Freedom Summer 50 years later

By Marjorie R. Esman
Guest Columnist

In 1964, I was a child growing up in New York. I am fortunate that my family has always had a social conscience. During that year, that conscience and equal helpings of shock and indignation would translate into long family discussions about what was happening “down South,” I knew about Birmingham, fire hoses and police dogs, about bus boycotts and lunch counters, about church bombings and billy clubs. I was old enough to be aware of the world around me, but too young to fully understand what it all meant. As a child I spent a fair share of my time on city buses, and I remember being unable to comprehend why it mattered to people who sat next to them on the bus; or who their children went to school with.

It was inconceivable to me that people were willing to fight, die and even kill to maintain a system that was racist; that served no one and no purpose. As a child, I couldn’t understand why a person’s color should make a difference in how they were treated. As an adult, I simply couldn’t accept it.

Fast forward 50 years. The fact that I have chosen to live in the South, in New Orleans most of my adult life, would have been incomprehensible to me in 1964. I don’t pretend to be as brave as those civil rights workers who risked and sometimes lost their lives for the fundamental yet complicated cause of equality. Fifty years is a long time. Two generations have grown since the summer of 1964. I wish I could say with conviction that those who fought and died would be pleased with the way things are now, a half century later. I wish I could say that we are a post-racial society; that we have moved past inequality to the world they dreamed of; where every child really does have an equal chance and every adult really is judged by their skills and accomplishments. We all know, however, that isn’t the case.

Things are better in many ways, of course. Occasionally, I still hear racially hateful comments from people who think that because I look like them I must also think like them. But now, with new challenges surfacing every day to racist and discriminatory policies, the people who make those remarks are surely made aware that their long-held prejudices are out of sync with the ideals of freedom and civil rights set forth in the U.S. Constitution, as well as a nation growing more tolerant with every generation. This was certainly not the case 50 years ago.

The “old” Jim Crow is gone. At least on paper, everyone is equal now. But the “new” Jim Crow is here, manifested in new and creative ways that continue to perpetuate inequality and discrimination. Cleverly disguised legislation and policies that promise to enhance public safety disenfranchise certain individuals and groups, usually the poor and people of color. And many of our schools remain as segregated as ever, with African-American children still in lower performing schools than their white counterparts.

My family knew the Goodman family. When Andrew was murdered in Mississippi in the summer of 1964, I was old enough to know that he died doing something important and brave; that he was killed for the cause of civil rights. I was too young to protest, but I was taught that his life was one to emulate. I couldn’t fully understand it then, but the events of the summer of 1964 helped shape the rest of my life and work—a summer when people more courageous than I, people like Andrew Goodman, died for a cause bigger than themselves. For me, the Freedom Summer set the stage for a lifetime of commitment to fixing what’s broken. I’ve worked personally and professionally to try to right these wrongs, and while we all have a long way to go, we’ve all come a long way.

This article originally published in the July 14, 2014 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.