Mississippi burning

The Hamer reports

Freedom Summer: The Savage Season that Made Mississippi Burn and Made America a Democracy. By Bruce Watson. Viking; 384 pages; $27.95. Buy from Amazon.com

COLIN POWELL, Condoleezza Rice, Eric Holder and, of course, Barack Obama. It is no longer remarkable to see African-Americans in the highest echelons of politics—nor, for that matter, at less elevated levels; American towns and cities now boast well over 600 black mayors. Whether that fulfils Martin Luther King's dream is doubtful, for racism remains a vigorous current in mainstream America. But it would not have happened without the civil-rights movement of the 1960s when a divided nation confronted the issue of segregation between black and white.

Bruce Watson concentrates on the so-called “Freedom Summer” of 1964, when some 700 young Americans, most of them white and many students, descended on Mississippi, the most recalcitrant state in the South, to teach in “freedom schools” and register black voters. His book is engrossing: naive young northerners, with zero previous experience of black America, living in sharecroppers' shacks, eating grits and using dirty outhouses; black Mississippians learning to trust the first whites who had ever treated them as more than simply “niggers”; bigoted officers of the law, such as Sheriff Lawrence Rainey of Neshoba County, who delighted in arresting and beating the northern volunteers and their black helpers.

Mr Watson has his heroes, not just the Berkeley and Brooklyn idealists, but also Robert Moses, the quietly spoken Harlem-born black field secretary of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), who directed the “freedom riders”. Another hero is a black Mississippian, Fannie Lou Hamer (pictured), who shamed the Democratic National Convention with her account of being beaten by the local police in Winona. The villains are several: the Mississippi police and the Ku Klux Klan—but also Edgar Hoover's FBI, lauded in a 1988 film, “Mississippi Burning”, yet accused by Mr Watson of being too slow to investigate the murders of two Jewish volunteers from New York and their companion, a local black activist.

The temptation for Mr Watson must have been to describe that period as a contest between good and evil, between literally black and white. Fortunately, he sets his story in a broader context. He describes the shocks that greeted the volunteers: “Savoury odours of fried food mixed with the foul stench of the outhouses…washed-out ads for Camels and Lucky Strikes painted on splintering wood; women bent over washboards”, and the oppressive, stultifying heat of the humid South. He notes the resentment of black activists at the white volunteers' tendency to assume leadership and notes the tensions within SNCC. Stokely Carmichael, later to lead the Black Panther Party, was one SNCC leader to lose faith in the policy of using non-violence to face down police brutality.

Mr Watson also highlights the difficulty for Lyndon Johnson, president following the assassination of John Kennedy and desperate to stop the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (representing the Freedom Summer's registration drive) from ousting the state's regular delegates at the Democratic Party's national convention in Atlantic City. That, Johnson knew, would divide the party and imperil his campaign for the November presidential election. Hence plenty of arm-twisting and a presidential press conference in Washington, DC, timed to coincide with Ms Hamer's speech in Atlantic City.

The shenanigans worked, up to a point. The Freedom Party was denied official recognition and Johnson went on to defeat Barry Goldwater for the presidency. But as Johnson had supposedly said when signing the Civil Rights Act, “We have lost the South for a generation.” And so it proved. White southerners bitterly opposed the changes imposed on them from outside, but were powerless to prevent them. The Supreme Court had ruled segregated schools unconstitutional back in 1954.

In that case was the Freedom Summer of 1964 “a catalyst for change or an unnecessary provocation that instilled new venom in a dying culture”? Mr Watson quotes John Lewis, a black participant in the Freedom Summer and now a representative from Georgia in Congress: “If it hadn't been for the veterans of Freedom Summer, there would be no Barack Obama.”