Mississippi: The Long, Hot Summer

By William McCord and Françoise N. Hamlin

In 1964, sociologist William McCord, long interested in movements for social change in the United States, began a study of Mississippi's Freedom Summer. Stanford University, where McCord taught, had been the site of recruiting efforts for student volunteers for the Freedom Summer project by such activists as Robert Moses and Allard Lowenstein. Described by his wife as “an old-fashioned liberal,” McCord believed that he should both examine and participate in events in Mississippi. He accompanied student workers and black Mississippians to courthouses and Freedom Houses, and he attracted police attention as he studied the mechanisms of white supremacy and the black nonviolent campaign against racial segregation.

Published in 1965 by W. W. Norton, his book, Mississippi: The Long, Hot Summer, is one of the first examinations of the events of 1964 by a scholar. It provides a compelling, detailed account of Mississippi people and places, including the thousands of student workers who found in the state both opportunities and severe challenges. McCord's work sought to communicate to a broad audience the depth of repression in Mississippi. Here was evidence of the need for federal action to address what he recognized as both national and southern failures to secure civil rights for black Americans. His field work and activism in Mississippi offered a perspective that few other academics or other white Americans had shared.

Historian Françoise N. Hamlin provides a substantial introduction that sets McCord's work within the context of other narratives of Freedom Summer and explores McCord's broader career that combined distinguished scholarship with social activism.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Release date: Oct 24, 2016
• ISBN: 9781496809377

Book preview

MISSISSIPPI:

The Long, Hot Summer

Civil Rights in Mississippi

Trent Brown, General Editor

MISSISSIPPI:

The Long, Hot Summer

William McCord

Introduction by Françoise N. Hamlin

University Press of Mississippi · Jackson

www.upress.state.ms.us

The University Press of Mississippi is a member of the Association of American University Presses.

Original text © William McCord 1965. Reprinted by the University Press of Mississippi 2016 by permission of Arline McCord. Introduction © University Press of Mississippi 2016.

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

∞

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: McCord, William Maxwell, 1930– author. | Hamlin, Francoise N., author of introduction.

Title: Mississippi : the long, hot summer / William McCord ; introduction by Francoise N. Hamlin.

Description: Jackson : University Press of Mississippi, 2016. | Series: Civil rights in Mississippi | Originally published: New York : Norton, 1965. Includes bibliographical references and index. | Description based on print version record and CIP data provided by publisher; resource not viewed.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016022002 (print) | LCCN 2016015695 (ebook) | ISBN 9781496809377 (epub single) | ISBN 9781496809384 (epub institutional) ISBN 9781496809391 ( pdf single) | ISBN 9781496809407 (pdf institutional) | ISBN 9781496809353 (cloth : alkaline paper) | ISBN 9781496809360 (paper : alkaline paper)

Subjects: LCSH: African Americans—Civil rights—Mississippi—History—20th century. | Mississippi Freedom Project—History. | Civil rights movements—Mississippi—History—20th century. | Mississippi—Race relations—History—20th century. | African American civil rights workers—Mississippi—Biography. | Civil rights workers—Mississippi—Biography. | McCord, William Maxwell, 1930–—Travel—Mississippi. | Sociology—Fieldwork—Mississippi—History—20th century. | Sociologists—United States—Biography. | BISAC: HISTORY / United States / State & Local / South (AL, AR, FL, GA, KY, LA, MS, NC, SC, TN, VA, WV). | SOCIAL SCIENCE / Discrimination & Race Relations. | SOCIAL SCIENCE / Ethnic Studies / African American Studies.

Classification: LCC E185.93.M6 (print) | LCC E185.93.M6 M32 2016 (ebook) | DDC 323.1196/07307620904—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016022002

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

Introduction

Françoise N. Hamlin, 2016

CIVIL RIGHTS movement veterans, current activists, and many historians have carefully constructed particular narratives around the memory of the 1964 Mississippi Summer Project. Freedom Summer, as the collective efforts that year became known, was a social, cultural, and political experiment to spotlight one of the nation’s darker corners. Narratives of that year’s work generally support the strategy that brought hundreds of people who otherwise had no reason to enter Mississippi, and the accounts applaud the results that occurred. Of those volunteers, autobiographies and scholarship highlight the young people, particularly judiciously recruited college students, health care professionals, lawyers, clergy, and the occasional elected officer who crossed the state line that summer to assist in the black freedom struggle that had manifested into a full blown mass of movements in the Magnolia State. Less known are the scholars and researchers who came to witness and study and who ultimately contributed to the struggle. William McCord is one from that group. This book is important because it represents an immediate social scientific study of the Summer Project. It is rare in its speed to publication (written in less than six months) and the positionality of McCord as a participant observer.

