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Ed Spannaus correspondence, June-September 1964
1964-08-03 Ed Spannaus to his parents Page 1
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Gulfport, Mississippi 3 August 1964 Dear Folks: We have stopped in Gulfport on the way to my assignment, which is voter registration in Moss Point. This is in the Gulf Coast Area, which is one of the relatively safer areas of the state. My address will be: 609 Bowen, Moss Point, Miss. We left Jackson this morning, and stopped here in Gulfport; Jim Forman is going to speak here at a mass meeting tonight, so we will ride back to Moss Point with the fellow that is bringing him here. This afternoon I did some canvassing here for tonight's meeting. There are quite a few summer workers here as well as local workers; they have a Freedom School and are doing quite well. Orientation was held at Tougaloo college just outside of Jackson. The session was of course condensed from that in Oxford, but was very valuable and quite impressive. The more I see of the operation the more enthusiastic I become about it. In our session there were about 26 people, of whom only 7 were undergraduates. Many were professional teachers and college instructors; a few were just housewives. The group was very all-American, all the way down to a former basketball referee now married with four kids. The main reason that so many teachers were called down is that COFO has decided to open Freedom Schools in Jackson. Originally they hadn't intended to, but the pressure from Jackson Negroes was so great that 10 days ago they decided to institute a 3-week crash program for Jackson. They also held an orientation session in Washington this weekend. Saturday morning session in orientation was a tape from the Oxford session concerning history of the movement, etc. On Sat. afternoon we had a workshop on theory and practice of nonviolence, by MacArthur Cotton, a SNCC veteran and very articulate guy. Sat. night he led a seesion on "Problems of Negro-white relations" which was mainly a discussion, almost a mass therapy session, in which we dealt witht he reactions of Negroes to whites in the movement, attitudes held by whites, motivation of white, black nationalistic attitudes, and so forth. Sunday was "Legal workshop", then talks by people from the various projects, and some role-playing of situations we would be likely to encounter. Sunday night we got our assignments. The philosophical or value orientation of this movement is really difficult to imagine unless one sees it in operation. It is a movement propelled basically by love, not by bitterness, or a desire for revenge, or strictly political notions. One finds a very intense concern for the humanity and individuality of every individual, b oth those with whom
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Gulfport, Mississippi 3 August 1964 Dear Folks: We have stopped in Gulfport on the way to my assignment, which is voter registration in Moss Point. This is in the Gulf Coast Area, which is one of the relatively safer areas of the state. My address will be: 609 Bowen, Moss Point, Miss. We left Jackson this morning, and stopped here in Gulfport; Jim Forman is going to speak here at a mass meeting tonight, so we will ride back to Moss Point with the fellow that is bringing him here. This afternoon I did some canvassing here for tonight's meeting. There are quite a few summer workers here as well as local workers; they have a Freedom School and are doing quite well. Orientation was held at Tougaloo college just outside of Jackson. The session was of course condensed from that in Oxford, but was very valuable and quite impressive. The more I see of the operation the more enthusiastic I become about it. In our session there were about 26 people, of whom only 7 were undergraduates. Many were professional teachers and college instructors; a few were just housewives. The group was very all-American, all the way down to a former basketball referee now married with four kids. The main reason that so many teachers were called down is that COFO has decided to open Freedom Schools in Jackson. Originally they hadn't intended to, but the pressure from Jackson Negroes was so great that 10 days ago they decided to institute a 3-week crash program for Jackson. They also held an orientation session in Washington this weekend. Saturday morning session in orientation was a tape from the Oxford session concerning history of the movement, etc. On Sat. afternoon we had a workshop on theory and practice of nonviolence, by MacArthur Cotton, a SNCC veteran and very articulate guy. Sat. night he led a seesion on "Problems of Negro-white relations" which was mainly a discussion, almost a mass therapy session, in which we dealt witht he reactions of Negroes to whites in the movement, attitudes held by whites, motivation of white, black nationalistic attitudes, and so forth. Sunday was "Legal workshop", then talks by people from the various projects, and some role-playing of situations we would be likely to encounter. Sunday night we got our assignments. The philosophical or value orientation of this movement is really difficult to imagine unless one sees it in operation. It is a movement propelled basically by love, not by bitterness, or a desire for revenge, or strictly political notions. One finds a very intense concern for the humanity and individuality of every individual, b oth those with whom
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