Freedom Summer workers return to hallowed ground at Miami

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By Mary McCarty, Staff Writer Updated 8:35 PM Saturday, October 17, 2009

For present-day Miami University students, Western College is merely a far corner of their sprawling campus.

For the veterans of Freedom Summer, it is hallowed ground.

This is the place where young civil rights workers Michael “Mickey” Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman spent their final weeks of life before being murdered in Mississippi.

This is the place where more than 1,000 young volunteers gathered, in 1964, at the Western College for Women — now part of the Miami campus — for two weeks of training to take part in Freedom Summer, an effort to increase voter registration for blacks in Mississippi.

It was dangerous duty. Charles Cobb came to Western College as a 20-year-old field commander for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which organized Freedom Summer.

Cobb, a retired National Geographic reporter, returned to Oxford last weekend for part of Miami University’s yearlong Bicentennial celebration, “Freedom Summer: Unity and Change, Then and Now.” The three-day conference attracted national and international scholars and also served as a reunion for more than 100 Freedom Summer activists, including Rita Schwerner Bender, Michael’s widow.

Cobb had been on campus only two days in 1964 when word came that Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman had gone missing. Cobb immediately left for Mississippi with civil rights giant Stokely Carmichael.

“We’d had a whole lot of deaths in Mississippi, so we assumed right away they were dead,” Cobb recalled. “It was tragic, but not surprising. We were constantly up against violence, getting shot at, getting beaten, getting chased. It was the way life was in those days.”

For the new trainees at Western College, the tragedy was more of a shock. “They had no experience of the South and this showed them how serious and deadly this project could be,” Cobb recalled. “This showed them this was no summer vacation.” He has written about his experiences in the recently published memoir, “On the Road to Freedom: A Guided Tour of the Civil Rights Trail.”

After the murders the students were encouraged to write home, he said, to urge their parents to pressure the federal government for more protection for voter-registration workers.

The spirits of the slain workers were never far from the minds of those attending the reunion, particularly at the candlelight vigil Friday night. “But it was not a sad or morbid affair,” observed folk singer Candie Carawan of New Market, Tenn. “We were also remembering how much had been gained.”

She attended the reunion with her husband, Guy, 82, whom she met at an early sit-in protest at the Highlander folk school in 1961. Guy taught the protesters the black spiritual “We Shall Overcome,” at that early sit-in, leading to its becoming the anthem for the civil rights movement.

“It’s very important to keep that history before people’s minds,” Candie said. “The Freedom Summer reunion was a really nice mix of present-day students and the veterans. It’s amazing the campus stepped up the way it did. It wasn’t an easy time to step up.”

Mary Jane Berman, director of Miami’s Center for American and World Cultures, said many students aren’t aware of the campus’ crucial role in the civil-rights movement. The event’s organizers “wanted to share their stories with our students, who are two generations removed from this incredible historical legacy. We wanted them to be a role model for how students can change their world, and we wanted them to think about what other social inequities they could address through knowledge and action.”

Filmmaker Keith Beauchamp, 38, won critical acclaim and an Emmy nomination for his documentary about Emmett Till, the 14-year-old boy who was beaten to death in Mississippi in 1955 for the supposed crime of whistling at a white woman. More importantly, his investigation inspired the Justice Department to reopen the case and at long last win a conviction. Emmett Till’s mother, Mamie Till Mobley, became like a mother to Beauchamp until her death in 2003.

He feels honored to tell the stories of the heroes of the civil rights movement. “I’m just a young guy,” he said, “among all these giants.”

Contact this reporter at  (937) 225-2209 or mmccarty @DaytonDailyNews.com.

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