By Christopher Young,
Contributing Writer,
Recent emphasis has been placed on the 60th Anniversary of Freedom Summer, and justifiably so. Hundreds upon hundreds of volunteers, many of them white, joined African Americans in Mississippi with the goal of increasing voter registration against the segregated Mississippi reality of voter intimidation and discrimination at the polls.
Also known as the Mississippi Summer Project, the Council of Federated Organizations (COFU) led the movement comprised of organizations like Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE). They were met with violence by the Klan and by local and state law enforcement.
Per History.com, “While 17,000 Black Mississippians attempted to register to vote that summer, only 1,200 were successful.” News coverage of the beatings, false arrests and murders drew international attention and helped bring about the passing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. It’s important to note though, that Freedom Summer didn’t just happen in a vacuum – it propelled an already existing structure. Young people had been carrying the water for years, and so it was when a 19-year-old Tougaloo College student, working at the college library to pay-down his tuition, was visited by Bob Moses, the civil rights activist and then SNCC Field Secretary.
Sitting at his dining room table on August 28,2024, “Mac” Cotton recalled meeting Moses. “It was not a long conversation, he told me who he was and what he wanted. I just asked him where he wanted me. Then he asked me to find others – that was it.”
At 82 and recovering from an automobile accident in April – it took the jaws of life to get him out of the vehicle where he had been hanging by the seatbelts for nearly two hours – leaving him with three broken bones in his back requiring surgeries, he invited this writer into his home where he has lived alone since his second wife’s passing in 2000 – just a short distance from his church, Pleasant Hill Missionary Baptist Church.
He has five children; his son Shaka has a wood-working project in progress on the front porch.
Cotton graduated from Tipton Street High School in 1960, before attending Tougaloo College. Despite recalling events and experiences from over sixty years earlier, he is a cornucopia of information – like an encyclopedia – sharp, clear and concise.
Heeding the charge by Bob Moses, “I brought my classmates Jimmy Travis and George Lowe with me to Tylertown, and we met local NAACP branch president Robert Bryant. We were joined there by another student, John Hardy, to focus on voter registration and political empowerment. Sit-ins were one thing, but getting out in the field, meeting folks – sometimes at churches and also door-to-door, we would see Black’s on farms and join them in chopping cotton. We did the work and so they trusted us, and we could pass the word about voter registration.”
“There was danger all around and SNCC leaders taught us to keep a dime deep in our pocket in case we needed to make an emergency phone call for help. In 1961, we were assigned to the McComb Project. The headquarters was in McComb – Pike County, and it spread into Walthall and Amite Counties. One day we brought someone to the courthouse to register and the circuit court clerk hit John Hardy in the head with his pistol – Hardy, not the clerk, was arrested and I used my dime to call the Justice Department, and I got right through – a miracle – they came and moved him out of that jail.”
They shifted to the Delta and Hattiesburg Project in 1962, and Freedom Days were launched by SNCC, and he remembers hundreds lining up in places like Greenwood. Per numerous sources, successful voter registration in Mississippi then required completion of a 21-question form, including a random one that could be harvested from any of the many sections of the state Constitution, which then had to be answered to the satisfaction of the 100% white registrars – a totally subjective process that kept African Americans disenfranchised. Yet Cotton and his associates kept on. “We were chased, shot at, they even tried to burn us. That was so prominent – people doing nothing at all were killed.”
By the time 1963 arrived, “we had some notoriety – a little bit of power – and they didn’t like it. We brought 200 people to the courthouse in Greenwood, Leflore County, and I was arrested for doing so. Those clerks found so many excuses to not do their jobs. They sent us to the county farm and while out doing ditch-work the Klan would be watching from the woods. After a few days we started a hunger and work strike and so they took us to Parchman – 14 of us, including a few women.”
A sworn affidavit by Cotton can be viewed at https://www.crmvet.org/nars/aff/mbp_mc.htm. Incarcerated for a total of about fifty days, he recalls that it was folks from the World Council of Churches that got them released, just a few days before the March on Washington. While at Parchman he and others were hung high-up with handcuffs so that only the tips of their toes grazed the floor – “one of us got that for singing – I got it for pushing the food – if you want to call it that – tray back at them.”
Freedom Summer was built on earlier work by thousands of African Americans – Douglas Macarthur Cotton among them. He walked the walk – risking his life so that African Americans could vote in Mississippi. The Mississippi Link newspaper salutes Cotton for his service, sacrifice and generosity of spirit.
The in-person voter registration deadline is November 5, 2024. General Election is Monday, October 7, 2024. If you are seeking registration by mail, it must be postmarked by October 7, 2024.
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