France, Alternative Libertaire AL #240 - Read: Doug McAdam, "Freedom Summer" (fr, pt)

Published in 1988 in the USA and translated in 2012, Freedom Summer. Struggles for civil 
rights offers a new perspective on social movements of the 1960s. ---- In the summer of 
1964 students and white universities in the northern United States students, traveling to 
Mississippi to support the civil rights movement. At the initiative of the campaign, the 
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Commitee, whose members are mostly Black-es. ---- The 
arrival of a thousand young bourgeois and bourgeois, according to them, the only way to 
popularize and publicize their struggles. Because of their image of son and daughters of 
good families, educated, media is finally interested in what happens in Mississippi. ---- 
In addition to transcribe organizational behind the campaign, MacAdam shows the impact of 
this campaign on the formation of a new kind of activism. Mississippi is one of the most 
racist and violent statements. Volunteers from es-privileged backgrounds are confronted 
with police repression and systematic racism. Some work to register blacks to vote, others 
manage Freedom Schools, where black history is taught. Summer is exhausting, and more 
intense activism, volunteers experience the community life, Freedom Houses, and sexual 
liberation. This experience challenges their conceptions of politics, morality, sexuality 
and themselves.

But what makes this book interesting is the path that will take militant veterans of the 
summer of 1964. Returned in their universities, they import practices struggles of Freedom 
Summer. They are found in the student struggles, anti-war and feminist. If sexism was not 
denounced during the campaign, the rules related to sexuality and the gendered division of 
labor is evident in the 1970s. MacAdam is one of the first sociologists to raise gender 
issues in study of social movements. It arises in particular the question of the influence 
of gender on the commitment. Parallel interracial test arises members SCNN, new white 
arrivals challenging the leadership and activists original black militants. This book 
portrays radical activists and organizations that influenced a generation of social movements.

In other words, this book shows how this campaign will be the breadcrumb trail of the 
sixties. That no longer seem, once finished reading, be only the history of yuppies and a 
collective political regret. Practices and discourses struggles but also the difficulties 
that emerged during a summer and made victorious campaign should inspire us. The struggle 
for civil rights has permanently changed the status of blacks in the United States, or at 
least be allowed to expose to light a persistent racism.

Claire (AL Paris Sud)

Doug McAdam, Freedom Summer. Struggles for civil rights, Mississippi in 1964 , Agony, 
2012, 486 p., 26 euros.