American Experience; 1964; Interview with Rita Schwerner Bender, Civil Rights Activist, part 1 of 2

Finally, when we get to do this, Andy's fan and his camera funny turns off, he's never been more happy to start rolling, you know, to use his camera. Can you see me? Okay. Again. Okay, good. So, like, as 1964 kind of dawns, you know, for better, lack of a better word. What's the condition of the civil rights movement, do you think? What's going on in January of that year? Well, a lot had happened in the few years leading up to January of 1964. The March on Washington, the earlier summer, the summer before. Certainly, the Freedom Rides, which were in the couple of years before that, the Birmingham and the bombing of the church in September of 63, all of which was raising, I think, an awareness

around the country, but also a discomfort. And I think some of the discomfort was the realization of how bad things were. But I think some of the discomfort was, why are you bothering us with this? This is, you know, this is the way it's always been and why should, why should there be all this turmoil about it? And then, of course, Kennedy was killed in November of 63. And Johnson becoming the president, I think, changed some of the dynamics in Washington because he was a master politician and was able ultimately to move things in a way that I don't know that Kennedy could have, even assuming he had been

deeply enough committed to try. Yeah. I think, you know what, this chair really is loud, making noise, and you change up. Andrew? Yeah. Is that other chair simply not here anymore? Not filming, right? Yeah. I figured out how much I need. We should give them today. So, that's a great sense of the context, but how many understand what the movement was feeling, people in the movement, what was their exhaustion level, their psychic kind of sense of what was coming? I think that there was a sense of frustration, of pain, a feeling that no matter what happens, things just keep going on.

I know the Mississippi movement better than in other places because that's where I spent time and got to know the people who were in the movement who were working there, the local people who were part of the movement. So, I can really speak to Mississippi and the mood there better than I can to other places. What I know about other places is what friends have told me, both then and over the years, sense about what was actually going on. What was it like in Mississippi? Mississippi was really a place in which there was tremendous resistance on the part of the white establishment of the white politicians of local whites.

There were very few people who were willing to support the movement among whites, very few, and those who were really at great risk. In the black population, there was both courage and fear. Often people had both courage and fear, individual people. There were some people who were just too fearful to become involved. You know, Medgar Evers had been killed the spring before in June of 63, and while there had been many, many beatings and murders before then, I think Medgar's killing really galvanized a lot of people who kind of dug in their hills and said no more.

Of course, there was a lot more, but he was very much respected and very much a part of what was going on. Now there were a lot of other people in various parts of the state who were extremely courageous and amzy more. I could go on with a whole long list. In the wake of Birmingham, in the wake of Medgar Evers death, leading up to Freedom Summer, what was the kind of the sense that people had about what needed to be done? Did it feel like there was a moment when something was decided? Well, there were a number of moments where things were decided.

There had been some effort to organize Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party back in 63, and to the extent that it had gotten a number of local people involved in the movement it had been successful. If success was measured in terms of did blacks get into the Democratic caucuses? No, they didn't. Were blacks elected to state offices? No, they weren't. But it became an important organizing tool in the state because people could understand the connection between the denial of voting rights and the denial of participation in the political process and how that connected to how their lives were being led in terms of the absolute lack of any ability to influence the politics, the economics of the state.

In the winter and early spring of 64, there were a series of meetings of the civil rights workers who were working in the state. They had, by then, formed an organization called the Council of Federated Organizations, or Kofo, which was an amalgamation of the various civil rights organizations working in the state. They included the NAACP and SNCC and CORE and SCLC. The two major players were SNCC and CORE because they were the organizations who had a lot of young people who were either local to Mississippi or the other southern states or who had come from various places in the country. They had a much bigger presence than CORE.

Field secretaries and people like that who were already on the ground in the state. Because we talked to Dave Dennis. It was great. And Bob Moses was here. It was an amazing guy. They are. And, you know, they've been important people in my lives and Dave and I are continued to be very good friends. It's amazing. What was the freedom project all about? What was the idea? Of the MFDP? Well, I've just freedom, the idea of not a MFDP specifically, but a freedom summer and the goal of voter registration. What was the idea? Well, and in particular, who was being drafted to come down south in the makeup of the group? The idea of freedom summer evolved over a period of months.

And was the subject of a great deal of debate within the state of the cohort people against SNCC and CORE primarily? Because there was a lot of concern that a bunch of white college kids coming into the state would have the attitude, as those of us who are white often do, that we know better and that we know how to do things. And there was a lot of concern that it would, in fact, instead of giving local people, helping local people get a sense of their own empowerment, that it would squelch their growing sense of being able to do something to affect their own lives. And so there was a lot of debate and a lot of discussion about whether this was a good idea or not.

