- You have been watching "Training for Freedom" here on PBS Western Reserve.

My name is Ben Holbert and I'm glad to moderate this upcoming panel discussion.

If you're just joining us, in the previous half an hour viewers watched an outstanding documentary.

In the summer of 1964, Civil Rights activist Bob Moses led a student campaign in Mississippi to register Black voters.

Bob Moses and many others felt the campaign was necessary because Mississippi leaders adopted laws in 1890 instituting poll taxes, literacy tests, and other restrictions that made it constitutional to keep Black people and even some poor whites from voting.

To some, this political tactic, more than 130 years ago, is what some believe is going on in the United States right now.

Voter suppression.

In 1890, Mississippi had 190,000 registered Black voters and 76 years later, in 1966, that number had dwindled to 2000 voters.

So, the film, "Training for Freedom" has a pronounced historical perspective.

- I'd like to introduce to you our panelists.

We have distinguished panelists who will explore these issues.

Joining us virtually is James Brown.

Mr. Brown is the President of the Youngstown NAACP, Chairman of the organization's Economic Empowerment, Reentry, and Political, Media and Communication Committees.

We are also joined with Dr. Nishani Frazier.

She is a Professor of History and American Studies at the University of Kansas.

She's studied extensively on the 1960s freedom movement.

And rounding out our virtual panel is Bruce Watson.

Bruce is the author of "Freedom Summer: The Savage Season of 1964 That Made Mississippi Burn and Made America a Democracy" So I'd like to welcome each and every one of you all to this program.

This was a very provocative film and a very powerful American story.

So we want to set the scene a little bit and describe Black voter suppression in Mississippi.

- [Narrator] Throughout the delta, 60 or 70% of the population was Black.

And so if you gave them the vote, you would have been surrendering power.

- No, Jennings, you didn't pass.

You see there?

you just filled out that part.

And look, you didn't write anything in there.

You didn't pass it.

You have to fill it out complete before you pass.

- So the idea of disenfranchising Blacks went all the way back to reconstruction where Blacks were given the vote by federal law.

And what happened was you had your first Black Congressman ever.

You had several city councils and town councils controlled by Blacks.

And when the federal troops left, the era of Jim Crow began.

By the 1890s, Mississippi enacted all of these various laws about interpreting the Constitution and poll taxes, et cetera that just decimated, just stripped the Black vote away.

By 1963, Bob Moses and SNCC, they were doing what they could to get people to realize that they could come down to the courthouse and register, but they were having a tremendously different time.

Moses' car was shot into.

One guy took the bullets in the neck, the driver.

They sicked dogs on them and dragged people to jail, singing and chanting and things like that.

And it was starting to look like this wasn't going to really make any progress for a long time.

- All right, now we want to unpack the efforts that we just saw, what took place in 1964 and we're gonna start off with Dr. Frazier in just a second.

We wanna know what it means now, 58 years later.

So Dr. Frazier, your dad was a part of the NAACP in Mississippi.

And when you look at "Training for Freedom," what strikes you most about what you just got through watching?

- I think perhaps one of the most powerful elements of the film is to look at what it took to engage in voter registration and to challenge the segregation system in Mississippi.

A lot people, they sort of think about the Civil Rights Movement as a process where people would protest and march, and you'd have somewhat of a framework similar to the March on Washington.

People gather, but there's no violence.

What the film demonstrates is that it took a lot for individuals to go down to a state where violence was the norm.

That was the way they controlled and maintained political power.

And I think also that it's a testament to the people who were involved in the movement.

It's a testament to what they were prepared to face in an effort to obtain the vote.

- I want to bring Bruce in on that.

And thank you for your comments.

I want to bring Bruce in on this, because Bruce, you wrote the book.

I just really want to know if you can share with us what compelled you to do this?

Why did you want to write the book and capture what took place with SNCC and the rest of the movement?

- I've always been drawn to hinges in American history when people really took the ideals of America, that it was founded upon, allegedly founded upon sometimes, very seriously.

And this was one where it seemed very clear, as one of the volunteers that I interviewed said.

This was very clear where right and wrong stood.

I met Bob Moses in 1994.

I was doing a story for his Algebra Project.

He took me up through the Delta one afternoon.

Absolutely unbelievable to me, traveling through the Mississippi Delta with Bob Moses pointing out this and that.

I never forgot it.

I began researching into Freedom Summer, which happened when I was 11, and so I don't remember anything about it, really.

And I began to research it and found what a remarkable and awe-inspiring story it was.

Not just the three murders that everybody focuses on, but the endurance, the courage, the persistence, the sheer guts that it took, not just to register people but just to teach in a Freedom School when there were bomb threats, things like that.

It really inspired me and brought out what I thought was the best in America.

- Was it emotional at any point for you when you were writing this?

Did it really just strike the core at all?