By the 1960s, movements for social change blossomed globally. As a sociologist, William McCord became interested in the domestic revolts, particularly as thousands of African Americans pressed for their Constitutional rights in multiple ways during the national mass of movements. McCord worked at Stanford University during 1964 and the production of this book. Indeed it was in Palo Alto where he met Robert (Bob) Moses who was traveling the country seeking participants for the Mississippi Project (17). Many volunteers of previous campaigns in Mississippi had originated from Stanford. Allard Lowenstein, labeled the peripatetic Pied Piper, utilized his influence in the National Student Association to recruit from Stanford and Yale to assist in the Mississippi Freedom Vote in 1963.¹ Perhaps McCord had knowledge of these direct connections to Mississippi and had contact with those students, feeding his own intellectual curiosities and giving him access to the Project’s organizers.

William McCord began his academic career as a social psychologist in Sociology with a Ph.D. in Social Relations from Harvard University (with a penchant for applied math) and a 1955 dissertation that re-examined studies conducted in the 1930s of Cambridge and Summerville. His earlier publications related to his dissertation, titled The Psychopathic Personality, do not indicate a driving intellectual quest to support African American social justice campaigns. Those topics ranged from psychopathy and delinquency (1956) to crime (1959) and alcoholism (1960). Nevertheless, his widow Arline McCord remembers that he prided himself as an old-fashioned liberal, an optimist and idealist who took note of the socially exciting moment that heralded new nation formations in Africa and the emergence of China on the world stage, and how that related to domestic change. As the eternal optimist he proudly identified with his grandfather, a Union Army veteran, and included that nugget in this book. His wife proclaimed that he was a great adventurer. Continuing that thought, she added that he believed in the mission of the movement and saw progress. He believed that all people should have equal opportunity, and he didn’t mind jumping in with two feet to work for it … he would … remind me of an Indiana Jones character, he would just step into any kind of action with both feet and he did so in trying to understand inequality and racism and so on.²

Buoyed by this sanguinity, McCord assesses the activism and organizing of the summer. Indeed hundreds of volunteers’ lives had changed, students and professionals who may have never crossed the state line into Mississippi now had memories and motivations that would never leave them. Those African Americans in the state with whom they came into contact had clearer visions of life outside the closed society into which they had been locked. The extent of substantive change was minimal, the numbers of African Americans registered to vote increased only slightly despite the successful 1963 Freedom Vote that indicated the eagerness to go to the polls, and there was no redistribution of wealth and resources, but that does not negate McCord’s enthusiasm as premature.³ Rather it illustrates how that summer’s work chipped away at white supremacy, one encounter at a time, breaking through once impenetrable barriers, unveiling hypocrisies from the inside to the nation and the world. A great example is his treatment of school desegregation. The 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling had ramped up white bigotry, spawning the Citizens’ Council fueled by brave and emboldened black parents who dared to add their names to petitions demanding better opportunities for their children. Petitions and lawsuits forced the token desegregation of select school districts, placing the onus on those discriminated against to challenge the entire structure designed for their failure. McCord applauds those who desegregated schools, and acknowledges the tokenism. It would take until 1970 for the courts to force massive desegregation in Mississippi, and that would only last a few years.⁴

McCord does not clutter his prose with sociological jargon, offering his observations and grounding his explanations with primary and organizational documents (a few key documents and field reports from Council Of Federated Organizations to which he had access), and easily found newspaper and other published sources. From his vantage point, he takes the pulse of the movement in Mississippi in 1964 for his readers, who would have been primarily white, allying with (and prominently citing) Professor James Silver, another white academic on the ground working and teaching in Mississippi at the bastion of white supremacy, the University of Mississippi, who lends his authority to this text. It is McCord’s witness testimony of Freedom Summer.

