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Freedom Summer | 
 enlarge | Author: Doug Mcadam
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Category: Book
List Price: $18.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  2 reviews
Sales Rank: 353790
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 368
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 7.9 x 5.3 x 0.6
ISBN: 0195064720
Dewey Decimal Number: 976.200496073
EAN: 9780195064728
ASIN: 0195064720
Publication Date: September 27, 1990
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Product Description
In June 1964, over one thousand volunteers--most of them white, northern college students--arrived in Mississippi to register black voters and staff "freedom schools" as part of the Freedom Summer campaign organized by the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. Within ten days, three of them were murdered; by the summer's end, another had died and hundreds more had endured bombings, beatings, and arrests. Less dramatically, but no less significantly, the volunteers encountered a "liberating" exposure to new lifestyles, new political ideologies, and a radically new perspective on America and on themselves.
Films such as Mississippi Burning have attempted to document this episode in the civil rights era, but Doug McAdam offers the first book to gauge the impact of Freedom Summer on the project volunteers and the period we now call "the turbulent sixties." Tracking down hundreds of the original project applicants, and combining hard data with a wealth of personal recollections, he has produced a riveting portrait of the people, the events, and the era. McAdam discovered that during Freedom Summer, the volunteers' encounters with white supremacist violence and their experiences with interracial relationships, communal living, and a more open sexuality led many of them to "climb aboard a political and cultural wave just as it was forming and beginning to wash forward." Many became activists in subsequent protests--including the antiwar movement and the feminist movement--and, most significantly, many of them have remained activists to this day.
Brimming with the reminiscences of the Freedom Summer veterans, the book captures the varied motives that compelled them to make the journey south, the terror that came with the explosions of violence, the camaraderie and conflicts they experienced among themselves, and their assorted feelings about the lessons they learned.
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Academic, Accessable, and Astounding January 28, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
Freedom Summer attempts to explain who gets involved in high-risk political action, and how their experience shapes their economic and personal decisions. McAdam uses the 1964 "Freedom Summer" program, where primarily Northern, white college students descended on Mississippi to register black voters. The experiences of the volunteers serve as a microchasm of the politics of the era; the lingering influence of the conservative 1950's with its fears of communism and idealized suburban nuclear families through the turbulent 1960's, and the collapse of the multi-racial civil rights movement into various atomized social movements - feminism, environmentalism, and of course, the anti-war movement.
The methodology here is fascinating in and of itself: McAdam obtained the original applications for the Freedom Summer program, and used them to track down both those who did and did not go to Mississippi that fateful summer. This allowed him to demonstrate not only how people are motivated to participate, but the difference that such participation can make on future life choices, not only for political engagement, but employment and even marriage. Along the way, he shatters some of the mythology about the baby boomers - especially the idea that everyone shed their love beads and picket signs for lattes and SUVs. However, he also is careful not to glorify the volunteers, many of whom found adjusting to life outside of "the movement" to be a difficult process (an issue McAdam handles with care and dignity).
Perhaps what is most admirable about this book, however, is that it gives a fresh view on the 1960's, an era that has been written about ad nauseum, and manages to do so in a way that is both academically sound (McAdam is a sociologist at Stanford) and easily accessible to a non-academic audience. Be sure to read the appendices as well as the main text; he includes SNCC's "incident list" detailing the daily litany of harassment and violence that the volunteers faced daily. It is especially chilling, not only for the savagery it details, but the matter-of-fact tone in which it is recorded.
Highly recommended.
Spectacular August 29, 2005
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
This book should be required reading for any of us crusty old lefties. A nice reminder (along with Martin Luther King Jr's "Why We Can't Wait") that sometimes with enough strength and drive, we can make the impossible possible. A great recounting, not only of the civil rights movement, but also the emerging New Left philosophy. Rich and detailed to earn a place as a university textbook, but still as plainspoken and accessible as to be read by anyone.
Highly recommended.
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