If White Kids Die: Memories of a Civil Rights Movement Volunteer

Published: May, 2001  Pages: 129  Features: 5 photos. Index.

The summer of 1964 had been “Freedom Summer” for a few campuses. The Student Non-Violent Co-Ordinating Committee (SNCC) had drawn some five hundred students, most of them white, from Ivy League and prestigious universities to help its integration efforts in Mississippi. An up-and-coming leader named Stokely Carmichael had told a group of prospective volunteers in New York that SNCC wanted to be sure that if blacks were killed for the civil rights cause, whites would die with them. What he said was prophetic, even if it wasn’t popular. A few weeks after his speech, three young men—two white and one black—were murdered in Philadelphia, Mississippi. The nation was scandalized. more... about If White Kids Die: Memories of a Civil Rights Movement Volunteer