Roots of Freedom Summer planted at Ohio college

OXFORD, Ohio -- It wasn't supposed to happen here.

Training for 800 Freedom Summer volunteers in 1964 was supposed to take place 150 miles south, at Berea College in Berea, Ky.

But 50 years after the volunteers spread out across Mississippi in a pivotal call for civil rights, they're returning this weekend to Oxford – not Berea – to celebrate their roots.

The reunion of four dozen of the original Freedom Summer activists will be bittersweet with memories of registering African-Americans to vote, teaching in Freedom Schools – and working side by side with three young friends killed by angry segregationists.

Now old and graying, the returnees also will pay tribute to Oxford, the unlikely meeting place that nurtured their work and stirred their idealism to a fearless, fever pitch.

"This training, which generated international headlines, cements Ohio's place and the places of Western College and Oxford in the civil rights movement," said Jacqueline "Jacky" Johnson, interim archivist at Miami University, which merged in 1974 with Western College.

Why Oxford, Ohio?

Why then, June 1964?

How 800 college students, mainly from East Coast schools and mostly white, arrived in Oxford is a story cast in turbulent times that changed a nation.

Administrators at Berea College, founded in 1855 as the first interracial and coeducational college in the South, said they feared for the safety of Freedom Summer volunteers that summer of '64. Privately, according to other documents, administrators caved in to pressure from alumni not to house volunteers on campus.

The National Council of Churches, a Freedom Summer organizer, asked Western College President Henrick Young if training could be held there. Known as a leader in the Presbyterian Church and an educational pioneer for creating an international studies emphasis at Western, Young agreed, and students traveled to Oxford for two weeks of training, June 14-27.

Bob Moses, Mississippi field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, proposed in autumn 1963 the idea of a voter registration project in his state. The Mississippi Summer Project received approval from several civil rights groups the following February, and leaders decided on initiatives including voter education and creation of Freedom Schools for black children.

The project also would create a Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party organized with diverse membership. It would challenge the all-white Mississippi delegation that would be seated at the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, N.J.

The goal was to flood Mississippi with white northern college students, drawing media attention to the plight of black Mississippians. Only 6.7 percent of African-Americans there were registered to vote, the lowest rate of any of the 50 states.

Freedom Summer recruiters hit college campuses in March. By June, they had collected 1,200 applications for would-be Freedom Summer volunteers. They weeded out applicants who thought they were better than the people they were going to try to help.

Mark Levy, a 1964 graduate of Queens College in his native New York City, applied. So did a fellow student government activist, Betty Bollinger, whom he would later marry.

"We were too young to be smart. People volunteer to join the Army, too," said Levy, who was 25 at the time. He will be among those reuniting with old colleagues this weekend in Oxford; his wife is now deceased.

For Levy, seeds of social activism had been planted in childhood in his liberal Jewish home. They took root during his freshman year in 1957 at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, 60 miles northeast of Oxford.

His dorm adviser, Steve Schwerner, welcomed freshmen to Antioch and told them a boycott had begun of a Yellow Springs barber who would not take African-American customers.

Steve was the brother of Michael Schwerner, one of the three activists who left Oxford after the first week of training and were killed by Ku Klux Klan members in Philadelphia, Miss., on June 21, 1964. Their deaths and FBI investigation are the basis of the 1988 film Mississippi Burning.

Levy, now 75 and retired from careers in teaching and as a labor organizer, saved notes from his Freedom Summer training. He and his future wife were designated teachers in the Meridian, Mississippi, Freedom School, where they used their training to teach students to think, ask questions and become leaders.

The volunteers also taught their students the value of understanding local black history and what the movement was doing in the area. In 1964, Mississippi spent $81.04 on each white student, $21.77 on average per black student. Public school curriculum extolled the segregated Southern way of life and ignored achievements of African-Americans.

Meanwhile, the atmosphere during the two, one-week orientation sessions at Western College was one "of excitement, fun," Levy said. "It was great seeing everyone there, all of these clean-cut young people committed to becoming civil rights activists."

Faculty at Western College and Miami rallied around students, joining an effort called "Oxford Friends of Mississippi" that had been started by Oxford NAACP branch president Arthur Miller to support the cause.

"These were young people without jobs who were going to Mississippi as volunteers," said Miami archivist Johnson. "They donated money. They sold greeting cards to raise money. The teachers in the Freedom Schools needed supplies for students."

Training, real-life experiences anticipate Mississippi greeting

Not all of Oxford's residents were happy to see the civil rights volunteers in town.

Gwendolyn Robinson, just 19, was an African-American who grew up in Jim Crow Memphis, Tennessee, and who had completed two years of studies at Spellman College in Atlanta. Her parents tried to dissuade her from going. Two professors encouraged her to volunteer.

One night during the first week of orientation in Oxford, she and a couple of white volunteers left Western College, driving in a Volkswagen to a convenience store.

"We were chased out," said Robinson, now 70 and known as Gwendolyn Zoharah Simmons, an associate professor of religion at the University of Florida. "It was 'n----- and n------lover,' right out of the blue. We ran out to the car. We were afraid they would tip it over. We managed to get away."