The book moves through the summer chronologically, pausing in places for elaboration when necessary. It is well-suited to both academic and general audiences, providing gentle insertions of analysis and theory to educate contemporary audiences while conducting the participant observation widely used in sociological methodology. From his introduction, it is clear that he believes in the goals of the mass movement and tiny hints in his text point to his position as more than a passive observer: from first driving a white female volunteer to Laurel (59); then escorting a black woman to the courthouse to vote for the first time (71); to a freedom school in Vicksburg (64); with workers traveling to McComb (83); or having his car with California license plates trailed by police in Jackson (129); he participates in movement activity, lending his resources and time to assist and promote the cause while he does his research. He makes no claim in support of mythical objectivity, noting how political points of view ultimately shape scholarship, including his own personal background that brought him to his field and his interests in social movements. So while he reveals himself sporadically in his report (beyond his personalized introduction), usually during moments where he experienced fear, his wife reiterated, He wasn’t the kind of social scientist that some of us were trained to be, to do not-value laden work, the objective work, he clearly put his values out there … and it wasn’t blindly. … he remained an old-fashioned liberal.⁵ This quality produced a text still legible and relevant in the twenty-first century.

He does not shy away from calling out causal systemic oppression that kept black populations downtrodden (163). One of the many gifts this book provides is a contemporary account of the racial frustrations of the time. Whatever the offense … a white Mississippian can anticipate the most fraternal handling from his fellow Caucasians … The Negro lives in a world of white brutality, white supremacy, and white law; it is a world where the policemen, the attorney, and the judge become symbols of terror (33). Dated terminology aside, tragically his words still carry veracity and urgency. At the time, journalists compared white supremacist groups to Nazism, not a far stretch of the imagination less than a generation from World War II (86). McCord goes further to indict the country and its investment in white supremacy that in turn holds up a mirror of accusation.

Given the extent of the violence exacted on black communities, McCord stood in awe of activists’ use of non-violence as a strategy: Mississippi Negroes demonstrated an almost superhuman restraint in the face of provocation … talk of violence was everywhere in the air (194). He also predicted that black self-control would not last, stating rather matter-of-factly, If you are tortured, the normal reaction is to retaliate (194). In this way, he deftly lays out rational arguments for and against black use of violence as a last resort, suggesting again the mainly white educated reader he addressed, and making the right to revolt a moral right based on terrorism and corruption (195)—an argument used by patriots against colonial Britain during the nation’s founding. Yet he questions the effectiveness of violence as a response to terrorism. This conversation with his audience serves to enlighten a population beholden to media and political scare-mongering about black violence, and the simultaneous justification of white brutality.

In many ways, unfortunately, the conversation has not shifted much in the ensuing half century. McCord’s explanation also serves as a bell-weather to what would follow—more radical movements that rejected the nonviolent strategy for armed self-defense (not to be mistaken as aggressively violent) as a natural progression for people whose patience and thick skins had worn thin. In his final chapter he lays out policy recommendations, recognizing racial politics as a national issue requiring federal intervention, and criticizing the federal government’s failure to protect basic citizenship rights that include the ballot (207). The book emerged just after the general election that supported Lyndon Johnson’s re-election, an opportunity to warn about trouble on the horizon without reform not lost on him, and most likely, his readers. The moral arguments for reform based on the law was the only way forward when he stated, In Mississippi, in America as a whole, we face a moral challenge where the alternatives are clear: either the supremacy of national law is upheld or we descend rapidly into anarchic violence (210). Again, it bears repeating that these words seem immortal. As the political pendulum swung rightwards in the late 1960s and never quite swung that far left since, moral challenges about the role of government in individuals’ lives and liberties persist and have deepened.

