In the summer of 1964, Bernard Wasow, a 20-year-old college student from Los Angeles, spent his mornings teaching at a Freedom School in Columbus and his afternoons canvassing the city’s Black neighborhoods, urging residents to register to vote.
Wasow was one of roughly 1,000 – mostly white – volunteers who traveled to Mississippi for Freedom Summer, a movement organized by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee with the goal of drawing national attention to the experience of Black Mississippians living in the Jim Crow South.
“It was a good idea because … (the) white kids who went down there saw what life is like, and the United States paid attention,” Wasow told The Dispatch on Thursday. “The reason I went was because it was an opportunity to perhaps do something useful.”
As the heat of that summer began to wind down, Wasow took a moment to type a letter to his parents, in which he told them he wasn’t quite ready to leave, certain that the work was far from finished.
More than 60 years later, two Mississippi School for Mathematics and Science seniors, John Broome and Walt Giesen, discovered that letter as they researched firsthand accounts from volunteers who visited Columbus that summer.
“He did a very good job (in the letter) of encompassing the atmosphere of the Black community versus the white community in Columbus at the time,” Broome told The Dispatch. “It was very clear from reading his letter that there were problems that the Black community was facing and that there was still work to be done for the Freedom Summer movement here in Columbus.”
Next week, Broome will portray Wasow as Giesen provides context of the movement during the annual MSMS Eighth of May Emancipation Celebration at Sandfield Cemetery.
Held May 8 to commemorate Union troops’ arrival in Columbus on that day in 1865 with news of emancipation, the roughly one-hour event will feature students’ portrayals of Black locals and other people, like Wasow, who helped shape the community’s history.
When the students managed to track Wasow, now 82 and living in California, he said he was “delighted” to learn his story would be included in their project. He plans to travel to Columbus next week with his children to watch the performance.
“I was a player in something which – although it’s now on another downslope – was coming up, building the Civil Rights Movement,” he said. “To see years later that it was acknowledged and recognized, not only by people outside Mississippi but by people inside Mississippi, it was great.”
For Giesen, the performance is an opportunity to recognize the contributions of ordinary participants in the movement rather than the figureheads on which most people focus.
“When it really gets down to it, it is like individuals in communities like Columbus who are making the biggest impact,” Giesen told The Dispatch. “That’s the incredible story to tell that will hopefully really resonate with people there because we’re mentioning places in Columbus. It’s a very relatable story to people who know the community well.”
Shaping community
Broome and Giesen’s will be one of four performances from MSMS students based on their own research, with stories spanning from Emancipation to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, Chuck Yarborough, MSMS history teacher and director for the school’s MoreStory projects, told The Dispatch.
While some names planned for the performance are better known than others – like Rep. Robert Thompson, one of five Black legislators to represent Lowndes County in the late 19th century – others shine a light on lesser known but equally significant figures, like Maria Rabb, one of the core teachers at Union Academy in the 1880s.
Along with the research and writing skills students develop while preparing their scripts, Yarborough said his hope is for them to finish the project with a sense of investment in the communities they’ll go on to shape.
“This research and this project allows students to do just that,” he said. “They uncover complexities of our local community that will empower them to shape whatever communities they end up in.”
The celebration will also include performances from the Columbus High School Drum Line, the MSMS Voices in Harmony choir and from A.H. Jerriod Avant, University of Mississippi Writer in Residence.
The aim for the event, which begins at 6 p.m. with no cost for entry, is to connect community members to their own history, though both names they already know and some they may have never heard before.
“We hope that people in the community will come out to celebrate local history, to honor those who came before us, who helped make the community what it is for today, and also that they’ll get the message that it’s our job to now make the community better for those who come after us,” Yarborough said.
McRae is a general assignment and education reporter for The Dispatch.
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Quality, in-depth journalism is essential to a healthy community. The Dispatch brings you the most complete reporting and insightful commentary in the Golden Triangle, but we need your help to continue our efforts. In the past week, our reporters have posted 28 articles to cdispatch.com. Please consider subscribing to our website for only $2.30 per week to help support local journalism and our community.
