As a college student in the 1960s, Peter Norall watched what was happening across the country.
He saw when the Freedom Riders started campaigning with John Lewis. He saw sit-ins at Greensboro, North Carolina, lunch counters. He saw when Medgar Evers was murdered in 1963 outside his Jackson home.
That series of events, Norall said, galvanized him from being a “mere onlooker” into an activist, which brought him to Columbus in the summer of 1964 at 20 years old.
“I volunteered as a voter registration worker at the end of my sophomore year at Amherst College and was asked to participate in a week-long orientation session at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio,” Norall said in an email to The Dispatch. “I was subsequently assigned to the Columbus office of (the Council of Federated Organizations).”
Since 1964, Norall has returned to Columbus three times, including in 2006, 2022, and now at age 80, in 2024. This week, he returned on the invitation of Mississippi School for Mathematics and Science history teacher Chuck Yarborough, to take part in this year’s Eighth of May Emancipation Celebration at 6 p.m. Wednesday in Sandfield Cemetery.
Performances will celebrate the anniversary of the Black emancipation in Lowndes County in 1865 and will be recognizing the 60th anniversary of Freedom Summer and this year’s 70th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education — the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision that integrated public schools.
“We’re honored to have Peter Norall, who in 1964 volunteered to put himself on the line to help support local people trying to register to vote,” Yarborough said. “It’s an honor to have him coming back to Columbus for the Eighth of May Emancipation celebration.”
Columbus during Freedom Summer
COFO was established in 1962, to bring civil rights activist groups like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Congress of Racial Equality together.
Norall remembered that while he was staying at Miami University and preparing to come to the South, he was warned that three Civil Rights activists were missing and presumed dead. James Chaney, Michael Schwerener and Andrew Goodman — the Civil Rights activists — were later found to have been tortured and murdered in Neshoba County.
Still, Norall loaded up into an old car with four other northern students and made the drive down from Ohio. He said they crossed the state line from Tennessee to Mississippi just as dawn was breaking.
“In my fevered imagination, we had just crossed enemy lines, and I felt very conspicuous,” Norall said.
When he arrived in Columbus, Norall said, he found a “rigidly segregated town.” While his memory has blurred over the years, he said he remembers an informal labor mart for casual laborers, who were all Black, at the “Black end” of Main Street.
Yarborough said a Freedom House, where volunteers helping with voter registration lived, was set up in Columbus on 17th Street North. A COFO office was also set up on Sixth Avenue, he said, and a Freedom School operated at St. James Methodist Church on Military Road throughout the summer, helping Black citizens pass literacy tests and enriching local Black youth with Black history, art and culture.
The group was responsible for recruiting, training and organizing volunteers, Norall said, that would engage in voter registration activism in Mississippi.
“I remember knocking on doors, introducing ourselves and going through a list of questions the local registrar might ask,” Norall said. “Southern voter registrars had considerable discretion and power, and many were outrageously obstructionist.”
Norall said he doesn’t know exactly how successful his effort to register voters was, at least, not right away. He remembers many Black voters being frightened just to be seen with the Freedom Summer workers, as he and his fellow activists faced threats for their work.
“Another memory fragment … being followed by a police car as we knocked on doors in the Black section of town,” Norall said. “This was shortly after the news had broken of the complicity of local police in the murder of the three civil rights workers (in Neshoba County).”
Norall said he went on to learn that those police officers shadowing him asked the people they had visited if they had been harassed. He said he doesn’t know whether they were genuinely concerned or looking for a pretext to arrest the COFO workers.
But police were not the only threat Norall faced. He remembers, while driving through a forest on his way from Columbus to Jackson to return a rental car, being followed by a white Ford Fairlane in his rearview mirror.
“A short wave radio antenna rose from the car’s trunk,” Norall said. “That was a chilling detail. The White Citizens’ Council patrolled the state in precisely such cars. He followed me for 5-10 minutes, and then passed me. I thought he might have radioed ahead to his confederates, and was expecting to be ambushed. But that was the last I saw of him.”
Successes of Freedom Summer
While Norall did not see immediate success during Freedom Summer, the efforts of COFO workers could be seen in other ways.
According to Stanford University’s Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute, about 17,000 Black residents of Mississippi attempted to register to vote in the summer of 1964. Only 1,600 completed applications were accepted by local registrars.
These efforts created political momentum behind the Voting Rights Act of 1965, an act that outlawed discriminatory voting practices adopted by many southern states after the Civil War, including literacy tests and providing for the appointment of federal examiners in certain jurisdictions with the power to register qualified citizens to vote according to the National Archives.
The Voting Rights Act also challenged the use of poll taxes in state and local elections, though poll taxes had been previously prohibited in federal elections by the 24th Amendment to the Constitution in 1964.
“By one measure, the Civil Rights movement at large was unquestionably successful,” Norall said. “It aroused the conscience of the nation, and — has been plausibly argued — enabled (former President Lyndon B. Johnson) to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964, as well as subsequent civil rights legislation, notably the Voting Rights Act of 1965.”
R.E. Hunt Museum and Cultural Center staff member and Columbus native Susie Shelton told The Dispatch that the work of Civil Rights activists during Freedom Summer later contributed to her efforts registering Black voters with the Voters League in 1971 alongside local dentist Dr. Emmett Stringer, who helped to found the Columbus NAACP chapter.
“They paved the way,” Shelton said. “I paid attention. I heard them, and I read up on a lot of things that they did, and I said ‘I feel the same way.’ And they did make an impact.”
Stringer and his wife, Flora, are also being depicted during Wednesday’s Emancipation Celebration. Stringer will be memorialized on a Freedom Trail marker by the Mississippi Humanities Council later this year.
One of Yarborough’s students, MSMS senior Dylan Wiley, will also perform as another local Freedom Summer worker, Marvin Griffin, during this year’s presentation.
You can help your community
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 38 articles to cdispatch.com. Please consider subscribing to our website for only $2.30 per week to help support local journalism and our community.
You can help your community
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 38 articles to cdispatch.com. Please consider subscribing to our website for only $2.30 per week to help support local journalism and our community.