McCord wrote quickly, finishing the manuscript before the year’s end, conscious of the fleetingness of this moment and the ensuing racial battles that brewed and would boil in 1965. Rather than hone in on local details and names—the task of documenting those people who were the movement—McCord opts for vignettes and snapshots he witnessed or researched from contemporary reporting and his observations. The effect of scattering stories (like buckshot) hoping that as many nuggets embed themselves, causes discomfort and demands attention. This approach sometimes mirrored the movement itself—the inconsistencies, diversity, non-uniformity of organizing and results. He manages to illustrate the complexity of the homegrown movement landscape in Mississippi up to the fall of 1964 without describing the richness of the vibrant local movements. The result is a sometimes disorganized structure with a few conflicting statements that a careful editing might have resolved, but it works to pull his audience along with him.

He makes sure readers understand the prices and costs of movement activism. He pauses to highlight Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer and Medgar Evers in particular, two Mississippians who entered the national stage through their activism and perhaps more significantly, because of the vicious violence they endured. When he does document homegrown black activism, the depictions often repose in an aura of passivism. He had very little firsthand connection to local people and their histories of resistance that began well before the 1960s during seemingly debilitating repression. It is often difficult, whilst in the midst of a storm, to keep sight of all those struggling to survive. McCord’s book is unsurprisingly gendered male, given the nature of formal leadership in all of the organizations, even the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. While he does spotlight Mrs. Hamer, it is in her uniqueness as a public figure. In doing so, he missed the quieter work of the women, work that later scholarship uncovers as their work is revealed and appreciated accordingly. He spends time in Ruleville, yet the ever-present figure of Charles McLaurin does not appear in these pages. Then again, McLaurin was (and still is) a lightning rod in the community, and drawing attention to him might paint an even brighter target for violent wrath. Perhaps his primary use of media reporting to support his observations insulates his grassroots sources still in need of protection. So many of the local people with whom he must have been in contact do not get named in these pages. One could think of him as a bridge, doing the work laid out in the organizing documents for the Mississippi Summer Project by communicating what he saw to wider audiences, overlaying those observations with research and critical thinking. In this way, the book serves as his form of activist scholarship, using his skills and standpoint to educate those without his access.

The prospectus for Freedom Summer outlined the goals and activities for the project. Rationale for recruiting white volunteers is at the forefront. On the first page, organizers state, A large number of students from the North making the necessary sacrifices to go South would make abundantly clear to the government and the public that this is not a situation which can be ignored any longer.⁶ Therefore, their primary goal was to bring the spotlight to Mississippi while adding to the organizing numbers on the ground. Freedom Summer organizers knew that volunteers would write home; that anxious families would apply pressure on lawmakers from the state to the president; that the media would follow and record Mississippi’s shameful acts. Among the slew of activities planned for volunteers, including running Freedom Schools, establishing Community Centers, and registering voters, organizers carved out special projects for selected volunteers. Purposefully vague, one sentence reads, a number of people will be asked to live in white communities to survey attitudes and record reactions to summer happenings and it would not be a stretch to imagine McCord in that role.

As a white man, older than the students at around thirty-three, he had a little more insulation than the younger volunteers who attracted a significant amount of the media coverage and the segregationists’ ire. He moves with relative ease behind his credentials and his academic project to speak to Jackson’s economic elite directly and obtain candid insights into their racial politics (99). He even meets William J. Simmons, one of the founding organizers of the Citizens’ Council, the gentleman’s Klan, finding out that in the credo, the founders reworked the doctrines of Gobineau, William Henry Chamberlain, and Goebbels, information not in printed materials. He also learned about the national reach of the Mississippi-based organization, with branches organizing in the North and the West (139) in part due to Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign. He also has access to lower-rung working white people like those he wrote about in Carthage (133). McCord’s ability to pass as a sympathizer reveals the evidence of increased racism from the sources, and not from the lips of those whom it negatively affected. During the mass campaigns for civil rights, segments of the nation’s population heightened their bristling and intense resistance to democratic change and as a result, resurrected the public and proud display of the Confederate battle flag that had been neatly folded and stored not too long after the South’s defeat. This focused reaction on giving a second lease of life to a symbol of defiance, indeed national treachery, visualizes the extent of the racist prevailing beliefs that hooded too many citizens from progress. Genuine fears, rooted in a perceived white heritage of regional superiority that itself fed off the blood of the enslaved and exploited labor revenues, became reignited as en masse black people claimed their Constitutional rights after World War II. Raising the battle flag meant war, and there were many ways to fight.

