Blacks & Jews, pt. 2

Hi everybody. I hope you all had a good holiday season, and you’re all rearing to take 2023 by storm. I apologize for the delay in getting this out. I know I’m always full of excuses, and you guys are infinitely patient, and I appreciate it. I wish I could keep a better schedule, but I simply don’t know how to write short pieces of limited scope - I always intend to, but before I know it I’ve got a stack of dogeared books and 25 browser tabs open, and a short article turns into a multi-part series of essays. The same problem plagues me when trying to keep to a decent schedule with The Unraveling podcast w/Jocko. The other reason (this time) is that I’ve been preoccupied by a family medical emergency, so I mean it when I say thanks again for your patience and support.

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Mississippi. Most histories of the 1960s protest movement in America will mark a point in 1966 or ‘67 when cooperation between black and white activists broke down, but cracks in the alliance had begun to appear a few years earlier. Riding on the success of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom (famous for MLK’s “I have a dream” speech), black civil rights organizations in Mississippi began recruiting volunteers for the 1964 “Freedom Summer,” a massive effort to agitate, educate, and organize black Mississippians to vote in that year’s elections. The white student organizations wanted to help, and their help was wanted, but the organizers requested no more than 100 outside volunteers for reasons that would soon become apparent.

The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) - the largest Southern-based, black-led civil rights youth organization - interviewed white volunteers to weed out those with a “John Brown complex.” They informed those who made it through the interview process that they were not there to “save the Mississippi Negro,” but to assist the thousands of native black activists, who had been on the ground living and working for years before the white students arrived, and would remain there after the white kids went back home for the Fall semester. But word got out that something big was going down in Mississippi, and others wanted in. White civil rights activists like Allard Lowenstein began raising money and recruiting white students from universities in the North and West, and soon at least a thousand (probably several thousand over the course of the summer) white students flooded the state to do their part. Most of the student volunteers came from rich families and were recruited from the best universities, and brought with them a variety of mixed motives. Undoubtedly they were moved by sympathy for the Southern Negro, but others journeyed to Mississippi on their own personal hero quest. Back at Columbia and Cornell, the activists who’d previously gone south as volunteers or citizen journalists were the aristocracy of the student movement. They were respected, envied, desired, and other students understood that a summer in Mississippi could be their one-way ticket to cool kid status. Unlike the black activists, who had been, and would be, working for years at the grassroots level in the state, the white students only had a few months before they had to head back to school, so they needed to accomplish something now to make their trip worthwhile.

If I seem ungenerous, I’m only repeating the complaints that would become common among many of the native black activists by the end of the Freedom Summer. While the sympathy of the college kids for the Southern Negro was real, it was also distant and detached. When the rubber hit the road, and a group of Harvard Law students found themselves in a room full of black activists with a second-grade education, their eagerness (impatience?) to move things along often led them to take over the proceedings and begin ordering the black activists around. Over the summer months of 1964, resentment and enthusiasm grew side-by-side. When the Freedom Summer failed to achieve any immediate political results (which is not to say it wasn’t a success on other fronts), it opened the door to a new breed of young black leaders like Stokely Carmichael, who insisted that their movement would never get anywhere following the lead of bossy white students and philanthropists. The claim was baseless and, really, quite ridiculous. All of the civil rights movements’ major successes - desegregation decisions at the Supreme Court, the Civil Rights Act of ‘64, the Voting Rights Act of ‘65, etc - were achieved by the very people Carmichael and his allies attacked as white toadies and collaborators. Nevertheless, the idea began to spread that the movement’s emphasis on racial reconciliation, incremental improvement, and nonviolence reflected the existing leadership’s excessive deference to white society. SNCC and other youth organizations emerged from the Freedom Summer with a new edginess, but it would be years before people looked back and realized that 1964-65 was the high water mark of the civil rights movement.