My Mississippi Freedom Summer Adventure

It was the summer of 1964. My first stop was an orientation in Oxford, Ohio. More peaceful than Oxford, Mississippi, where I had fresh memories of James Meredith's enrollment there. I had covered that event. The day after a night of rioting I learned that a French journalist and one other person had been shot dead. The journalist had a beard and it was assumed that that tagged him as an outsider. It may have cost him his life. At Oxford I learned that three young men, including one with a beard, were heading down to Mississippi to join hundreds of others in a summer that would center on voter registration. I remember expressing serious reservations based on my experience at Ole Miss.  When the worst happened, we were all on our guard. Later that summer, after the three men had been killed, I flew from Chicago to Memphis and drove to a strategy meeting in Clarksdale, Mississippi. There I met John Lewis. I had come to know John in Nashville where I spent the summer of 1961 working for the Reverend Kelly Miller Smith. When John found I was returning to Memphis that evening, he asked for a ride. We drove North in a rented car. For the most part we were serious. Quiet. Side by side. Looking ahead. I think we were both thinking the same thing. When we crossed the Tennessee line, we signed with relief. We didn't need words. I have not ordinarily experienced fear during years of participation in and coverage of demonstrations and volatile events. But on that summer evening in Mississippi, I felt that let-me-out-of-here feeling and I can summon it up as if it was yesterday. And given the way things are now, it was only yesterday.

Charles Sanders Peirce - Thinking in Threes