Lessons from 1964’s Mississippi Freedom Summer

The recent arson that destroyed Beth Israel, Jackson, Miss.’s only synagogue, evokes that state’s dark legacy of violence toward those supporting racial equality — one stretching back more than 60 years.

In spring 1964, a Duke University sophomore from Connecticut, Dick Landerman, and a Harvard senior from New York, Nick Fels, joined the civil rights movement in Mississippi. As idealistic foot soldiers, they were unwittingly marching into history. 

Landerman’s family was apolitical. His civil commitment was more interpersonal than ideological — a function of friendships made at a racially mixed YMCA summer camp and on Hartford basketball courts.

But casual campus racism repelled and incited him. What prompted his activism, he told me in an interview, was “my shame at not speaking up in response to a racist incident at the start of my freshman year.”

Fels recalled to me that his civil rights interest preceded the summer of 1964. “Among other things, growing up in New York as a rabid Brooklyn Dodgers fan, I idolized Jackie Robinson — and still do,” he said. 

So, Landerman, 19, and Fels, 21, joined the Mississippi Freedom Summer, a joint effort involving the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Council of Federated Organizations, which included the Congress of Racial Equality and Martin Luther King Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference, plus the NAACP and its Legal Defense Fund. 

In 1961, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee organizers moved into Mississippi cities and towns to register local Blacks to vote. Poll taxes and literacy tests stymied registration, as did widespread racist violence and intimidation.

In 1963, a Liberty, Miss., politician shot and killed Herbert Lee, a Black farmer working with the the organization. A white sniper murdered NAACP state field secretary Medgar Evers, and local activist Fannie Lou Hamer and Lawrence Guyot were arrested and beaten in jail. Activists faced church bombings, house burnings and economic retaliation.

Yet the national media virtually ignored this terror and intimidation. No government protection or voting rights action came. 

Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee strategist Robert Moses concluded, “It is not possible for us to register Negroes in Mississippi. … There is reason to believe that authorities in Mississippi will force a showdown over the right to vote in large numbers.”  

Moses and local leaders decided on recruiting mostly white, Northern middle-class volunteers for national media attention, and to serve as a tripwire against local white terrorism.

Like many Mississippi volunteers, Landerman and Fels are Jewish. But white and Black, Christians and Jews, the same missionary zeal fired them as embodied in the Civil War era Battle Hymn of the Republic: As Jesus “died to make us holy, let us die to make men free.”

And so, they did, a century later. 

On June 21, 1964, Black Mississippi activist James Chaney and two white volunteers, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, disappeared while driving from Philadelphia, Miss., to Jackson. Neshoba County and Philadelphia City police officers, most Ku Klux Klan-affiliated, arrested the trio on speeding charges. After they were released, Klan and law enforcement officers followed them, beat Chaney, shot all three, and buried the bodies in an earthen dam. 

Fels recalls riding in a car with two other volunteers one night after the murders. “Our car was stopped by the local sheriff, who was notorious for harassing” civil rights organizations’ volunteers. “After directing us to get out of the car and show our IDs, he paused for a moment and then let us go. I have never forgotten the sense of panic.” 

Later, he and other volunteers saw the dam site where Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman’s bodies had been buried. “The visit brought home the depth of the hostility we faced and triggered a strong sense of anxiety, particularly because of our own recent encounter with the sheriff in Hattiesburg,” Fels said. 

The deaths galvanized the nation and influenced passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which eliminated poll taxes and literacy tests, exploding Mississippi and southern Black voter registration.

Although the summer also deeply affected other volunteers, many remained in Mississippi, despite the trauma.

Motivated by his experience, Fels joined Friends of Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and was active in the Berkeley free speech movement. After graduating from Harvard Law School, he clerked for U.S. Circuit Judge John Minor Wisdom — a staunch foe of racial segregation — and worked in legal aid. 

That December, Landerman returned to Duke, becoming active in a campus civil rights organization. He stood up to racism in late-night dorm arguments with segregationist students about sit-in arrests at local segregated restaurants. Following graduation, Landerman spent several years community organizing in a white Durham, N.C working-class neighborhood. 

At 81, he reflects on his Mississippi experience’s relevance today. 

“When Bob Moses entered Mississippi in 1961,” Landerman said, “Black people had lived for decades under a brutal and oppressive system where change seemed inconceivable, and opposition brought economic retribution, beatings, jailings, and death. Together with local Black people, a [Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee] staff of 41 built a movement capable of making Freedom Summer happen and bringing voting rights to Black people across the South.” 

Fels, now 82, says Mississippi Freedom Summer also deeply affected him. Retired from his Washington law firm, he’s on the board of Lawyers Defending American Democracy. The group filed an amicus brief challenging President Trump’s executive order restricting the number of citizens who could register to vote in federal elections.

“The repression of rights and violence we faced in Mississippi obviously differs from what the current federal government seeks to impose today,” he says. “I think, however, that the lesson from Freedom Summer applies: Resistance is necessary and may, in the long run, succeed.” 

Mark I. Pinsky is a journalist and author based in Durham, N.C.