Ultimately, the decision was made. Understanding that most of the college kids who were recruited would likely be white, that the project should go ahead. And then it should go ahead, first of all, because it would establish a presence in terms of numbers of people around the state that otherwise just wouldn't be there, couldn't be there. Bodies on the ground. That a lot of these kids could be useful in terms of doing freedom schools, which was really conceived as a notion of trying to deal with the fact that the lack-segregated schools were atrocious. I'm not sure how much that's changed, but the idea was that you could teach African-American history, which was certainly a subject that wasn't being taught.

You could help people with the skills that they needed, frankly, to be able to register to vote. And you could give people, help people develop their own sense of pride about where they came from and who they were and what kind of future they might envision. All incredibly noble goals and worth the risk of the sharecropper working side by side with the Princeton underground. Yeah, and sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn't. When Mickey and I first went to Meridian, we were tasked to establish a community center there. And it really in some ways was sort of a little bit of an experiment in terms of what might freedom schools look like. I mean, the idea was to have a place in the black community where people could come to get the kind of literacy help they might need in order to try to register to vote. That people could come, kids could come, there would be a library which ultimately had a lot of books on black history and politics and things like that and kids books.

And so it would be a place where people could come and borrow books that they couldn't otherwise have access to. It would be a place where kids could simply come and hang out and talk to each other and talk about what was going on in the community and how they wanted to affect it. And so one of the things that happened was some of the kids and Mickey built a ping pong table which turned out to be a big hit. And the idea wasn't to teach people how to play ping pong. The idea was to have a comfortable place where people could hang out and talk to each other. But it was an early, well, all of this time was moving very quickly because this was in January and through the spring of 64 and of course the whole idea of freedom summer was being developed at that time and by the middle of the spring, it was well on its way to happening. Why did you and Mickey decided to go? You were in New York?

We were in New York. That's a very complicated question. Why did we decide to go? We decided to go because we wanted to try to be part of a solution not part of the problem. That's probably an oversimplification. It's the best I can do. Did you have any idea what you were getting into in terms of Mississippi? Probably not. I mean, we thought we did, but probably not. Did you meet Dave Dennis? He told me that at first he was like, who are these kids from? He did. He referred to us as kids because his life experience had been a lot more difficult. In fact, I think Mickey May have been a little bit older than Dave and I only a bit younger. I think Dave and I are pretty close at the same age.

He obviously was, when we first got to Mississippi, actually we traveled down there with another person from New York, Dick Jewett, who was also white. So we got to Jackson and Dave was the one who needed to make the decision about whether we would stay, what we would do, where we would go. As I recall, we stayed around Jackson for a couple of weeks and spent a fair amount of time with him just sort of talking with him, hanging out, spending a lot of time in the cofo office talking with the people who were there who were working. And then Dave decided to send Dick to Kenton and so he went over there with us and introduced us to people.

He and Dave both came out of the Louisiana movement. And so Matt introduced us to people in Meridian and then over the months he would sort of come by occasionally and talk to us see what was happening. He said it was pretty skeptical at first and then he went over there finally and he really blown away by what you and Mickey had done. No, I don't know how you measure what we had done. First of all, we didn't do it alone. There were people in and around Meridian who really very much wanted to be part of what was going on. You know, we couldn't have had a place for a community center. We're not for the fact that one of the local black merchants owned this building that had an empty floor on the second floor and agreed that we could use it for the community center, which was a very, very brave and risky thing for her to do.

We ultimately wouldn't have had a place to stay if one of the other black merchants hadn't rented a house, a little house from a white woman who owned it. And we would pay him the rent and then he would pay her and she must have known we were there, although we never had any direct contact with her. Ultimately, we had to leave because I think there was too much pressure being put on her, so we had to leave it. But this was not, we suddenly showed up in Meridian and we did something by ourselves. We certainly didn't. You know, I think we obviously resettle. The whole story, the disappearances, it becomes such a national phenomenon, which is revealing a lot of levels.

What was your response when making any others were witnessing? What was my response? That's the long word. I guess maybe what was your reaction? Was it something that, you know, I guess you'd, there'd always been the potential around you all the time, right? It's kind of a thing to have. I'm sure there had been threats and I mean, it turned out afterwards that there was much more organized watching of us by them in the city of Meridian police, the state patrol. Most of it was the clan and while all of us suspected that for a long time, it ultimately came out that it was true.

The sovereignty commission records, the state sovereignty commission records are now online and they're amazingly revealing documents in terms of the state institutions that were organizing the harassment in many cases. The violence that occurred, but while there was a lot of them, we actually had had relatively little overt mistreatment in Meridian as compared to what was happening to civil rights workers in other parts of the state who were routinely being beaten jailed for absent on whims. There was very little of that. A few times Mickey would be picked up by the local police when he was on the street, taken down to the Meridian police station, never really charged with anything, released after a few hours and it was sort of meant, I think, just to harass him. But there wasn't the kind of overt violence in the city of Meridian out in the talons and surrounding counties, places like Nashaba County or Kemper County.

There was much more overt violence against people. You decide it.