As much as the religious would have us believe in the holiness of an ideal standard of conduct, an unchanging set of views and values from which one may never need to deviate, we know this is absurd. After all, such standards are informed by the times and the cultures in which they were enshrined. And the merest glance at human history, both recent and ancient, tells us that social mores change over time. What is inexcusably taboo in one culture might not even be worthy of a whisper of controversy in another. Which leads us to an inescapable conclusion. As our physical forms evolve, so too do our morals and mores, taking us on a long and winding journey to freedoms both of the flesh and the mind. This should not be feared. On the contrary, it should be embraced. For to do so is to accept that we can always be better.
But there's a deeper question here, one that cannot be so easily dispensed with. How do mores evolve? What motivates social change? Is it the introduction of foreign elements that must be grappled with, incorporated into our cultural worldviews? Or are mores changed by insurgency, an upheaval from within the culture that has woken to an injustice that must be corrected? Both may be applicable, but I cannot think of a better argument for the latter than the remarkable story of hardship and endurance laid out here by Bruce Watson.
Fully a hundred years after the Americans fought a great, transformative war to expunge their nation's original sin, slavery, life in parts of the racially divided American South had changed amazingly little. African Americans were still segregated, forced to use different washrooms and schools, restaurants and churches, distinctions imposed upon them by their white masters, men and women who had refused, since the end of the Civil War, to admit defeat. Their rage and humiliation coalesced into a movement to deny the rights of their black neighbors, not only disenfranchising them, but igniting the creation of a culture that caused the law to look the other way while the descendents of their slaves were beaten and murdered, raped and marginalized.
Tired of the indifference and the status quo, and chafing at the soulless, forced conformity of the homogeneous, 1950s white culture, a group of young, rebellious, earnest and devoted students, from schools all over the country, descended on the South, in 1964, armed with a mission to compel change upon the ignorant and the backward. With songs and leaflets, energy and passion, they helped to shield the African American community from the slings and arrows of their white peers while they organized to do what most of them hadn't done in their lifetimes, register to vote. The riots and killings that flowed from this hellish summer would change forever the way the world viewed the American South, inspiring lasting legal and social change worthy of Lincoln's memory.
From the policy arguments to the tactical disputes, from the mobilization to the execution, Freedom Summer collects the stories of these legendary rebels that helped to finally abolish this most enduring stain on the American fabric. Shaping his narrative around a number of the Summer's key figures, revealing them in all their admirable passion and headstrong determination, Mr. Watson allows his chronicle, of those few, memorable months in Mississippi, to telescope back and forth between the heatedness of the view on the ground and the more calculated coldness of the view at 20,000 feet, where politics and necessity trump individuality. In this, the reader is afforded an excellent overview of this reckoning with the old South that is as comfortable sitting in the White House, with a conflicted and annoyed Linden Johnson, as it is roaring along at 100 MPH through the Mississippi heat, with the bringers of change and those who sought to snuff them out before they could work their will.
As of this writing, we're less than a year away from the 50th anniversary of this revolutionary summer, a fact which will surely author thousands of recollections, white and black, liberal and conservative, of what happened in 1964. There will be analyses of what it meant, some arguing for everything, others countering with nothing. Freedom Summer may not have all the definitive answers to these inevitable disputes. What it does possess, though, is far more important, a knowledge of the means by which positive change can be wrought. These rebels didn't have to have a coherent message -- on the contrary, the author is quite clear about the many, ruinous disputes that convulsed the SNCC. No, all they needed was the will, and the courage, to enable, and to motivate, the criminally disenfranchised to vote. The poisonous snakes obstructing them, envenomed by their irrational hatreds and burdened by their cultural conservatism, would happily expose themselves at this provocation, slithering out into the bright lights of the national spotlight where they could be judged and found wanting.
Freedom Summer is not a perfect work. It could have spent more time on the lead up to, and the aftermath of, this critical conflagration. Moreover, Mr. Watson virtually ignores the terrible optics of white people, however good-intentioned, riding bravely to the rescue of the beleaguered and uneducated blacks. This must have created fallout, both at the time and thereafter, but these are small quibbles with what is otherwise a wonderful work that exposes, and largely celebrates, the lives of heroes of all stripes who recognized an injustice and, instead of whining about it, chose to attack it directly. Would that they were better remembered by the culture at large.
Inspiring work... (4/5 Stars)
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