 1964

By Nicholas von Hoffman and Henry Herr Gill

One of those who watched and was watched in the turbulent summer of 1964 was Chicago Daily News reporter Nicholas von Hoffman. 
Through ten tense weeks and over 6000 miles of dusty roads and highways, from the Delta to the piney hills to the Gulf, von Hoffman studied the state of mind of the State of Mississippi. 
Mississip

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ebooks for Students, Ltd.
• Release date: Jan 4, 2016
• ISBN: 9780985034573

Book preview

Table of Contents

Publisher's Note

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Photographs Part 1

FOREWARD

Maps

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Photographs Part 2

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Afterword

EndNotes

Mississippi Notebook

Freedom Summer June-August 1964

by Nicholas Von Hoffman

Photographs by Henry Herr Gill

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Washington, D.C.

Copyright

Copyright © 1964 by Nicholas Von Hoffman

Published by Ebooks for Students, Ltd. January, 2016

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Washington, D.C. [phone]

Comments and corrections to [e-mail]. 

THE LINES ON P. 64 ARE FROM THE WASTE LAND IN Collected Poems 1909-1962 BY T. S. ELIOT,

 COPYRIGHT, 1936, BY HARCOURT, BRACE AND WORLD, INC. ©, 1963, 1964, BY T. S. ELIOT.

REPRINTED BY PERMISSION OF THE PUBLISHER.

Publisher's Note

We are excited to bring this book back to readers. Nicholas Von Hoffman still has much to say about life in the United States. The columns in this book about political rights, political participation, and about attempts to suppress other people's political participation introduce topics have not gone away.

Reading his accounts of this major effort of outsiders, mostly black and white college students, to work with people in a community at serious risk to the lives of both outsiders and insiders, is inspiring. Von Hoffman had the energy to write about such large stories as this work of over a thousand college students in the Mississippi Delta in the summer of 1964. This work is now known as Freedom Summer or the Mississippi Summer Project.

When I saw Von Hoffman in the Washington Post in the 1980s, his was the first story I read that day even before the sports section. His political reporting was that fresh and energetic.

And one of the topics of this book, somehow implicit, is now among the largest challenges facing the United States: what to do with pockets of poverty that last generation after generation? In this case in 1964, Nick was writing about the Mississippi Delta. Today he could be writing about the lives of African-Americans in West Baltimore which the Post is now covering, or the stories about the declining life expectancy of white men without college educations. He would be writing about how other countries protect the lives of people in low-paying service jobs. He would talk about communities especially battered by globalization.

If Von Hoffman, now retired to the coast of Maine, was still writing he would be bringing back stories about these topics. Would he travel to Germany to learn more about the famous German apprenticeship programs which connect non-college youth to good jobs? He might ask why Congress vetoed funding for these programs in the past.

Or he would he be suggesting how to pay for the new infrastructure and apprenticeship programs the country needs? Is it time to return to the 90% top tax rate on the extremely rich which were in place during the prosperous years of President Eisenhower in the 1950s? Somehow this top marginal rate did not discourage the business community in the 1950s. But most of all, Von Hoffman would still be complaining and bringing in fresh information and insights about difficult political challenges. This is why his writing can still inspire us.

Jim McCabe

Ebooksforstudents.org

January, 2016

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

MOST of the material in this book, both text and pictures, first appeared in the Chicago Daily News, which has graciously permitted its reuse in book form.

Such errors, inaccuracies, and faults as the book may contain are the writer’s responsibility. He can defend himself only by pleading that the work is, as its title says, a notebook, not a definitive history: however, the idea of describing the Mississippi summer of 1964 in this form and scope, a distinctly new direction for American journalism, belongs to the Chicago Daily News’ executive editor, Lawrence S. Fanning.

Would that every editor could give every writer the same understanding direction and comforting support.

I owe a like debt to our newspaper’s city editor, Robert Rose, and his assistant. Dean Schoelkopf, both of whom worked long and, I suspect, trying hours discussing the manuscripts with me and preparing them for publication. Then too, I must thank my colleague, Lois Wille, for reading and criticizing the work and providing me with moral support when the whole thing looked impossible and inexorable deadlines were having to be met.

I should also like to thank Henry Gill, my Mississippi traveling companion, whose magnificent photographic portrait of the state appears in this book, and for his patience in putting up with my odd notions of where to go and whom to see.

Lastly, I should like to express my obligation to Karl Fleming of Newsweek magazine and Claude Sitton of the New York Times for so much valuable information and many hours of good companionship when it was sorely needed during this distracted summer.    

Chicago, September, 1964

Photographs Part 1 

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FOREWARD

I KNOW we’ve had a hundred years. I know that, and I'm ashamed to ask it, but we need more time. If we had more time, we’d work it out. I’m sure we would. I still have faith in the people of my state."

So speaks a Hattiesburg doctor, a Mississippian who describes himself to northern visitors, but not his fellow townsmen, as a moderate. There are many like him in the state, men who know there must be change and are ready to accept it, and even work for it. When they ask for more time, they ask for it in the belief that the best hope for the best change for the state they love is through the actions of Mississippians themselves.

Yet in the spring of 1964 neither moderate nor anybody else in white Mississippi was able to bring himself to say that the century of grace had expired, that the time was up, and something would have to be done immediately. The most that people like the doctor could do was to extend themselves into a mournful and backward-looking sympathy for the hundreds of college students, ministers, doctors, and lawyers who were to come into the state to begin the revolution.

I’m not questioning the motives of these civil rights workers, the doctor went on. "I’ve talked to some of them. I invited them to my office because I wanted to find out what kind of people they are. They made a good case for themselves.

"I talked to two of their ministers. I thought one was very sensible. I was impressed by what he had to say. The other was the ‘but-but’ type of person—always trying to break in with a ‘yes, but.’ I told him I thought he was too excitable, and he agreed maybe he was.

You see, I know most of them coming into our state are fine people. I know they’ve come here to do what they think is right, but they don’t know us. They’re doing it the wrong way. They’re forcing what can’t be forced. We need time, though Heaven knows we haven’t put the time we’ve had to much use.

In fact, a case could be built to show that Mississippi has put the time since the 1954 Supreme Court school desegregation decision to quite effective use. The time has been used to equip and perfect every organ of government and virtually every private institution to fight any favorable change in the position of the more than 40 per cent of the population that is Negro. The time has been used to cauterize the society against the effects of change when, as at the University of Mississippi, a Negro was enrolled by the United States Army.

In the interval between 1954 and the spring of 1964 it became treasonable in this state—which thinks of itself as a sovereign nation in loose affiliation with the rest of America—to say that ultimately the Constitution will have to be obeyed. The years were spent displaying more Confederate flags and making speeches to gullible Mississippi white men about preserving the white race against foreign attack from Communist government officials in Washington and Communist bankers in New York.

Then, with the news that the civil rights movement would make its first great effort in the state this summer, the white population fell into a frenetic boil of emotion and activity.

A state legislator emptied a Jackson restaurant of customers by rushing in and shouting that a Negro cook had poisoned the food. Men armed and did close-order drill after work to protect themselves against the rape squads that they were sure would form part of an invading civil rights army.

Official appeals to let the authorities handle things during this crisis confirmed the people in their fears. It was to be a second Reconstruction, and the Mississippi folk memory of the first Reconstruction would have