WKNO INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT
CHRISTOPHER BLANK (HOST): Sixty years ago this summer, a group called the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, also known as SNCC, organized a major campaign to drive up Black voter registration in Mississippi.
It was called Freedom Summer. Many of the 1000 or so volunteers were students from northern cities. Judy Richardson was among them as a staff member of SNCC. She would later become a documentary filmmaker. She now lives in Maryland near Washington DC. This Saturday, she's taking part in a Freedom Summer Symposium at the National Civil Rights Museum.
Judy, thank you for joining me!
RICHARDSON: Oh, thank you so much Chris. It's just wonderful, and I can't wait to get to Memphis.
BLANK: What was your experience like in Mississippi during that summer of 1964?
RICHARDSON: Well, you know, unlike a lot of the volunteers, as a staff person I knew the absolute violence within which SNCC and CORE (the Congress of Racial Equality) and other workers and particularly the local leaders in Mississippi had to work because, I mean, the primary goal is: how do you get Black people registered to vote without getting them killed?
And so because so many local Black leaders — Herbert Lee, Lewis Allen — I mean, so many, had been killed trying to organize Black people to register to vote. And this is happening at a time when the two Mississippi U.S. Senators — Senator Eastland and Senator Stennis — who are very, very powerful at that time and they're saying, "Oh we're not stopping Black people from registering to vote."
BLANK: Almost right after Freedom Summer began, three activists were kidnapped and murdered — James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman — and I wonder how did that affect the morale of everybody taking part in this?
RICHARDSON: It did what the murders had always done... What it always did is, there were two things: one is we always understood that violence should never ever ever be allowed to stop the movement. So if they kill one, ten come in our place.
I mean, I remember when I hear about it, you know, I'm at the orientation. We were doing an orientation at a school in Ohio — a college in Ohio — and Bob Moses who was SNCC's Project Director in Mississippi, he came up and he said three workers are missing and he said we in the movement assume that they are dead. Because everybody had two-way radios. They knew to call in twice a day. We recorded it. We'd call them if we didn't hear from them. It was really very organized.
And so when we didn't hear from them, the movement people — we knew — that they're probably dead. But what Bob is saying this first day is that this happened. And if any of you volunteers and primarily white, primarily college students from the north, if any of you want to leave we will not think badly of you. We understand, you know. Not one of them left. Not one of them left. I will say, however, that as prepared as I thought I was, it became real for me that these people could now be killed. And that's where my heart sank. It wasn't distant anymore. It was so real. People talk about the movement as you know, Kumbaya, and "We Shall Overcome." Uh-uh. There was righteous rage.
BLANK: Today we just don't think of voter registration as such a high stakes effort. Were you surprised that it meant so much to the people that would prevent you from getting the vote in 1964?
RICHARDSON: Yes, I was surprised because, of course, I'm coming from Tarrytown, New York. It was no big deal to register to vote. The stakes were not that high. See, for folks who say to me, "Oh, it doesn't matter whom I vote for, or whether I vote or not," white supremacists would not have done what they did — would not have focused so much on stopping Black people to vote — if these white racists had not understood how powerful that vote was. They knew that with the vote can come power.
BLANK: Sixty years later, this summer, there is an election that many feel are as consequential as when you all were trying to support Lyndon B. Johnson, who eventually won in a landslide. Do you see any comparisons between then and now?
RICHARDSON: Yeah, absolutely I do. Although, I got to say to me the stakes are really really higher, and I don't think we have had this kind of choice to make as Black people since, really, Reconstruction.
What happens in November means: Are you going to have regulation of the EPA, of the consumer protection? Are you going to have full-scale drilling in forests? Are you going to have elimination of the Education Department? What President Biden's Administration was able to do was to put, of course, two folks on the Supreme Court. Well, you're going to get probably one or two vacancies again. If you want a total lock by white supremacists on the Supreme Court, then, hey, don't vote. And if we do that: shame on us. Shame on us.
BLANK: Judy Richardson is a civil rights activist and filmmaker. She'll be taking part in a symposium at the National Civil Rights Museum on Saturday from 10 a.m. To 3 p.m. marking the 60th anniversary of Freedom Summer.