This battle had soldiers from every walk of life. A common misconception that McCord shatters is the idea that overt racism only manifested among the less educated—in addition to the economic elite, he was surprised to see rampant bigotry in intellectual ivory towers like the University of Mississippi in 1964. He criticized the poor white men he encountered in Carthage residing in their secluded mental universe (133), contributing to that myth of seclusion that was in fact widespread and systemic, albeit reasoned and articulated differently by different sectors of the white population from the economic elite, lawmakers, to subsistence farmers. The mental universe rested on the foundation of the international slave market and markets for slave-raised, manufactured products. Textbooks supported and propagated that mental universe, adding cement to the foundations of segregationist views under the guise of God-sanctioned truths, a continuing trend in current education battles over grade school revisionist histories.

McCord’s interviews shed light on the spectrum of white supremacist thought, rationale, and action. His whiteness and status provides him a premium perch and relative protection for participatory observation. He marks his place of privilege, perhaps unconsciously, right from the start by placing himself on the banks of the Nile in Egypt in late 1964 as he finished his book. He has mobility and freedom, and can literally move a world away from Mississippi to write and distance himself from the real distractions that continued long after his departure.

Nevertheless, despite his privilege, McCord’s research behind his ruse assists the black freedom struggle with vital information not available to the organizers, and reveals still more areas of exploration. For example the group, Mississippians for Public Education (111), presents a model, perhaps, for moderate and interracial reform. Although buried by the lack of news coverage because of their seemingly treacherous stance against the state, they ran a solid public relations campaign for peaceful integration, all the while withstanding threats and alienation from their communities, churches, and Citizens’ Councils. The levels of demagoguery gagged most moderate political stances, rendering it easier to stay quiet and ensure the safety of one’s family and livelihood, to submit to one’s human nature to survive. McCord freely rebukes ministers and professors for abdicating their responsibilities, considering how racial terrorism also targets those straying from the hardline, driving families out-of-state. Indeed, his definition of white radicals becomes those who do withstand and sometimes survive the hardships (145), but his definition reveals diversity in white communities, dispelling another myth of a Solid South. Estimating the numbers of these brave souls is tricky—the squeaky wheels make the most noise and attract the most attention—whereas quiet and oftentimes anonymous activism was more likely to keep one alive. McCord cites, therefore, the noisier moderates, from University of Mississippi professor James Silver to Tougaloo Chaplain Edwin King and four others, those of a certain (more privileged) class and educational level that enable them to use their pen and pulpit as weapons.⁷

The work of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party also requires more study to broaden the scope from merely organizing to the role of political education as the real threat to white supremacy. MFDP’s 1964 challenge yielded profound changes to the Democratic National convention—eliminating the validity of all-white delegations through the McGovern-Fraser Commission—movement victories so often overlooked. The forever dynamic MFDP organizer Lawrence Guyot stated that without the MFDP there would be no Barack Obama—a statement not so far-fetched given the party changes, and the grassroots political education given to those so long denied the right to vote. At this time a former volunteer who became a judge, Lisa Anderson Todd, has written the only one monograph-length study of the MFDP. Drawing from her experiences in Greenville and subsequent interviews, Todd recreated the events, discussions, and decisions leading up to and including the DNC challenge, while assessing the aftermath.⁸

Released in 1965, Mississippi is one of the first social scientific academic studies published on the Summer Project. A few autobiographies written by summer volunteers began to emerge soon after that long, hot summer. Sally Belfrage’s simply titled, Freedom Summer, also published in 1965, documents her experiences at the SNCC head office in Greenwood and has remained in print. Illustrator Tracy Sugarman published Stranger at the Gates: A Summer in Mississippi, with a foreword by Mrs. Hamer in 1966 that plotted his experiences in Ruleville. Other white volunteers wrote their stories and kept diaries, some for their own personal collections, others for academic projects and studies. For example, Stan Boyd wrote a masters’ thesis from his research in Clarksdale, Mississippi for his degree at Antioch College.⁹ More books appeared as the