“You’ve Got to be Carefully Taught:” Why Learn the History of Freedom Summer
2024 marks the 60th anniversary of Freedom Summer, the education and voter registration movement that is the centerpiece of my historical novel, The FOG MACHINE, and lies at the epicenter of the American Civil Rights Movement.
The FOG MACHINE was published to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Freedom Summer by capturing its history, lest we forget or never even know it.
In future BLOG posts, my intention is to commemorate the 60th anniversary by:
Remembering movement veterans I met while writing The FOG MACHINE
Reflecting on where we are today, looking back to the 50th anniversary and the summer of 1964
Sharing how my awareness has been influenced during my writing journey
This inaugural post will focus on the importance of knowing the history of Freedom Summer.
Please let me know what you think!
Freedom Summer created martyrs and heroes as it laid the foundation for the 1965 Voting Rights Act. But since the 2013 Shelby County v. Holder Supreme Court decision gutted Section 5 of the act, more and more states have enacted laws restricting voter access. At least 29 states have enacted 62 restrictive voting laws since the 2020 election alone, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. This whittling away of what is arguably the most significant piece of civil rights legislation ever passed underscores the need to know the history of Freedom Summer 1964 in order to confront questions such as:
At what cost were the rights codified by the 1965 Voting Rights Act earned?
At what cost do we ignore their erosion?
“Follett’s ear has perfect pitch in capturing the ingrained attitudes, nuanced feelings, and voices of hope at the 1964 Meridian Freedom School. Children naturally play together; it’s the grownups who teach them to hate and fear. The more we reveal how that happens, the more we can be hopeful about changing it.”
—Mark Levy, 1964 Meridian Freedom School Coordinator, on The FOG MACHINE
Levy alludes to the song “You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught,” from South Pacific by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein. “You’ve got to be taught to hate and fear. You’ve got to be taught from year to year. It’s got to be drummed in your dear little ear. You’ve got to be carefully taught…”
Hate and fear seem to lie at the root of what divides us in America today. I contend that teaching our full, true history is a requisite step towards breaking down those divides.
While we’ve got to be taught to hate and fear, we’ve also got to be taught to resist those urges. But what? And how? and who makes those decisions?
I recently happened upon an online gathering entitled “Freedom Summer 2024: Urgent Lessons to Save Our Future.” Dr. Kimberlé Crenshaw of the African American Policy Forum hosted. Judy Richardson was a featured guest.
A modern-day documentary film producer who was drawn into the Civil Rights Movement as a student at Swarthmore, Judy Richardson was Jim Forman’s secretary in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s Atlanta office before becoming part of 1964 Freedom Summer.
Judy Richardson, seated, clapping hands and singing as James Forman leads in 1963. L to R: Mike Sayer, MacArthur Cotton, Forman, Marion Barry, Lester McKinney, Mike Thelwell, Lawrence Guyot, Richardson, John Lewis, Jean Wheeler, Julian Bond. From Memories of the Southern Civil Rights Movement by photographer Danny Lyon.
Dr. Crenshaw posed multiple questions, each of which Ms. Richardson addressed with enthralling stories. But suddenly, she asked what, for me, was perhaps the most crucial question of the evening:
As you think about our fight now to correct the deliberate distortions in our public school curriculum, what do we need to keep forefront and foremost in our thinking about what the role of public education is in our democracy?
“If folks don’t know that it was their mothers and their teachers and their clergy and their fellow students who made and sustained the movement, they don’t know that they can do it again,” Ms. Richardson told us.
“And it’s the whole point of the other folks who wanna make sure we don’t teach this real history. They do not want us to see ourselves as the ones who made it and changed the country. And made it more democratic for everybody.”
The “deliberate distortions in our public school curriculum” and the fight to correct them which Dr. Crenshaw refers to in her crucial question boil down to choices. What history is to be taught? How? And who gets to make those decisions? These choices are central to what many call our divided America. Amidst conflicting views on those choices, there may seem to be no easy answers.
Judy Richardson, holding Hands on the Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC, which she co-edited with 5 others
Courtesy SNCC Legacy Project
But I believe Ms. Richardson hit the nail on the head. If we want to bridge those divides, heal the hate and fear, and ensure a more democratic society for all of us, we have to know that we can “do” Freedom Summer again. We have to know it deep within ourselves and accept that we must do it again and again, however long that takes.
The 60th anniversary of Freedom Summer predisposes us to explore those choices through the lens of 1964 Freedom Summer. We have much to learn and much to work out, and 1964 Freedom Summer gives us a benchmark against which to do that.
Thanks for reading this Stories from Civil Rights History, Then and Now BLOG post by author Susan Follett.
Please let me know what you think!
Copyright (C) 2024 Susan Follett. All rights reserved.