- I went to Mississippi many times in the process of research, and I don't know if you'd call it emotional but I rolled the windows down in the car and I sweated it out, like people did, because there was no air conditioning.

There was nothing.

And obviously I was not facing any violence, but nonetheless, you could still sense in a dark Mississippi night, even now, you can sense the fear.

You can sense the fear that would have been felt by volunteers, and of course by generations, centuries of Black people in Mississippi.

There is something about it that touches you to the quick.

To that extent, I did feel very emotionally involved.

- All right, well let's bring President Brown, Youngstown Chapter of the NAACP, involved in this conversation.

President, the late Congressman John Lewis.

He coined the phrase where he talked about getting into good trouble.

The meaning of that phrase, basically good trouble, what we're trying to do is you go through protests but you're trying to achieve something that redeems the soul and the consciousness of America.

When you hear the phrase good trouble and know what you try to do every day as the president of the NAACP, how do those two thought processes collide?

How do they work together?

- Well, I think when you say good trouble, it kind of has, kind of a misnomer.

But I think what we try to do is, as the NAACP was actually founded in February 1909, we are inspired by the Niagara Movement and the white liberals who helped to partner to create the NAACP in 1909.

That's what I'm thinking about.

Because of the fact that there has to be two like minded sides to this thing, where they want to see an end to the segregation and they basically will fight and make sure that everyone is free, everyone is free to do what they need to do.

- Yes, sir.

And so to follow up on that question, what we're look at right now, it's not poll taxes per se, but there seems to be a number of things that make impediments to people voting, voter suppression.

We hear about it every day.

Your team, with the Youngstown NAACP, what are some of the things that you would suggest or that you're trying to do to sort of eliminate some of those barriers, if you can?

- Well, I think this film is inspirational as well because of the fact that our six game changers that we focus on with the NAACP is education, voting rights, economic sustainability, criminal justice, and youth engagement and health.

And we wanna make sure that every one of the game changers are identified.

And what we do is we try to make sure that we have not just voter registration, but voter awareness.

Why are you going to vote?

Because voter registration is easy.

I shouldn't say easy.

It's not as difficult as it used to be, but now a person needs to know why they're voting and what they're voting for.

- And I wanna bring Dr. Frazier back in on this as well, because in the beginning, at the intro, we told our viewers that her dad was involved with the Mississippi NAACP.

Any kind of stories that were ever shared with you?

Or any thoughts about the work that had to go into that, Dr. Frazier?

- So one of the things that was really interesting as I was listening to Bruce was as he talked about his own experience of going down to Mississippi and trying to kind of have a lived experience.

And my father actually lived the experience, right?

It's one thing to sort of imagine.

It's another thing to actually be in that moment.

And I do recall, my father, it took a long time for him to return to Mississippi.

Over 40 years for him to return to Mississippi.

And when we returned, I recall him talking about the sound of the road.

We were on the highway and it had a kind of thud, thud, thud, this sort of repetitive sound.

And it just made my father incredibly nervous, and he talked about how he couldn't stand that sound because it took him back into that space.

And the degree of fear, and also the degree of courage.

I'm always inspired by my father and the courage that he had.

In Greenville, Mississippi as a high school student, he started protesting.

He was a one-man protest.

(both laughing) In front of one of the retail stores there.

And the Black community supported him by walking by and telling him, "You're doing good."

But they were not standing in that line.

(laughs) It was my father standing in that line.

He goes on to join the NAACP Youth Student Group and becomes State Youth President.

During that time, he's working with Medgar Evers and he is in that world of Aaron Henry, of trying to establish some sort of movement for voter registration.

He talks a lot about the level of violence.

My father certainly was beat in a Mississippi jail.

He also talked about the amount of on-the-ground organizing that was necessary, and was certainly, as President Brown, talks about with the work of the NAACP, we're talking about on-the-ground, door-to-door work of both citizenship education, but also helping people feel comfortable going into these courthouses, challenging these systems, in an effort to vote.

- Wow.

And to bring Bruce back in on this, and thank you so much for the recollection and sharing the information about your dad.

I think that was very powerful.

But Bruce, when you were writing the book, one of the things I find very interesting is that Dr. Martin Luther King during his "I Have a Dream" speech, he talked a little bit about how Black people can't do this, or negroes, African Americans, couldn't do this by themselves.

It required to have the assistance of others.

So when you're writing your book, you're talking about those students that came down to Mississippi to try to make a change.

They were not just Black students.

They were white students as well.

Can you talk a little bit about that, if you don't mind?

- Well, Bob Moses and also his most famous recruit for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Fannie Lou Hamer, were born and raised in Mississippi.

As Moses once said, "She had Mississippi in her bones."

And they were both quite adamant that SNCCC would not become an all-Black organization.

It later did, but at that point it was not.

And they were quite adamant that it would be white volunteers and Black volunteers coming down.

