Designed by a veteran of the Mississippi Freedom Summer Project, Freedom '64 aims to restore the historic Fielder & Brooks Drug Store, which housed the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) in 1964. This project serves to educate the public about Meridian's central role in the Civil Rights Movement and inspire future generations of young and old citizens to make their contribution to building
a more just and equitable society. Freedom '64 plans to celebrate the contribution of civil rights veterans who pursued the cause of freedom during the historic Freedom Summer of 1964. The work of those veterans helped to usher in a new era in Mississippi. Please stay tuned for more information on this convention slated for 2014. Freedom '64 is a not-for-profit Mississippi corporation in Meridian, Mississippi. Why is Freedom '64? Why Meridian? In the rich history of the Civil Rights Movement, the summer of 1964 stands out as one of its most significant periods. It came to be known as “Freedom Summer” because it was during that time that COFO, a confederation of several civil rights organizations, brought nearly 1,000 volunteers to Mississippi to work for civil rights. These mostly young volunteers worked on voter registration and community organization, and they operated Freedom Schools, the largest of which was in Meridian. What is the mission of Freedom '64? The mission of Freedom 64 is to develop, preserve and promote understanding of the Civil Rights Movement in Meridian and East Mississippi. How do you propose to do this? We have a local Board of Directors and are building a National Committee to inform and guide our work. Our most immediate priority is forming, engaging and supporting this organization. Roscoe Jones of Meridian serves as CEO of Freedom 64. Jones was a student leader and song leader in the Meridian Freedom School, a student organizer in the COFO office at the Fielder and Brooks Building, and was co-chair of the state-wide Freedom Summer Youth Convention held at the Baptist Seminary in Meridian in August of 1964. As a high school student he participated in the Selma to Montgomery March. He also served our county in Vietnam as a US Marine Officer. In short, he "gets" the value and the price of freedom and justice. He is supported by a diverse, community-based board. What is Freedom '64 doing? Projects are underway in three areas:
Youth engagement/Education:
We began as "Freedom Summer" began: with youth and a few volunteers including veterans of the summer of 1964. Meridian Freedom school teachers/leaders Mark Levy, Patti Miller and Gail Falk have made a visit to Meridian at their expense to assist in this work. They continue to inform our work. We are listening to their voices and those of local 'students' who participated in and those who enabled the Freedom School in Meridian. And we're gathering ideas from young people about how best to advance our programs. Some of our educational programming includes interactions with students at Meridian High School. Thanks to Parents for Public Schools and MHS faculty ; Mr. Jones, Mr. Levy and Ms Falk spend an entire school day engaging with local HS in classes and large groups. Over three hundred students and numerous faculty participated. Through collaboration with Dr. Toby Bates of the Meridian Campus of Mississippi State University (MSU/Meridian), Mr. Jones and Mr. Levy dialogued about the Meridian Freedom School with a student and community group at First Union Baptist Church. Freedom 64 has sponsored two field trips for youth led by Mr. Jones. Around 30 youth were transported to Jackson for the Freedom Riders' Convention. This trip was supported by a local citizen. In collaboration with Meridian Community College (MCC) 35 students attended a conference developed by The Hamer Institute in Jackson. This trip was supported by McDonalds of Meridian. Additional trips and community events are in planning. Historic Preservation:
We secured a long term lease on the Fielder and Brooks Building on 5th Street in Downtown Meridian. This property is included on the Mississippi Heritage Trust's 2011 List of 10 Most Endangered Historic Places. Freedom 64 has received support from the State Department of Archives and History to begin rehabilitation of that historically significant site. With the assistance of Meridian Main Street additional grant support from The National Trust for Historic Preservation has enabled a structural engineering study. The initial Meridian COFO headquarters was on the second floor of the black owned Fielder & Brooks Drug Store on Fifth Street. From this site COFO workers and local volunteers coordinated activities across this community and region in preparation for Freedom Summer. On the first official day of Freedom Summer in 1964, three COFO workers from the Meridian office were murdered by Ku Klux Klansmen between Meridian and Philadelphia. Their deaths appalled the nation and spurred passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Thus, this location has local, state, and national historical significance. Historic preservation includes archival and interpretative materials which inform youth and adults about the significance of the physical structures. To that end Freedom 64 is engaging with The William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation's Mississippi Truth Project to assist in more fully developing oral/video materials to support our work. Additionally Freedom 64 is networking with faculty at MCC and MSU/Meridian and local NAACP leadership and others to assist development of archives and interpretative opportunities. Community Education:
