In 2006, Peter Norall returned to Columbus for the first time in 42 years to look for whatever traces of his first visit could be found. There weren’t many to speak of.
In June of 1964, Norall, a student at Amherst College in Massachusetts, was one of roughly 1,000 college students, mostly from the North, who came to Mississippi as part of Freedom Summer, a campaign by a coalition of Black civil rights organizations to expose Black voter suppression in the state, educate young Mississippians through Freedom Schools and register Black Mississippians to vote.
Norall was assigned to Columbus where he spent the summer canvassing Black neighborhoods and providing residents with information on how to register to vote. There were some anxious moments, Norall recalled, but he encountered no violence.
On his return to Columbus in 2006, he went to the MUW library and scoured the microfilm from back issues of The Dispatch. He was surprised to see no local coverage of the Freedom Summer activity in Columbus. The only coverage of Freedom Summer to be found in The Dispatch were wire service accounts from The Delta, Jackson and, most notoriously, Philadelphia, where the disappearance, murder and discovery of three of Norall’s fellow Freedom Summer volunteers attracted an enormous amount of news coverage. With a few exceptions – legendary New Orleans Time-Picayune Mississippi Bureau reporter Bill Minor being the most prominent – The Civil Rights movement was a story reported almost exclusively by the national newspapers and TV networks.
Well into the 1970s, Mississippi’s newspapers’ attitudes toward the sizable Black population were either indifferent or downright hostile. The Dispatch was no different. The daily events that marked the Black experience in Columbus was left largely unrecorded.
Only recently has our communal awareness of the Black history of Columbus emerged, thanks in part to events such as today’s Eighth of May Emancipation Celebration at the historic Sandfield Cemetery. Since 2005, Chuck Yarborough’s history class at Mississippi School for Math and Science has been telling the history of the city’s Black community through the lives of those buried in the cemetery. Students research and craft a biography of these lives, then portray them in period costume. Eighth of May is the day in 1865 that the Black slaves of Columbus were informed of their freedom, one of the most consequential moments in the city’s 203-year history.
For the MSMS students, the historic day is a point of departure in covering the broad expanse of Black history in our community. As part of today’s event, Norall will share his recollections of Freedom Summer. It is a story that many of us never knew about since the local Freedom Summer activity was ignored by the media of the day.
Recapturing that history through Norall’s memories adds to the substance and texture and of local Black history. It also is a reminder that those with personal knowledge of the events of that historic summer are getting older. In another 20 years, those who can tell personal stories about this time in our history will be few. Norall is 80.
As the 60th anniversary of Freedom Summer approaches, we are able to draw some conclusions about its successes and failures. Certainly, Freedom Summer succeeded in focusing the nation’s attention on Mississippi’s abuse of its Black citizens. It is considered a key factor in helping the Civil Rights Act of 1964 pass later than summer.
But it did not achieve its goal of greatly increasing Black voter registration – at least not immediately. According to a 1977 study published in The Journal of Negro Education, Black voter registration in the state increased by only 13,791 between June 1962 and November 1965.
Although approximately 17,000 black residents of Mississippi attempted to register to vote during Freedom Summer, only 1,600 of the completed applications were accepted by local registrars.
By highlighting the need for federal voting rights legislation to combat local registrars’ tactics, what might have been initially perceived as a failure turned out to be a driving force of the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
In the first month after the Voting Rights Act became law, Black voter registration in Mississippi soared from 35,000 to 77,222, an increase of 120% in just 30 days.
That can rightly serve as an epilogue of the Freedom Summer story that Peter Norall lived and witnessed in Columbus in the summer of 1964.
It is a story worth knowing and worth preserving. We thank the continuing work of Chuck Yarborough and his MSMS students for reclaiming our community’s Black history for the benefit of us all.
The Dispatch Editorial Board is made up of publisher Peter Imes, columnist Slim Smith, managing editor Zack Plair and senior newsroom staff.
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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 36 articles to cdispatch.com. Please consider subscribing to our website for only $2.30 per week to help support local journalism and our community.
