The Battle Against Black Freedom Wasn't Nonviolent

IN JUNE 1964, 54 years ago this month, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael “Mickey” Schwerner were asked by leaders of the Congress of Racial Equality to investigate the burning of a black church that had doubled as a Freedom School in Neshoba County, Miss.

More than 1,000 people, including college students, boarded buses bound for Mississippi that year. Over the preceding four years, these young people had witnessed a Southern sea change, from school desegregation to the integration of lunch counters, buses, bus depots, and movie theaters. They witnessed the Children’s March in Birmingham—hoses, dogs, terror faced down by black children who did not run. They stood their ground and they filled jails and they sang about overcoming. These previously silenced and subjugated people were now using the only thing they had—their bodies—to break through. And they had broken through.

Nashville, Greenville, Montgomery, Birmingham ... Now, it was Mississippi’s turn. James Meredith had served as the tip of the spear in 1962 when he registered for courses at Ole Miss. Mississippians lost their minds. The ensuing riot required 31,000 National Guards to quell it and left two dead and hundreds wounded. Meredith did register—and was graduated—but Medgar Evers, field secretary of the NAACP in Mississippi, was assassinated the following year, in his driveway.

One year after Evers fell, Freedom Summer upped the ante. Mississippi civil rights workers declared it was time to bring freedom to all people of African descent in the state that had exonerated the bragging murderers of Emmett Till.

White and black, thousands of students from across the country signed up for Freedom Summer. They joined the Council of Federated Organizations and their member organization, the Congress of Racial Equality, in a massive voter registration effort throughout the state. It was during Freedom Summer that Schwerner, Goodman, and Chaney rode to Meridian, Miss., to their deaths.

Assassinated by members of the sheriff’s department, Philadelphia, Miss. police officers, and members of the Klan, the three men were buried in an earthen dam and found two months later, along with numerous other bodies. The concentrated effort of the FBI and 200 sailors from a nearby naval air station assisting in the search ripped the sheet off the depravation that had been allowed to thrive in Mississippi until then.

The movement for black freedom in the U.S. was not nonviolent. It was war, a clear continuation of the Civil War. In each city and town, the civil rights leadership chose a battleground. It was a war fought on one side with bombs, dogs, terror-washed rope and trees, rivers and dams. The other side fought with the weapons of nonviolent resistance. They wielded soul force, bodily presence, resolve, waves of foot soldiers ready to take the last one’s place, and faith. Faith was at their core.

We rarely engage with that level of resolve today. We understand marching and getting arrested to change policy. But I don’t think we understand that we are still in this war. Perhaps the revelations of Charlottesville and promises of Southern border walls and talk of “s***hole nations” and threats to after-school programs and public-school education are our wake-up call.