Opinion
Freedom Summer – 50 Years Later
“Challenging People to Shape
a Better Future Now”
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The Skanner Newspaper, established
in October 1975, is a weekly publica-
tion, published each Wednesday by
IMM Publications Inc.,
415 N. Killingsworth St.,
T
he 50th anniversary of
Freedom Summer is being
commemorated this week
in Mississippi and it provides the
perfect backdrop to reflect on the
transformation of not only Missis-
sippi, then the deadliest state in the
nation, but the entire region..
As I have written in the space
before, there was a popular joke
about Mississippi making the
rounds during the height of the
Civil Rights Movement. Suppos-
edly, a Chicago seminary student
who was awakened at 3 a.m. by a
voice imploring him: “Go to Mis-
sissippi! Go to Mississippi!! Go to
Mississippi!!!” The seminary stu-
dent said, “Lord, you said that you
will be with me always, even until
the end of the earth. If I go to Mis-
sissippi, will you go with me?”
The heavenly voice replied, “I’ll
go as far as Memphis.”
Of course, if the Lord was reluc-
tant to go to Mississippi, the
chances of a Black surviving were
slim and none. At the time, I had
just completed my junior year at
Druid High School in Tuscaloosa,
Ala. In the summer of 1964. Ala-
bama had its own violent racial
history when it came to race rela-
tions, but Mississippi was
the one state we knew was worse.
Of course, we all awaited the
beginning of Freedom Summer, a
national mobilization of mostly
college students who would
descend upon Mississippi in 1964
to help civil rights activists, led by
Bob Moses of the Student Nonvi-
olent Coordinating Committee,
assist Blacks in voter education
and voting.
More than 1,000 college stu-
discovered. One was Herbert
Oarsby, a 14-year-old boy who
T HE C URRY was wearing a Congress of Racial
R EPORT
Equality (CORE) T-shirt. The bod-
ies of Henry Hezekiah Dee and
Eddie Moore, who had been
George E.
expelled from Alcorn A&M Col-
Curry
lege for civil rights activities, were
also discovered. The remains of
five more Black men were found,
but never identified.
It wasn’t until 1970 that anyone
dents, about 90 percent of them
White, participated. With so many was imprisoned for the slayings of
northern White students descend- Chaney, Schwerner and Goodman,
ing on the state, the nation would with six years being the longest
be watching. And Blacks like me, time served.
In 1964, only 6.7 percent of
who grew up under America’s ver-
sion of apartheid, knew that Blacks were registered to vote, the
virulent White racists in Missis- lowest in the nation. Today, more
With so many northern White students
descending on the state, the nation
would be watching.
sippi would not go quietly into the
dark. They would go into the dark
– where they did their most
vicious work – but they wouldn’t
be quiet about it.
And sure enough, at the outset of
Freedom Summer, three civil
rights workers – James Chaney,
Michael Schwerner and Andrew
Goodman – were arrested in
Nashoba County by Sheriff Cecil
Price, a member of the Ku Klux
Klan. That night, they were
released. Tipped off about their
impending release, Klansmen
abducted the three and murdered
them.
While looking for the three civil
rights workers in rivers and
swamps, other Black bodies were
than a third of Mississippi’s voters
are Black and the state has the
largest number of Black elected
officials in the nation.
But that progress came with a
price, with people losing their jobs
–and even their lives – simply
because they wanted to exercise
their constitutional right to vote.
The casualities extended beyond
the three civil rights workers.
According to the book, Freedom
Summer by Doug McAdam, in the
summer of 1964 alone:
At least four Blacks from Missis-
sippi were murdered because
of their civil rights activities;
Four people were seriously
wounded;
80 summer workers were beaten
1,062 people were arrested’
37 churches were burned or
bombed and
The homes or businesses of 30
African Americans were
bombed or burned.
Visiting college students weren’t
the only ones responsible for the
success of that summer. When
Berea College withdrew as a train-
ing site for students headed South,
Western College for Women in
Oxford, Ohio, now part of Miami
University, stepped forward.
Attorneys volunteered from the
NAACP Legal Defense and Edu-
cational Fund, the Lawyers’
Committee for Civil Rights Under
Law, the National Lawyers Guild
and the ACLU. Medical profes-
sionals,
participating
as
individuals as well as the Medical
Committee for Human Rights,
also joined the caravans headed to
Mississippi.
The level of national support
emboldened Black Mississippians,
such as Fannie Lou Hamer, to
challenge the seating of the all-
White Mississippi delegation to
the Democratic National Conven-
tion in Atlantic City.
