When the MSU freshmen, class of 2018, pours into Jack Breslin Student Events Center Monday, August 25 they won’t be there for a basketball game, but rather a lesson in American history. Their teacher, Georgia Congressman John Lewis, will take them back in time 50 years to the “Black Belt” of Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi. He will tell them about beatings, bombings, brutality and death, but mostly he will talk to them about how they can make a difference in the world they live.
Lewis, a colorful elocutionist and the only living speaker from the historic 1963 March on Washington, was younger than most of the MSU freshmen when in 1958 he first met Martin Luther King and began down his path in the Civil Rights struggle.
The iconic Civil Rights leader, along with his co-author Andrew Aydin and illustrator Nate Powell of the graphic novel “March: Book One”, the 2014 One Book/One Community (OBOC) selection, will address the students at 9 a.m., Monday, August 25 in the Breslin Center. Later in the day, they will be hosted at the Hannah Community Center beginning at 7 p.m. Both events are free and open to the public.
Since 2002, incoming MSU Freshmen have been asked to read a single book with the East Lansing community to create conversation among themselves and community members.
Over that time there have been some impressive books including “The Kite Runner”, “Behind the Beautiful Forevers” and in 2007 “Lay the Trumpet in Our Hands” which also detailed Southern racism from a young white girl’s perspective, but none of the selections considered America at such a tumultuous turning point and none were in graphic novel format.
Aydin, who is also on the Congressman’s staff, said the style and format of “March” are a throwback to a 1957 Comic book about the life of Martin Luther King. A comic geek, Aydin was inspired to approach the Congressman with the idea of doing a graphic novel to tell his own story.
“March: Book One”, the first book of a trilogy follows Lewis through his youth and the early days of the Civil Rights Movement. The second installment will take readers from desegregation activities in Nashville in 1960 to two weeks after the momentous March on Washington when the Alabama church bombing took the lives of four little girls.
Aydin said, “We wanted to make a direct connection between the March on Washington and the resulting agitation.”
The third book will cover what has become to be called “Freedom Summer” where nearly 800 young, mostly white, Americans travelled to Mississippi in 1964 to register voters and hold Freedom Schools.
That summer is close to the heart of John Lewis, who at the time was chairman of SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and one of the major organizers of Mississippi Freedom Summer which would take the Civil Rights movement into dangerous territory. Mississippi among all the “Black Belt” states was considered the most egregious when it came to letting Blacks register to vote. Lewis a veteran, at 24, of the Civil Rights movement knew what to expect. He had already been jailed 20 times, beaten 15 and subject to unbelievable degradation.
Nathan Powell, John Lewis and Andrew Aydin at Pettus Bridge-photo by Sandi Villarreal
As prospective recruits filled out applications to join Freedom Summer it’s likely their hands shook a little when they got to the second question on the form asking them to name someone who could guarantee $500 in bail money if they were to get arrested. And many, many of them did.
Once accepted, volunteers underwent a rigorous training session held in Oxford, Ohio which reinforced they could be expected to be arrested, beaten or worse. As they lay on the ground curled in a fetal position practicing techniques of non-violence, the seriousness of what they were about to undertake certainly sank in.
“Freedom Summer is not appreciated enough,” Aydin said “and more people should know about it.”
For the Freedom Summer participants “worse” came very quickly when on June 21 three participants, a black man, James Chaney, and two white men, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman went missing. Participants lived under the cloud of fear all summer and in late August the bodies of the “missing men” were discovered buried in shallow graves.
Former MSU History Professor Norm Pollack was one of the cadres of adults who travelled to the South in 1964 to lend their hand to the effort. Now 50 years later he recalls being on the same road as the martyred freedom workers and being told not stand in front of a window with the shade pulled and the lights on.
“You make a target,” he said.
At the time Pollack was a junior professor at Yale and he believes his activism cost him his job there. He also remembers the tension of the Freedom Summer control center where phone calls would come in from participants confirming their safety.
The 70 days of Freedom Summer would change more than Civil Rights’ activism in this country. Upon returning home, individuals such as Tom Hayden and Abbie Hoffmann of SDS fame, Mario Salvo who led the Free Speech Movement and Susan Brownmiller, journalist and feminist, would turn those summer experiences toward the burgeoning peace and women’s liberation movements and hundreds of others would lend their hand to community organizing.
Two East Lansing activists John Duley, 93, and Robert Green, 80, MSU professor and later Dean of MSU’s College of Urban Development, followed the summer’s activities closely and in October they travelled to Canton, Mississippi for a Freedom Rally led by Jim Farmer, co-founder of the Congress of Racial Equality and organizer of the Freedom Riders. Green had been invited to the rally by a former babysitter of his, MSU student Mary Ann Ehinger, who was 19 and one of the Freedom Summer participants. Green then called Duley, who was campus minister and who he knew by reputation only, and asked him to join him on the trip. They said they both understood the implications of a black and white man travelling together in the deep South.
Upon their return to East Lansing Duley and Green continued their civil rights activism in their own backyard. East Lansing, at the time, did not have an open-housing ordinance and Green, a Black professor at MSU, could not own a home in the city due to racist real estate practices. He and his family would ultimately become the first African American owners of a home in the city, but it would take four years and the assassination of Martin Luther King before the City would adopt an open-housing ordinance. In 1965, Green would take a leave of absence from MSU to become the National Educational Director for the Southern Leadership Conference and a confidant of Martin Luther King.
The next year, Duley would become the leader of MSU’s STEP (Student Tutorial Education Project) which over three summers sent more than 100 MSU faculty and students to the South including former Mayor David Hollister.
Skip ahead 50 years and Duley and Green after learning about the selection of “March” and Lewis’ visit decided to revisit those years. The two long-time friends will be hosting a “community conversation” about the civil rights movement in the East Lansing area during the 1960’s. Duley has written a monograph detailing that period and Green is working on a memoir which will be published by MSU Press in 2015.
Green, a long-time friend of Lewis’, will be travelling from his home in Georgia where he runs an educational consulting company for the event.
“I better call John and tell him I’ll be at his event,” he said. Watch a recent video of Lewis talking about the civil disturbance in Missouri on Huffington Post.
Green called “East Lansing a mighty tight place for racial relations” during that era.”
Duley said the goal of the meeting is to create a record about the Civil Rights Movement in East Lansing.
“There is a lack of any public record, and we will be facilitating conversations about that period,” he said.
The meeting will be held Sunday, August 24, 7-8:30 p.m. at the Village Network Center at Edgewood Village in East Lansing, 6213 Towar Gardens Circle.
In an interview earlier this summer, Lewis said revisiting this era, both literally to its iconic places and philosophically, has been painful for him. He said, “There has been many a time my eyes teared.”
Aydin said it is “all worth it” citing just one letter from a third grade class in Iowa which included copies of a class project which showed how they could use non-violence to solve their own problems. In addition to Lewis’ appearances the One Book One Community is hosting Ryan Coogler, director of “Fruitvale Station” on September 2 and NPR contributor and journalist Michele Norris to speak about her memoir “Race Card” on September 15. Details are available at www.onebookeastlansing.com
