Shootings, bombings, beatings, disappearances — welcome to 1964 Mississippi
Thomas Foner’s images from the Freedom Summer capture the specter of violence, spirit of resistance
The letters home read like frontline reports from a war zone. Thomas Foner detailed the violence surrounding him: shootings, bombings, beatings, disappearances. He wrote about the willful absence of civil authorities, of police grabbing people on the streets. But he wasn’t writing from Vietnam — he was in Mississippi.
In June of 1964, the college sophomore from Long Island arrived for the Mississippi Summer Project, a comprehensive civil rights campaign fighting entrenched segregationist policies. United by the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) — made up of chapters of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the Congress of Racial Equality, and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People — roughly one thousand out-of-state volunteers were supporting hundreds of local activists on voter registration drives, setting up free schools and community centers, and establishing an alternative political party to the all-white state Democratic Party.
Socioeconomic conditions in Mississippi made these already challenging goals nearly impossible. Foner’s snapshots show civil rights speakers trying to rouse crowds from stages of splintering plywood and cinder blocks in the middle of fields, activists trying to rally half-empty country churches, meeting halls cobbled together in the spare rooms. There’s an undeniable spirit in the people, who face insurmountable odds, but also a Southern Gothic desolation lingering in the remote woods and back roads.
The back roads had already proven to be dangerous. On June 21, the official first day of operations for the project, white New Yorkers Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner and black Mississippian James Chaney disappeared along one of those back roads in Neshoba County. Foner had met all three, and bunked with one of them, during training in Ohio. Their bodies were found two months later.
Days after arriving, Foner was arrested for distributing leaflets in Canton, and almost arrested again while escorting ministers to a meeting. The first house hosting him was bombed, and the neighboring homes shot up. All across Mississippi, local and out-of-state civil rights workers, protesters, and people trying to register to vote were being arrested and attacked by mobs.
In one letter home, Foner described the events of a single day:
Two COFO volunteers were jailed on a trumped up rape charge. Forty M-1 rifles and a thousand rounds of ammunition were stolen from the local National Guard armory. As I write this letter, a Negro church is burning down the street; the fire department is nowhere to be found. Two other volunteers have just been arrested. Last night a Negro freedom worker was shot by white hoodlums. He was taken to the white University Hospital and was released about an hour later with the slug still in his head. Also last night Reverend Smith’s house was shot into about 1:30 AM by white men. The Negro guards fired back as the men got into a city truck.
At the end of summer, the volunteers — mostly white college students from the north — packed up and went home. The free schools and community centers had been a success, but only a few hundred people had managed to brave the intimidation and outsmarted the system to become registered voters. There was still work to do, and Foner stayed behind as a COFO project leader in Neshoba County. He was in the state when the interracial Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party challenged the mainstream delegation on TV at the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, when America heard Fannie Lou Hamer speak of her own failed attempts to register to vote, and of a near-fatal prison-cell beating she survived the year before. He was still there at the end of the year when the FBI arrested 21 men for the murders of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner.
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