"And told him, if you don't beat her, we'll see just how you beat her and we're going to beat you even harder."īut even the worst violence, the murder of three civil rights workers in Mississippi, didn't keep volunteers away.įor a less violent, more personal journey, viewers can watch the Hallmark Channel's adaptation of The Watsons Go to Birmingham. "When I asked to see Miss Hamer, this storied woman leader of the civil rights movement in the South that she was to become, she had been beaten unmercifully by a black trusty," she says. (from left, Bryce Clyde Jenkins, Skai Jackson, Anika Noni Rose, Wood Harris and Harrison Knight). The Watsons Go to Birmingham features a black family from Flint, Mich., on a road trip to Birmingham, Ala. or Mrs., they were always called by their first name or just 'boy.' All of these things, the degradation and poverty, was really startling to the volunteers, even though they had been told about it." "Black people had to get off the sidewalk if a white person approached black people were never called by Mr. that insisted that black people defer to whites in a way that was really shocking to everyone from the North," says Watson. Once in Mississippi, volunteers faced another journey, learning to live in the crushing poverty and strict segregation suffered by their hosts. And many volunteer told me that at that point, when they crossed the line, the singing stopped and it got very serious from then on." "And then, in most cases, the buses were met at the state line by highway patrolmen, who had known, of course, that they were coming. "There was a lot of singing, a lot of freedom songs being sung on the bus, until they reached Mississippi," Watson says. Volunteers rode buses from Ohio to Mississippi, where they would live with black families scattered throughout the state.Īt first, they felt a joyous excitement known as a "freedom high," says Freedom Summer author Bruce Watson. Freedom Summer tells the tumultuous, emotional story of that journey, using archival photos and fresh interviews with the participants to re-create one of the most dangerous summertime trips of that time. Kunstler was one of more than 700 mostly white student volunteers who headed to Mississippi in the summer of 1964 to challenge segregation.
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