Radicalizing White Anti-Racists in the Sixties
April 17, 2008
After forcing the federal government to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed many forms of racial segregation and discrimination, the African-American civil rights movement turned its attention to fighting for the right to vote. As one component of its campaign, the movement recruited white volunteers to assist a voter registration drive targeted at blacks in Mississippi during the summer of 1964. Known as Freedom Summer, the movement aimed to undermine Mississippi’s laws effectively barring blacks from voting by refusing to comply with them, and hoped the participation of white volunteers (many of them young and from out of state) would generate sympathetic national media coverage.
Despite its title, Doug McAdam’s Freedom Summer isn’t actually about Freedom Summer itself. Rather, it focuses on the northern participants in Freedom Summer before and after the event. McAdams uses a combination of oral and quantitative history to examine participants in the Summer, the effect it had on them, and compares them with people who signed up to participate but chose not to show up at the last minute. The central argument of the work is that Freedom Summer radicalized the northern participants and that these radicalized northern students subsequently played an important role in creating the upsurge of activism and unrest of the late sixties. After they returned north they brought with them experiences gained in Mississippi and tried to recreate similar activist communities in the north. Overall, the book made a persuasive argument.
McAdams shows that, prior to Freedom Summer, both those who went to Mississippi and those who signed up to go but didn’t show up were very similar. The only significant difference was that the no-shows had fewer connections to groups and individuals who were also involved in Freedom Summer. Comparing the two groups is thus a good way to determine the effects of Freedom Summer.
The participants in Freedom Summer took a significantly different life course than the no-shows. For McAdam’s purposes the most important differences was their significantly greater involvement in left-wing activism. To separate the effects of Freedom Summer from other factors McAdams uses a regression analysis to determine which factors correlate with their level of activism. In his regression table on page 289 participation in Freedom Summer is by far the largest statistically significant variable, with a value of 5.008. A few other variables also correlate with level of activism, including number of volunteers in contact with in 1970, number of organizational affiliations prior to Freedom Summer, and number of years unemployed or underemployed during the sixties, but none are even close to as strongly correlated as Freedom Summer.
McAdams also debunks the myth of the “yuppie ex-radical” that sold out and became a stockbroker or other privileged person when they got older. Although he concedes there are two people who fit this stereotype (two people the media focus heavily on), his research shows this is not true in most cases. On the contrary, compared to the no-shows most participants in Freedom Summer paid personal prices for their politics and activism after the social movements of the sixties and early seventies went into decline. They have a lower rate of marriage, changed jobs more often, are less wealthy, have careers that are further behind, and often have a sense of alienation and isolation.
Despite being a generally well-supported book, the table on page 221 may be problematic. The table compares marriage rates of the volunteers in Freedom Summer, the no-shows and a comparison group of Americans taken from the census. For the comparison group, one would expect the male and female marriage rates to be the same, yet the male rate is 82% while the female rate is 74%. This means there are 8% more men getting married than women, which raises the question of who the men are marrying? If there are more men than women married it implies that either men are marrying each other at higher rates or some women have multiple husbands - yet both of those were not allowed when this book was written (and even today, there probably aren’t enough gays in Massachusetts to make a big difference). This discrepancy casts doubt on the table.