When Civil-Rights Unity Fractured

By Peniel E. Joseph, The New York Times

30 June 14

ifty years ago this month, more than a thousand predominantly young, predominantly white volunteers arrived in Mississippi to help local blacks register to vote. “Freedom Summer” is remembered as both a high point of interracial democratic activism and a low point in racial violence, most notably in the brutal murder of three civil rights workers, two of whom were white.

Yet Freedom Summer was also a historical hinge point — a pivotal moment that helped fracture the civil rights movement’s tenuous unity and spur black political radicalism. In many ways the divisions that manifested themselves in 1964 are still with us today, and any attempt to build new interracial coalitions will have to first wrestle with their legacy.

White veterans of Freedom Summer recall the time as a life-changing event in their personal involvement in the movement, the apotheosis of their vision for biracial, harmonious activism. And the experience did inspire many students to stay in the state afterward and work for groups like the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (also known as the S.N.C.C.). Others, most notably the free-speech activist and Berkeley student Mario Savio, took lessons learned that summer back to their own campuses, seeding the fledgling student movements that would grow to a revolutionary fervor by the end of the decade.

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