We recognize that Freedom Summer 2014 brings opportunity to engage our immediate community with visitors from across our nation. We aspire to achieve community development as well as educational and economic impact around this "mile marker." With the support of the Lauderdale County Tourism Commission (LCT) development of a local civil rights "trail" has been initiated to complement the Mississippi Civil Rights Trail. Freedom 64 has developed a community based collaboration with Freedom School participants, Freedom School host familes, The Meridian/Lauderdale County NAACP, representatives of SCLC, SNCC, downtown businesses and property holders, MCC, MSU/Meridian, Meridian Main Street, the City of Meridian, The Montgomery Institute, Lauderdale County's Tourism Bureau and community leaders through formal and informal channels to advance mutual interests. Freedom 64 is encouraging and supporting organization of Freedom Summer 2014 activities/events in our region including seminars, group discussions, first-hand accounts, singings, tours of historical sites, theater productions, further development of archives, and other appropriate informal and formal educational vehicles. Jones is coordinating our work with the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum development team. What's next for Freedom '64? More work: planning, doing, collaboration building and fund raising. All informed by continuing listening. How can I volunteer for Freedom '64? If you wish to volunteer for Freedom '64, please contact Roscoe Jones, Sr. at [email protected] or 601-692-3825. FREEDOM SONGS
by freedomsongs11
We started the summer singing and we never stopped all summer. Like most volunteers, I arrived at the Oxford, OH training week knowing some folk songs and protest songs: Blowin' in the Wind, The Banks are Made of Marble, If I Had a Hammer, Michael Row the Boat Ashore, This Little Light. I was used to sitting in someone's living room singing melody or humming harmony with a guitar strumming accompaniment, or humming along to a 33 LP record of Joan Baez or the Weavers. But within that short week at Oxford, along with the principles of nonviolence and tips for teaching Freedom School, I learned a whole new way of singing. The SNCC staff, in their bib overalls, didn't so much teach us as they did let the music pour out of their beings into ours. We stood around a big bonfire one night at Oxford as a group of SNCC veterans gathered their fears, their hopes, their wounds and sang them out into the night, all one in the yearning and the promise of the music. I started to sing with my body and my heart, singing at the top of my voice yet losing my individual voice completely in a blend of all the voices. I think the actual moment I joined the movement was the moment that night I opened my mouth and sang too. The freedom songs we learned that week and kept on singing all summer long were a musical center that united us with civil rights struggles all over the country, with the Freedom Riders of 1961, with the Albany and Birmingham marchers of the year before, and the Selma marchers of the year to come. We might work in different states or towns, we might be in organizations with different initials (CORE. SCLC, MFD, SNCC, NAACP, COFO, etc.) we might have personality or ideological conflicts, but we all knew a core of 30 to 40 freedom songs, and when we sang them, we were one. Gail Falk, George Smith, Preston Ponder, ?, Sam Brown, Leila Waterhouse, Pete Rabinowitz
All the best freedom songs could and were adapted on the spur of the moment to the particular town and particular struggles of the people who were singing. In Meridian, we sang, Ain't gonna let Lee Roberts turn me roun'. For I'm gonna set at the welcome table, we sang, I'm gonna set at Weidmann's Restaurant and "I'm gonna set at Kresge's counter. For This little light, we'd sing All around Meridian, I'm gonna let it shine! Freedom songs were sung with no soloists and no conductor. There were often song leaders, who could get the song started on pitch and call the words for the next verse, but anyone else was welcome to be a leader or call out a verse too. There were no mimeographed songsheets, no notes written out on scores. Guy
Ben Chaney
