Freedom Summer

Starred review from May 3, 2010
In this mesmerizing history, Watson (Sacco and Vanzetti) revisits the blistering summer of 1964 when about 700 volunteers arrived in Mississippi to agitate for civil rights and endured horrific harassment, intimidation, and persecution from racist state and private forces. The largely white, college student volunteers and the largely black trainers and organizers, SNCC veterans of previous campaigns, were fed and sheltered by the impoverished black community members they had come to serve and secure suffrage for. Their path was two-pronged: the Freedom School’s challenge to a “power structure... that confined Negro education to ‘learning to stay in your place’ ” and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party’s challenge to Mississippi’s all-white delegation to the 1964 Democratic National Convention. Familiar figures (e.g., Lyndon B. Johnson, Stokely Carmichael, Fannie Lou Hamer) take the stage, but Watson’s dramatic center belongs to four “ordinary” volunteers, whose experiences he portrays with resonant detail. The murdered Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner cast shadows over all, haunting Watson’s account of how the volunteers, organizers, and the black Mississippians who dared seek political expression “lifted and revived the trampled dream of democracy.”