That was controversial.

It was not something that everyone thought was a good way to go.

SNCC had worked for years in Mississippi, three years in Mississippi, trying to use a grassroots approach to get locals to rise up and take their own empowerment, their own voting rights, seriously.

And now all of a sudden you're gonna bring all these white folks in from Yale and Harvard and Overland, and they were gonna come in and everyone feared they were gonna take charge, that they would just pull the rug out from under the people who had been empowered.

And indeed, in many cases that did happen.

It was a mixed bag in terms of results of Freedom Summer.

But nonetheless, it did have to... One of the reasons that Moses wanted to bring white people in was not just to integrate.

He knew that America was not paying attention to Mississippi.

Medgar Evers was gunned down.

Everybody paid attention for a week, and then all the attention went back to Martin Luther King or went somewhere else.

Moses knew that if you brought people from Des Moines and from St. Louis and California and they were in Mississippi writing back what they were doing, everybody in America would pay attention to Mississippi.

And that is indeed what happened.

- And those students, this wasn't quite the internship that they were looking for (laughs) to do this.

Laying all jokes aside, they may have changed the course of this nation.

I'm sure that's reflected in your book as well.

- Well, it's, to me, one of the more inspiring aspects of it.

Dr. Frazier was talking about her father's courage, and that was living in Mississippi, and that was everyday.

There was no one who would pretend that what the volunteers who came from outside the state did was anywhere comparable to that courage.

Because after all, at the end of the summer, everyone knew they're going home.

And yet as I said in the documentary, they didn't have a dog in that fight.

They didn't have to do it.

And they also didn't have to go.

There was a pivotal moment in the training, as we saw, where the three men were killed, Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney disappeared.

They were not known to be have been killed yet.

They were just disappeared.

And you see the girl watching the TV documentary, and they all know this could happen to them.

How many left?

Maybe one or two.

Everybody else said, "This is what I have to face," and they went down there.

That's a remarkable kind of courage.

- Remarkable courage.

And like you said, they didn't know if they would come back, but they still went anyway, and that speaks volumes.

I wanna bring in President Brown real quick, 'cause right now here in the state of Ohio, and we probably see it across the country as well, but let's talk about the Ohio Supreme Court.

They struck down the Republican drawn state legislature maps relative to voting here in Ohio.

Very powerful situation of what organizations like the NAACP are trying to do to make sure that those maps are redrawn and drawn correctly.

This is the second time that this has happened.

Would you like to weigh in on that, sir, just to say a little bit about what the NAACP, their position, and what they're trying to do to make sure that they get this right.

- Well, our position is basically they have a map that's drawn that is fair and equitable.

Just as the author, Mr. Watson, has said before, when they created the SNCC head and invited those folks down to Mississippi, that was a powerful strategy.

So our strategy basically is to stay on top of how these maps are drawn.

And as you said before, it was drawn against the Supreme Court's wishes not once but twice.

And so what we're doing now is to basically bring attention to those individuals who continue to promote an inaccurate map and to continue to have a map that is intentionally discriminatory.

- And there's gonna be a lot more discussion and conversation about that, I'm sure.

And groups like the NAACP will be watching very closely.

- Yes.

- League of Women Voters, all the same.

There's another issue, and I wanna bring Dr. Frazier in on this one since she's an educator.

But when we start talking about the critical race theory, and I was reading something the other day that educators, I think the University of Texas, they're concerned.

They've even adopted a resolution when it comes to critical race because it doesn't give professors, educators, the opportunity to be able the share the history of what took place in our country.

So I wanna give you a swing at that, Dr. Frazier.

- Sure.

So I'm actually gonna go back a little bit to your first question to Bruce, 'cause I do think it's important to contextualize Freedom Summer as part of a kind of long arc.

From beginning, early 1960s, there's a focus on voter registration.

You get the formation of 1962 Council of Federated Organizations.

And the reason I'm mentioning this is that there were a number of organizations that were involved in attempting to do work of voter registration from Congress of Racial Equality, Delta Ministry, which ends up collaborating with SNCC, and certainly the NAACP.

I think it's also important to understand that SNCC itself is undergoing its own internal transformation.

So part of the tension about white students coming into that space has to do with the ways in which they're trying to empower the community.

And I'm hinting at that language in particular, because Stokely Carmichael, who's one of the persons doing training during Freedom Summer, comes to embrace Black power.

But in part, he starts off beginning to question some of the very foundations of SNCC, including it being an integration, an open organization racially, and its attachment to nonviolence.

And I think that when it comes to critical race theory, I think that part of it has to do with the ways in which conversations about race challenge our fundamental sense of ourselves as a nation state.

We have constructed ourself as a space of democracy and freedom.

And when we get into this conversation of how issues around racism and discrimination are embedded within the structure of the United States, it begins to raise questions about how free is freedom in America.

