Freedom Summer

by Sally Belfrage

Freedom Summer is a richly detailed account of a young white woman who participated in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee's summer project in Mississippi in 1964. The text covers one intense summer from the basic training session in June to the Democratic Convention in August.

Genres: Memoir, Nonfiction, History, Race, African American

246 pages, Paperback

First published July 28, 1965

Reviews

[Amy · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an "on the ground" account of the summer of '64 in Mississippi as experienced by one of the Freedom Party volunteers. Although Belfrage is white and northern, she has a very humble understanding of what her small role was in the civil rights movement. The book sometimes reads like a very well-written journal. Interestingly, i found my friend's father's name mentioned several times, (another volunteer.)

[Emma · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is very special to me because it gives me insight into a life my father lived before me. It solidifies his role as hero, not only in my life, but in so many others.

It's also just a great read, a peep hole into an era that still lingers in modern day racism and class warfare, but it leaves the reader with hope, and without hope we're truly fucked.

[Emilie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Utterly vital and yet so, so dull. Published 1965 by a white volunteer, this is an invaluable source but such a poor piece of fiction which, fascinatingly, is how many read it.

Her account flits unconvincingly between third and first person, memory seems to cloud history with a strange determinism, and crude moralistic metaphors displace her more candid reflections. Nonetheless, the desire to bring her reader’s eye to little details, no matter how artlessly done, is interesting. In these interruptions Belfrage gives us less of a sense of her own early experience than of her desire, at the summer’s close, to communicate her politicisation.

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you want to get a sense of what it was like to be a white volunteer in Mississippi during the "Freedom Summer" of 1964, this is one of the best ways to do it. Sally Belfrage must have gone to Mississippi with the intention of compiling material for this book as well as working for first class citizenship for black Americans because it is full of eye-witness details that must have come from her journal. And, originally published in 1965, it must have been one of the first books published on the subject. By design or by luck, Belfrage managed to be present at many of the significant events of that summer. Participating in the training sessions in Oxford, Ohio, she was present when the disappearance of three civil rights workers, later discovered murdered, was announced. Sent to Greenwood, Mississippi--the headquarters of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee's operation--to set up a library in the town's black community center, she worked with Stokely Carmichael, Mary Lane, Sam Block, Willie Peacock, Fannie Lou Hamer, and other major Mississippi civil rights figures. Along with them (and many others), she was harassed, arrested on ridiculous charges, jailed, and tried in courts that didn't follow the rules of justice. Like other volunteers, she was housed, fed, and protected by an African American family, at great risk to themselves. One of the most interesting chapters of the book deals with the seemingly fearless McGhee family of Greenwood whose members were repeatedly beaten up and shot--mostly for trying to integrate a Greenwood movie theater--and with their admirers, many of whom wanted to respond to white violence with violence of their own. Belfrage also attended the 1964 Democratic National Convention where the integrated Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party's challenge to the all-white Mississippi Democratic Party regulars--who fully intended to vote for Barry Goldwater in the presidential election--was defeated through the backroom machinations of Lyndon Johnson and Hubert Humphrey. I highly recommend this book for the detailed view of what Freedom Summer was like.

[Lisa · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an important record of the author's volunteer experience enforcing civil rights in Mississippi in the summer of 1964. Unfortunately it's written too poorly for many people to stick with it. Her thoughts ramble without direction. A simple outline would have helped a lot. Horribly, some of the voter registration suppression tactics sound too like what happened in the 2012 election. The accounts of trumped-up charges to arrest black people are so ludicrous that they would be comical if they weren't true.

[Hope · Rating 4 out of 5]

summer...very freeing

[Aaron Horton · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was and okay book from the view of a white women from North working Civil Rights movement in Mississippi .

[Mary Fusoni · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've had this book on my shelf for at least 30 years, and finally was drawn to reading it after finishing Anne Moody's "Coming of Age in Mississippi." Moody ends her account in the spring of 1964, just before the beginning of the Mississippi Summer Project (as it was known until Sally Belfrage's book title caught on as an excellent referent). The book begins with journalistic detachment, referring to the volunteers arriving for training in Ohio as "they." But as soon as Sally (a volunteer too, but a bit older than most) arrives in the boiling cauldron of that Mississippi summer, the writing becomes personal and immediate. She and the other volunteers witnessed a horrifying degree of brutality and illegality on the part of local law enforcement—none of it unexpected by the local population of African Americans. I am grateful for this book. The writing is not perfect, but the emotion and the raw witness are important for an understanding of the tremendous courage and extraordinary sacrifices that led to some of the gains of the Civil Rights Movement, as well as providing insight into the virulent resistance to full equality for African Americans that persists to this day.