As Attorney Thomas N. Todd
likes to remind us, this was done
before the existence of Facebook,
Twitter, InstaGram and other
social media.
It’s good that civil rights vets are
celebrating Freedom Summer this
week. But the challenge is to
reignite that passion and sense of
commitment today. Many of the
problems of 1964 are still preva-
lent today. We need a Freedom
Summer, Winter, Fall and Spring.
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The Central Park Jogger Case Settlement
H
ow much is a person’s inno-
cence worth?
That’s the most fundamental
question framing the news that,
after years of bitter dispute, a set-
tlement has been reached in the
lawsuit stemming from the notori-
ous Central Park Jogger case that a
quarter-century ago inflamed
racial tensions in New York City
and across the country, sent five
Black and Latino youth to prison
for years – and since then has
become one of the best-known
examples of the injustice that’s
corroded much of America’s crim-
inal justice system.
The five men, who, though 14 to
16 years old at the time, were tried
as adults for beating and raping
the young White woman, will now
receive about a million dollars for
each year they served in prison.
Four of the men—Antron McCray,
Kevin Richardson, Yusef Salaam,
and Raymond Santana, Jr. – spent
about seven years in prison. One,
Kharey Wise, served about 13
years.
More than a decade after their
trial, DNA and other evidence
uncovered by the Manhattan Dis-
trict Attorney’s office proved that
none of the five youths had beaten
and raped the jogger. The evidence
tied the attack to one man, Matias
Reyes, who by then was in prison
for murdering a woman shortly
after he had attacked the jogger,
then confessed to the crime.
The convictions of the five were
Page 2 The Portland and Seattle Skanner June 25, 2014
L AST
C HANCE
Lee A.
Daniels
vacated in 2002, but for a decade
the administration of New York
City Mayor Michael Bloomberg
refused to settle their lawsuit that
charged that police and prosecu-
tors had deliberately suppressed
the DNA and other evidence. City
Thanks
to
technological
advances in the use of DNA evi-
dence and action taken by some
state legislatures and some police
and prosecutors, too, the list of the
exonerated has grown significant-
ly in the decade since the Central
Park Jogger Five were cleared.
According to data from The
Innocence Project, a national liti-
gation
and
public
policy
organization, there have now been
316 post-conviction DNA exoner-
ations in the country. That
includes 18 people who were sen-
tenced to death before DNA
proved their innocence. The aver-
One of the best-known examples of
the injustice that’s corroded much of
America’s criminal justice system
officials, however, then main-
tained that the police and
prosecutors had not committed
any wrongdoing and therefore
could not be held liable.
By contrast, the administration
of Mayor Bill de Blasio, who took
office in January, moved quickly
to settle the case, which yet
remains one of the most notorious
examples of the egregious mis-
takes and willful misconduct by
police, prosecutors and judges that
have sentenced men and women
of all backgrounds to long terms in
prison – and some to death row.
age sentence those convicted
served before their DNA-based
exoneration was nearly 14 years,
70 percent of those exonerated
were people of color, and in 50
percent of the cases, the true crim-
inal was identified by the DNA
testing.
Undoubtedly, the most stunning
example of the criminal justice
system’s wrongful conviction
dynamic is now unfolding in
Brooklyn, N.Y. Growing doubts
about numerous murders convic-
tions obtained there in the 1980s
and 1990s in recent years led the
New York City borough’s long-
time prosecutor, Charles J. Hynes,
to establish an special unit to
investigate claims of innocence.
The result: in recent months six
men who had already spent as
much as 23 years in prison after
being convicted of murder, have
been exonerated and set free.
Now, Kenneth Thompson,
Brooklyn’s newly-elected district
attorney (who defeated Hynes last
year in a bitterly-fought contest),
is, as the New York Times put it in
a recent news article, “grappling
with a metastasizing wrongful
conviction scandal in which
dozens of imprisoned men have
asked for freedom, their convic-
tions linked to mistakes and
misconduct by police and prosecu-
tors in the violent, drug-plagued
1980s and 1990s. It is a tidal wave
that could dwarf other exoneration
clusters.”
This wrongful conviction scan-
dal, mind you, concerns just one
borough of one American city.
But, like the Central Park Jogger
case, the terrible miscarriage of
justice that is being uncovered
there underscores that for many
individuals accused of a crime, the
criminal justice system’s operating
principle has been, not innocent
until proven guilty, but guilty until
proven innocent.
Read the rest online at
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