Freedom Summer 1964
Jun. 18th, 2006 03:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brooklynwriterYou know you're entering old age-hood when you start to reminisce.
Jim picked up some samples from Springsteen's new album "We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions" (which we are now determined to order) and among them was the title song. I mentioned that I remembered when that song was actually sung sincerely and with fervor, and that made me remember the summer of 1964, which was known as Freedom Summer, because of the campaign to registered blacks in the south to vote. A day was set aside to support the civil rights workers, and my mother, who was an elementary school teacher, got the local Workman's Circle shul (Yiddish school) to open for the day so she could teach a "Freedom School" for a bunch of us kids.
We all trooped the several blocks to the school, only to find it locked. One of the adults went for a phone, and came back to report that the board of the school had decided they didn't want to be involved. This infuriated my parents -- Workman's Circle is an old Jewish socialist organization, and the idea that they wouldn't support the civil rights movement was a shanda, a scandal, a great shame.
We all trooped back to our little Brooklyn apartment and crowded into the living room, where my mother taught a class on equal rights and how we should all be proud of our background, and my father (who was a natural with kids) sang songs with us on his guitar. The last thing we did was write essays on what we thought about equal rights, and afterwards, when everyone else had gone home, I got to read them (which thrilled me; it was like getting to read other kids' homework assignments). I still remember one of the essays, by a girl who wrote that she wasn't proud of being black, she hated it, and wanted to be white. It was an incredibly angry essay. I was ten, and just didn't get it; my mother tried to explain to me how people can hate themselves because of how society makes them feel about themselves, but I think it was a few more years before I really understood what she was talking about.
Jim picked up some samples from Springsteen's new album "We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions" (which we are now determined to order) and among them was the title song. I mentioned that I remembered when that song was actually sung sincerely and with fervor, and that made me remember the summer of 1964, which was known as Freedom Summer, because of the campaign to registered blacks in the south to vote. A day was set aside to support the civil rights workers, and my mother, who was an elementary school teacher, got the local Workman's Circle shul (Yiddish school) to open for the day so she could teach a "Freedom School" for a bunch of us kids.
We all trooped the several blocks to the school, only to find it locked. One of the adults went for a phone, and came back to report that the board of the school had decided they didn't want to be involved. This infuriated my parents -- Workman's Circle is an old Jewish socialist organization, and the idea that they wouldn't support the civil rights movement was a shanda, a scandal, a great shame.
We all trooped back to our little Brooklyn apartment and crowded into the living room, where my mother taught a class on equal rights and how we should all be proud of our background, and my father (who was a natural with kids) sang songs with us on his guitar. The last thing we did was write essays on what we thought about equal rights, and afterwards, when everyone else had gone home, I got to read them (which thrilled me; it was like getting to read other kids' homework assignments). I still remember one of the essays, by a girl who wrote that she wasn't proud of being black, she hated it, and wanted to be white. It was an incredibly angry essay. I was ten, and just didn't get it; my mother tried to explain to me how people can hate themselves because of how society makes them feel about themselves, but I think it was a few more years before I really understood what she was talking about.