Carawan quotes Pete Seeger as saying, "One woman on the Selma march saw me trying to notate a melody and said with a smile, "Don't you know you can't write down freedom songs?'" I never saw most freedom songs written down until I came across them in the hymnal of the Unitarian/Universalist church I attend now in Vermont. When we sing a "freedom song" out of the hymnal, I always feel off base. The process of translating the rhythms into measures with equal numbers of beats, while well-intentioned, seems to remove the flow, and putting the notes into exact scale pitches on a staff takes away the nuanced pitches of the oral songs. It feels like singing a photograph of a song. It has been said by many people, but it bears repeating, that music gave the civil rights movement its power and its soul. We haven't had another movement since in this country with music in its heart. It unified people in a meaning more powerful than mere words. There were songs for every mood of a movement (and the greatest of the songs were chameleons that adapted to the various emotional states we shared.) There were songs for perseverance: Keep your eyes on the prize, hold on. They say that freedom is a constant struggle. There were songs of determination and anger: Before I'd be a slave, I'd be buried in my grave. Ain't gonna let nobody turn me roun'. Songs for making a choice: Which side are you on? with its verse Don't Tom for Uncle Charlie, don't listen to his lies, cause black folks haven't got a chance unless we organize. Songs for scary times: I ain't scared of your jail. Joyful, hopeful songs: Woke up this mornin' with my mind stayed on freedom. This little light of mine. I'm gonna set at the welcome table one of these days, Halleluia! There were songs for parting and mourning: We been 'buked and we been scorned. This may be the last time. There were songs with humor: If you miss me from Miss Anne's kitchen and you can't find me nowhere, come on out to the living room 'cause I'll be settin' right there. And songs that told history. My favorite Oginga Odinga tells about the State Department's ill fated effort to show Kenyan official Oginga Odinga in 1963 that race relations in the United States were really fine. The State Dept. included Atlanta on its tour (after all, it was supposed to be the City Too Busy to Hate) and put Odinga up at the Peachtree Manor, one of the only integrated hotels in the city. SNCC staff heard about Odinga being in town and went to visit him with the purpose of giving him a different perspective. They invited the Kenyan to accompany them to the Toddle House restaurant, right next to the hotel, where they were refused service because of their race, and a number of people were arrested for sitting in. Odinga realized he had been given a "whitewashed" version of American race relations. He taught the SNCC workers the Swahili word for freedom, which is the chorus of the song: Uhuru, Uhuru, Freedom Now, Freedom Now. We sang marching and at meetings, in churches and in freedom school. I remember singing one of my favorites Wade in the Water in a congo line snaking down the beach beside the boardwalk in Atlantic City at the end of August 1964, when we were still hopeful that the FDP delegation would be seated by the Democratic Convention. I'd say my favorite song was/is Oh Freedom, for its prayerful spiritual yearning, so simple and so deep. But of all the songs, We Shall Overcome had a unique role. It was always sung last, and after it was finished, there would be no more singing. We always sang it connected to everyone else, with arms crossed, hands clasping the hands of the person on either side. I loved to look around the circle or the pews as we sang and see the intertwining of arms, smooth and gnarled, skinny and hefty, black, brown and white. We Shall Overcome was one of those chameleon songs that could express anger, determination, optimism, or perseverance in the face of great sorrow or fear. On the night of August 4, the song gave us all what we needed. By coincidence, that night Pete Seeger had come to Meridian to give a concert. First Baptist Church was full of Freedom school students, COFO workers, adults active with the movement, and, as I now see in Mark Levy's photos FBI agents (identified by their neckties, short haircuts and white shirts). Earlier that day, the FBI had found the bodies of Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman beneath an earthen dam in Neshoba County, but most people in the church didn't know it yet. Here's what I wrote to my parents the next day:
The night the bodies were discovered, Pete Seeger was giving a concert in Meridian. Most of the people there still did not know the news. Finally . . . Seeger very beautifully made the announcement. We must sing "We Shall Overcome" now, Seeger said. "The three boys would not have wanted us to weep now, but to sing and understand this song. That seems to me the best way to explain the greatness of this project, that death can have this meaning. Dying is not an ever-present possibility in Meridian, the way some reports may suggest. Nor do any of us want to die. Yet in a moment like last night, we can feel that anyone who did die for the Project would wish to be remembered not by tributes or pure grief, but by understanding and continuation of what he was doing in Mississippi. And so we stood up and crossed hands and sang "We Shall Overcome." Thanks to Donna Garde and Mark Levy for their photos of Meridian, summer 1964. For written background on Freedom Songs, see the many wonderful articles and writings of Bernice Reagon, and Sing for Freedom, by Guy and Candie Carawan (foreward by Julian Bond). But of course, the songs shouldn't be read, they should be listened to, and there is are rich libraries of recordings accessible through the web.