During orientation, trainers taught volunteers how to register people to vote and about the dangers of segregated Mississippi. Simmons recalls trainers showing a video of white government officials in the state, including some of the voting supervisors in each of the 82 counties. One man was rotund, comedic looking.

White students laughed. Trainers told them not to, that the man was dangerous and controlled who could vote in his county. White students, despite their formal educations, did not know black history. They learned it in Oxford.

They learned how to walk in formation during a march. They learned how to protect themselves in nonviolent fashion, in part, by getting on the ground and curling up.

The danger was real in Mississippi: 1,000 civil rights workers and associates were arrested that summer; 80 Freedom Summer volunteers were beaten; 37 black churches were bombed or burned; four volunteers died -- the three in Philadelphia and another in a car accident.

Volunteers enjoyed cook-outs during orientation. Music was a large part of the training. They learned the songs of the movement: "This Little Light of Mine," "Keep Your Eyes on the Prize," "We Shall Overcome" and "Oh, Freedom" among them. Cook-outs often turned into sing-along sessions during orientation.

"Music was a big part of it," Simmons said. "Once we got to Mississippi, we were always marching and singing. I did get arrested in Alabama and Mississippi. Singing those songs kept our spirits high."

From Oxford, Ohio to Oxford, Miss.

On June 20, 1964, the first 250 Freedom Summer volunteers arrived in Mississippi and began their efforts to register black voters.

That day, Michael Schwerner, 24, James Chaney, 21, and Andrew Goodman, 20, left Oxford for Mississippi. They drove to Meridian to investigate the burning of nearby Mt. Zion Baptist Church – site of a Freedom School – in Neshoba County and the beating of three people attending a meeting there. That evening, a sheriff's deputy pulled them over for a traffic violation outside of Philadelphia, Mississippi, and jailed them. They were released later that night after paying a fine. It was the last time they were seen alive.

Two days later the charred and still-smoldering station wagon they were driving was found. The news traveled quickly to Oxford, Ohio.

Moses told volunteers that the men had been abducted and that their car had been found. The three civil rights workers, he said, were presumed dead. Moses offered volunteers a chance to back out of the program without embarrassment.

Simmons had met and talked with Chaney, the only African-American of the three murdered. He was from Meridian and had joined the Congress of Racial Equality in 1963 and worked as a community organizer.

"When we got that news at the start of the second week, things really quieted down," Simmons said of orientation in Oxford. "It had been festive during the first week. We all suddenly realized who we were dealing with. And, for me, as an African-American, it shattered my illusion that we would be safe because we were with white people. They had killed two whites."

Rick Momeyer, professor emeritus of philosophy at Miami University, attended orientation in Oxford in 1964 after graduation from Allegheny College in his native Pennsylvania. He remembers Moses' speech, offering them a way out. Yet the workers' murders only strengthened the students' resolve to affect change.

"Mississippi was the hardest of the hardcore of the deep South," he said. "The feeling was if we could break the back of Jim Crow in Mississippi, the rest would come tumbling down."

On June 28, 300 more Freedom Summer volunteers arrived in Mississippi from Ohio.

Levy went to work as director of a Freedom School in Meridian. It was one of the largest in Mississippi, attended by 250 children with a smattering of adults.

"They were smart, energetic kids," Levy said. "They were from segregated schools, where they were taught by black teachers making less than white teachers. Yet these children were loved by their teachers, their parents and were raised in the church. Our first lesson was getting past the preconceptions of who we thought each other were."

Life-changing summer for student volunteers

Life went on outside of Mississippi, as the rest of the nation watched Freedom Summer unfold.

On July 2, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the landmark bill outlawing discrimination based on race, color, sex or national origin.

On Aug. 4, the bodies of the three missing civil rights workers were discovered in an earthen dam on a farm only six miles from the jail where they had last been seen. Goodman and Schwerner were found with one bullet hole. Chaney had been shot three times and sustained multiple serious injuries before his death.

Throughout the states, volunteers, living with African-American families risking reprisal, went about their civil rights work.

Some African-Americans were public with their activism, such as the woman who brought sandwiches and other food to the Meridian Freedom School every day. Years later, Levy learned that she had a network of black women working anonymously behind her, making food in their homes and taking it to the organizer's house before daylight.

"What impressed me was that while we could leave or would be leaving, our hosts were not and could not," Levy said. "They were very courageous, wonderful people who wanted to help."

Yet the experience of Freedom Summer remained and molded lives. Many volunteers admitted to weeping openly when they left Mississippi.

Levy was a classroom teacher and union organizer for many years and, today in retirement, is involved in immigration reform efforts for undocumented youths.

Simmons stayed on for 16 months in Jones County, running two Freedom Schools. One of the buildings had been bombed by the Klan. Firefighters watched it burn, destroying books and other supplies in the process. She experienced cross burnings. The Klan shot into a picnic she was attending.

"Freedom Summer changed my life," she said. "It totally shaped me in how I saw America, in what being a citizen means, how important it is to be informed and committed to a progressive social agenda."