As Freedom Summer activists began arriving in Mississippi, newspapers throughout the South ran editorials and articles condemning the volunteers. The following article appeared in a South Carolina newspaper and is representative of the ways in which white southerners characterized Freedom Summer. It mentions the National Council of Churches, a federation of white and black Christian churches that supported many civil rights and peace causes in the postwar era, including Freedom Summer.
This week the vanguard of a youthful army left the rolling hill country of southwestern Ohio, where volunteers had spent several weeks being indoctrinated and incensed, for the flat Delta land of Mississippi. The Summer Project, a joint effort of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNICK) and the National Council of Churches, was on the march. . . .
“The real aim of SNICK and the other more extreme Negro organizations is to secure the military occupation of Mississippi by federal troops.” This is not the expressed judgment of Mississippi Governor Paul Johnson or even of Senator James Eastland. The words are those of Joseph Alsop, the liberal columnist [from the Washington Post]. Mr. Alsop, however much he may desire civil rights for Negroes, knows that no good can come from this Summer Project, controlled as it is by the most militant of the many civil rights groups and the one whose ranks include, according to Mr. Alsop, more than a few dedicated Communists.
It would be comforting to believe that the young persons involved in this project understand something of what is going on behind the scenes. It would be much easier then to dismiss their possible fate from the mind. But the facts will not allow such optimism.
“Last summer I went back to London for three months and did nothing,” one recruit told a Washington Post reporter. “It was unhealthy. This summer I want to do something.”
Another young recruit said he didn’t think he could live with himself if he didn’t do something about Mississippi. A third, a young lady studying theology, said she was going because of her belief that “the SNICK people are living a life that is relevant to the New Testament.” Just how accurate is this rosy view?
The crusade leaders say publicly that the main thrust of the summer invasion will be directed at voter discrimination in Mississippi, where only 6.6 percent of Negroes of voting age are registered to vote. Such an effort, conducted with forbearance and directed at helping the Negro improve himself, might produce some good. Judging by the record, however, SNICK is short on forbearance and uncommonly long on making trouble. Nor is the National Council of Churches likely to provide much in the way of restraint.
The Council has invested $260,000 in this project, and it wants more out of that investment than a handful of votes. At a Baltimore meeting last February, during which the Summer Project was under discussion, Council members talked of “social redevelopment” in Mississippi, of applying “corrective treatment” to the Delta region.
“The main problem at this point,” the Council’s own report of the Baltimore meeting said, “is the concentration of wealth among the few, e.g., on an average, 5 percent of the farms control 50 percent of all the farmland.”
Voting? This has nothing to do with voting. The Council is speaking of agrarian reform of the sort that socialists promote.
From this, the goals of the Summer Project appear to be two-fold: first, indoctrination in socialist economics; second, military occupation of Mississippi if that can be arranged. This is no longer a struggle of black and white. If the reports of even the most liberal observers are to be believed, the Reds predominate and the nation can anticipate a long, hot summer indeed.
Source: “‘Freedom’ to the Delta,” Charleston Post, June 24, 1964.