Black History

Freedom Summer, A Turning Point in The Civil Rights Movement

Devices used to deter voters included literacy tests and poll taxes, a fee that must be paid by Blacks in order to vote. And Mississippi led the pack, boasting the lowest number of Black registered voters: less than 7% of those who were eligible. These issues led to a 1964 voter registration drive aimed at increasing the number of registered Black voters in Mississippi. It was called Freedom Summer, also dubbed the Mississippi Summer Project.

Published

3 years ago

November 14, 2021

Oakland Post

In June 1964 around 800 white, mainly middle-class northern students travelled to Mississippi to spend the summer working alongside veteran Black activists. It was a bold and creative attempt to advance the cause of civil rights and to force decisive action from the federal government. Courtesy of heroesofthecivilrightsmovement.org/chapter/freedom-summer

By Tamara Shiloh

It was 1964 and the Civil Rights Movement was in full swing. Three years before, unforgettable history had been made: Freedom Riders (groups of white and African American civil rights activists who participated in Freedom Rides) traveled via bus throughout the segregated South fighting Jim Crow laws; and Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech at the March on Washington in 1963. What took place then was called “progress.”

Still, the South remained segregated, especially at polling places. Blacks were abused, attacked, threatened, and some were killed when attempting to exercise their right to vote.

These issues led to a 1964 voter registration drive aimed at increasing the number of registered Black voters in Mississippi. It was called Freedom Summer, also dubbed the Mississippi Summer Project.

The project was organized by civil rights groups such as the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE) and the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and run by the local Council of Federated Organizations. More than 700 volunteers (mostly white) joined Mississippi Blacks in the fight against voter intimidation and discrimination.

They, too, were met with the same level of violence, all perpetrated by the Ku Klux Klan alongside some local and state law enforcement officers. Reports from the press drew international attention to America’s racist treatment of its Black citizens.

As the summer grew hotter, the violence escalated.

Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, white students from New York, and James Chaney, a Black man from Meridian, Miss., arrived in Philadelphia, Miss., on June 15. There, the trio was tasked to investigate a church burning. The arson was not resolved, and the three men had been kidnapped.

Six weeks later, their bodies were recovered: beaten and lynched by a Klan mob.

Public outcry mounted as the hunt for their killers began. Schwerner, Goodman, and Chaney became nationally known. The press dubbed the crime “the Freedom Summer murders.”

Distrust crept in between white and Black volunteers and staff. There were 17,000 Blacks in Mississippi that summer attempting to register to vote. Sadly, only 1,200 were successful. Still, progress was made.

The project established 40-plus Freedom Schools serving 3,000 adults and children to read. National attention spurred by the press convinced then-president Lyndon B. Johnson and Congress to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964, squashing segregation in public places and banning all employment discrimination.

The violence of Freedom Summer eventually cooled, as did some relationships among those active within the Civil Rights Movement. Anger over the violence and deaths spurred a split: those who continued to believe in non-violence and those who had begun to doubt whether equality could be reached through peaceful means. After 1964, more militant factions would rise as the struggle for equality continued.

The events of Freedom Summer led to the passing of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. And still, the struggle continues.

Oakland Post

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Black History

Book Review: ‘The Jazzmen: How Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Count Basie Transformed America’

Your toes didn’t wait long before they started tapping. They knew what was coming, almost as soon as the band was seated. They knew before the first notes were played and the hep cats and jazz babies hit the floor to cut a rug. Daddy, it was the bee’s knees but in the new book “The Jazzmen” by Larry Tye, if you were the Sheik on the stage, makin’ cabbage wasn’t all that swank.

Published

4 days ago

May 17, 2024

Oakland Post

Courtesy of Lisa Frusztajer

By Terri Schlichenmeyer

Your toes didn’t wait long before they started tapping.

They knew what was coming, almost as soon as the band was seated. They knew before the first notes were played and the hep cats and jazz babies hit the floor to cut a rug. Daddy, it was the bee’s knees but in the new book “The Jazzmen” by Larry Tye, if you were the Sheik on the stage, makin’ cabbage wasn’t all that swank.

Louis Armstrong was born in 1900 or thereabouts in a “four-room frame house on an unpaved lane” in a section of New Orleans called “Back o’Town … the Blackest, swampiest, and most impoverished” area of the city. His mother was a “chippie,” and the boy grew up running barefoot and wild, the latter of which led to trouble. At age twelve, Armstrong was sent to the Colored Waif’s Home for recalcitrant Black boys, and that changed his life. At the “home,” he found mentors, father-figures and love, and he discovered music.

For years, Bill “Count” Basie insisted that he’d grown up with “no-drama, no-mystery, and nobody’s business but his,” but the truth was “sanitized.” He hated school and dropped out in junior high, hoping to join the circus. Instead, he landed a job working in a “moving-picture theater” as a general worker. When the theater’s piano player didn’t come to work one day, Basie volunteered to sit in. He ultimately realized that “I had to get out … of Red Bank [New Jersey], and music was my ticket.”

Even as a young teenager, Edward Ellington insisted that he be treated like a superstar. By then, his friends had nicknamed him “Duke,” for his insistence on dressing elegantly and acting like he was royalty. And he surely was — to his mother, and to millions of swooning female fans later in his life.

Three men, born at roughly the same time, had more in common than their ages. Two of them had mothers “who doted” on them. All three were perform-aholics. And, for all three, “Race … fell away as America listened.”

Feel up to a time-trip back a century or more? You won’t even have to leave your seat, just grab “The Jazzmen” and hang on.

In his introduction, author Larry Tye explains why he so badly wanted to tell the story of these three giants of music and how Basie’s, Ellington’s, and Armstrong’s lives intersected and diverged as all three were near-simultaneously performing for audiences world-wide. Their stories fascinated him, and his excitement runs strong in this book. Among other allures, readers used to today’s star-powered gossip will enjoy learning about an almost-forgotten time when performers took the country by storm by bootstrapping without a retinue of dozens.

And the racism the three performers encountered disappeared like magic sometimes, and that’s a good tale all by itself.

This is a musician’s dream book, but it’s also a must-read story if you’ve never heard of Basie, Ellington, or Armstrong. “The Jazzmen” may send you searching your music library, so make note.