Invasion

This summer will witness a massive, daring, probably bloody, assault on the racial barriers of Mississippi. The nation's chief civil rights organizations from the NAACP to SNCC, are Supporting the Mississippi Summer Project--an ambitious battleplan which breaks most of the precedents of the rights movement.

Wary of the old red herring of "outside agitation," Negro groups traditionally have been careful to class their few Northern volunteers as "helpers" and not "instigators." The 1964 plan however, calls for an invasion of "over 1000 Peace-Corps-type volunteers," in order to "shake Mississippi out of the Middle Ages."

Where former projects concentrated on a specific grievance, such as voting or public accomodations, this summer's effort will cover the whole field at once. An accelerated voter registration campaign aimed at the November elections has already begun. Freedom schools, stressing political education and the humanities, will be established in Negro areas. The project also provides for special community centers staffed by nurses, librarians, and social workers. Still more ambitious is the White Community Project, designed to "organize poor white areas in order to eliminate bigotry, poverty, and ignorance."

And, for the first time, active self-defense and actual retaliation, though not officially advocated are being openly discussed.

Civil rights leaders carefully weighed the possible consequences of the radical changes before endorsing them. They knew the program would alienate some Northern white moderates, but they argued, and argued rightly, there is no other way to liberate Mississippi. Mississippi is the only state where a majority of whites don't consider desegregation "inevitable." Remembering that Reconstruction lasted only seventeen years, Missippians plan to resist until the North again tires of crusading.

A police-state atmosphere, poor schools, and slanted newspapers isolate Mississippi's populace, both white and Negro, from the rest of the country. There is not even that rivalry between liberal cities and conservative rural areas which promises change in Alabama and Georgia. In fact Jackson, Mississippi, recently fitted out armored personnel carriers and doubled its police force in preparation for this summer. The mayor has pledged "to stop all demonstrations and jail all demonstrators." Unique even for the South, Mississippi demands a unique soluton: If the state will not come to the nation, the nation must go to the state.

The project will also attack the present censorship of news coming out of Mississippi. While recruiting here for the program last Sunday, Allard Lowenstein outlined the problem: "Wire service reporters are roughed up several times, and they learn. They have to live here, and the police can make living very difficult." Lowenstein cited recent lynchings and beatings never reported in the Northern press. To remedy this, some project volunteers will remain in the North to report the activities of their counterparts in Mississippi. As Lowenstein noted, "This invasion will be too big and noisy to ignore."

Equally important in this election year, the project will keep the attention of the nation's politicians focused on civil rights. Unless Mississippi reforms miraculously before June, the summer project will dramatize the brutality of the segregationists' last ditch stand. Hopefully, this dramatization will make the Presidential candidates realize, and openly declare, that civil rights laws are useless unless enforced conscientiously by Federal marshals or, that failing, by Federal troops.

Central to the project, then, is the anticipated lawlessness of Mississippi whites. The planners reason that massive non-violence will precipitate a crisis of violence, which they consider prerequisite for further progress. Understandably, such candid reasoning disturbs moderates torn between respect for civil tranquility and support for civil rights. In this case, however, rights and tranquility are not compatible.