AFRAID». YET. DEDICATED" —
By Bvelyn Sell
"Welre hoping for the best and preparing for the worst," say students engaged in Freedom Summer Project in Mississippi, There are now 400 students, black and white from North and South, working in Mississippi,. Their goals: to develop local Negro leadership and organization to carry out voter registration drives; to set up oom munity centers to provide educational and cultural programs for Negroes; to establish "freedom schools" for political education,
| The young civil-rights workers were recruited and trained by the National Council of Churches and the Council of Federated Organizations [coro], an ailiance of civilerights groups. The direotor of COFO is Robert Moses,. one of the leaders of. the Student Non- Violent Coordinating Committee [snec], who has been active in Mississippi civil-rights projeots since 1961.
Mississippi officials prepared to meet the Freedom Summer Project with the full armed might of.the gtate. New Jaws were passed and police forces were augmented, Gov. Paul Johnson asked for and got from the state legislature the first state police force in Mississippi history. Thousands of Ku Klux Klan members and “Amoricans for the Preservation of the White Race" armed and‘ readied them selves for the summer, Federal authorities estimate that there are 60,000 armed whites prepared for. guerrilla warfare against the students and Negroes,.
Most of the students have been assigned to Southern Mississippi -- the most feared section of the state. In the week before the bulk of the students arrived, five Negro churches:in the area were bombed, three Negro homes were dynamited, Negro men, women and children were beaten and three young civil-rights workers vanished,
A spokesman for COFO said that each student volunteer "knows he is taking a chance of physical violence, ‘The students, reoruited during the spring, were warned of the dangers. The depth of their dedication to the civil-rights cause can be gauged by the fact that in order to participate in the project they had to bring $130 for living expenses, be able to raise $400 to bail themselves out of jail in case of arrest, and be willing to put their lives in jeopardy. Before they left for the South, they attended courses to prepare themselves for their work and bo learn about techniques of passive resistance, :
. At-one of these sessions, Attorney John Doar, a key man in the U.S.Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division, told them: "there is no federal police force, We cantt keep a crime from ocour~ ring. I suggest that you accept that for a fact and guide your con= duct accordingly."
Doar was roundly booed and hissed by the students. But it wasn't long before the predicted crime. (that. the powerful U.S. government was helpless to prevent!) happened.
On June 21, three civil~rights workers disappeared. One was Andy Goodman, a 20-year-old white student from New York who Had just arrived with the first group of summer volunteers, Another was Mickey Schwerner, 24 years old and also a white.student from New York who had been working in Mississippi since January as a field worker from the Congress of Racial Equality [CORE]. The third missing person was James Cheaney, 22, a Negro member of CORE who had been active in civil-rights work for nine months,
These three young men had.gone to the small town of Philadelphia to see. a church which had been burned by racists. besause it was scheduled for use as a freedom school, The three were arrested by police for "speeding" (a typical harassment tactic -against civil-rights workers). Then, again according to the local police, they were released after paying a $20 fine. The deputies said they followed the trio "several blocks to make sure they got out of town all right." This occurred at the unusual time of an hour or so before midnight, Their fire-gutted car was found two. days later,
As a search got under way, President Johnson expressed "deep concern" for the students! safety. He ordered FBI agents and 200 men from a nearby naval base to help the State Highway Patrol comb swamps and woods for the missing three, He also sent Allen Dulles, former head of the Central Intelligence Agency, to Mississippi to confer with Gov. Paul Johnson.
Dulles advised the president that more FBI agents should be . sent to Mississippi, and that closer contact should be established between the White House and the Mississippi government, and also with the other civil-rights groups active in the area,
Meeting with representatives from the National Council of Churches and other civil-rights leaders, Dulles said that students going to Mississippi should "stay out of danger areas" and conduot themselves in such a way as not to provoke incidents, (All of. | Mississippi is a "danger area" and the mere presence of the students "provokes! the racists, )
Gov, Johnson, for his part, stated that Mississippi “will maintain surveillance of the activities of all extreme ZroupS. « e This inoludes Negro groups as well as white groups." (He equates unarmed Negroes with armed terrorists! ) Fs
Groups across the country have demanded that the federal government protect the students and Negroes in Mississippi, When Johnson spoke at a Democratic fund-raising meeting in Detroit, he was pioketed by some 200 Negroes and whites who demanded that "the president send federal marshais to Mississippi. The same demand was raised by similarly integrated marches and sit-ins in Boston} Greenville, Miss.; New Brunswick, New Jersey; St. Louis; Chicago and Washington, D.C.
Jesse Gray, leader of the Harlem rent strike in New York, told the Chicago demonstrators that the federal government should "return all troops from South Vietnam and Europe" and send them to Mississippi. "Every black soldier should leave the army and go to Mississippi," “ 4
In Washington, 2,000 members of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People [NAACP] marched on the Department of Justice to demand stronger federal action in Mississippi, Attorney-General Robert Kennedy, who is head of the Department, watohed the demonstration and then walked over to shake hands with some of the marchers,
Seeing this, parade marshals shouted, "Dontt smile; give him hell; don't smile." The previous evening, Kennedy had rejected | demands to send 2,000 specially deputized agents to assure the safety of the students working in Mississippi, His excuse was that "it is a local matter for local law enforcement."
Mississippians claim that the trio's disappearance is only a hoax, Sheriff Rainey of Philadelphia, the town from which the three vanished, said: "If they're missing, they just hid somewhere, trying to get a lot of publicity out of it I figure," This idea was echoed by Southern representatives and senators in Washington,
Robert M, Shelton, Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, dismissed the matter as “another promotional gimmick," He said it was all a "plot" of the NAACP and hinted that: behind the whole thing was the Communist party.
A minister, recently returned to Michigan from the civil-
rights front in Mississippi, said that the biggest fear among the Negroes was not of the armed terrorists but the police, “The - Negroes fear more than anything else being dragged from the oar by police,'
Asked about the three missing civile-rights workers, the minister said, Por the present, we can only assume the police killed them," —
Tensions are rising higher and higher, both sides. girding for sharper conflicts this summer. . Despite the threats, the bombings and the disappearance of their fellow workers, more students continue to enter Mississippi determined to carry out their civilrights projects. As one of them said, “We go afraid, yet dedicated,”
NUCLEAR ARMS IN WEST CERMANY
The nuclear weapons held by Washington and Moscow are suffi~.cient to obliterate all mankind many times over. In addition, Great Britain possesses nuclear weapons and France is well on the way.
“Nevertheless the illusion persists: that the further dissemination of the monstrous weapons might be halted by a gentlemen's agreement between the governments of the USA and the USSR.
Khrushchev has fostered this illusion in many ways. He even went so far as to block Soviet aid to the. People's Republic of China in the production of nuclear materials. Washington helped foster the illusion, too, but acted in a different way toward its capitalistallies, Last New Year's Eve the Pentagon sent sufficient nuclear warheads to Canada to make that country a major nuclear power overnight.
In the past several weeks, two more significant items showed Washington's real policy. On. June 30 the Canadian government revealed that a Canadian air division stationed in West