And I think some people don't want to deal with those issues.

They don't want to look at the other side of The United States and United States history.

And I think they also want to wipe it away.

By making it nonexistent, we can all embrace this concept of a freedom together.

And of course that flies in the face of the history of many people who are in The United States, whether they be African Americans, Indigenous people, Chicanos, Asian American.

So critical race theory is not about this whole question about inclusion of race or making white people uncomfortable in the classroom.

It's about a confrontation with the self.

And The United States is having difficulty with that confrontation of self.

- And there has to be a discussion, because if you sweep it under the rug, if you pretend like it never existed, you cannot grow.

And one nation should be one that try to grow, try to become better.

It's not about me, but when it comes to the critical race theory, I hope that this is a discussion and a debate that continues on, that we can get some resolution to it.

- Well, I think part of the issue is we have to understand freedom as a process.

And I think some people are uncomfortable with thinking about American history as a process of democracy and freedom.

We insist that that's how we started.

But we started in a space of both freedom and unfreedom, including the enslaved people and including how we treated Indigenous folk.

So if we embrace process of democracy, what it does is encourage a greater level of citizenship.

This is what Freedom Summer was about.

Voter registration, Freedom Schools was about enhancing citizenship and citizenship participation.

You cannot do that by being dishonest or burying one's head in the sand.

- Yes ma'am.

Thank you very much for that.

I wanna ask Bruce a question.

This has to deal with Shelby County versus Holder.

Is there something that you're working on right now or your observations relative to the significance of this court case.

- I'm not specifically working on something, but all Americans, myself included, should be paying attention to this.

And I was alarmed.

Part of my book ends with what followed Freedom Summer.

And one of the more inspiring offshoots of it was the Voting Rights Act in 1965, which changed, really just as much as anything, to make America a democracy, as I said in my subtitle.

You cannot call yourself a democracy if only 7% of Black people in Mississippi can vote.

By the end of 1965 after the Voting Rights Act, 60% were registered to vote and that ushered in a period where we can call ourselves as close to democracy as we have been.

And the Voting Rights Act was renewed and renewed, and challenged in the Supreme Court and upheld to the broadest possible interpretation of the law the Warren court said before the 60s were even over.

And it was renewed again.

And then in 2013, this case came up and Chief Justice John Roberts writing for the majority said times have changed, basically.

I'm summarizing, but times have changed.

We don't need this anymore.

It only governs certain states.

It only governs certain southern states that abused the 15th Amendment and we don't need that anymore.

Well in fact, what we needed was a Voting Rights Acts for 50 states.

Because what we see across the board in the wake of Shelby versus Holder, what we see is just an unleashing of all of this pent-up effort to suppress Black vote.

And it's going on.

It makes headlines all the time now.

It was naive.

How sweet to think we didn't need it anymore.

Well that was just totally naive, and worse than naive.

It was, let's face it, rather cynical.

And so yes, I'm watching.

Everybody should be watching and doing everything we can to bring out the vote.

I love what President Brown said about voter awareness as well as voter registration, not just I can vote now, but why.

And my fondest hope is that in addition to all of this that the suppression efforts will simply do what they did in 2020 and bring out even more people.

Nothing looks more important than voting when you're told you can't vote.

They put this barrier or that barrier in front of you, it will stop too many people, but it will also inspire others and that's my most fervent hope.

I never thought I'd live to see the Voting Rights Act repealed or overridden.

- I know.

There's a phrase that, I caution to say, the young people use, but stay woke.

But I think we have to stay woke at this particular point.

- Absolutely.

- And Bruce, Dr. Frazier, President Brown, we've had a wonderful, I mean an outstanding discussion here.

We've talked about a number of things, but unfortunately, as they used to say in broadcasting, the old clock on the wall is telling us that we're gonna have to wind this thing down.

But we have really had an insightful commentary from you all and we watched a very insightful documentary.

We've heard the idealistic college students and these activists who came together in 1964 on a mission, as you all discussed, to try to achieve quality.

So Dr. Frazier, Mr. Watson, Mr. Brown, like I mentioned before, we could speak about this forever.

But what we want to do at this particular point and what we're gonna do is we're gonna let ladies go first.

We just want you to leave the audience with a pearl of wisdom if you could.

Dr. Frazier, what's something that you would say to be a call of action or something that someone should do.

- Well, I'm gonna say two things.

One, I think it's important we understand that voting rights is not just something that impacted African Americans.

Voting Rights Act set the stage for Indigenous and Chicano communities as well, in terms of access to the vote.

So when you see these voter ID laws, they are hitting across the board, impacting African America, Chicano, Indigenous people.

Look at the work of people like Stacey Abrams.

She has her Fair Fight Playbook, looking at voter registration, voter education on the ground, that kind of door-to-door process.

There is a way to stymie this effort to engage in disenfranchisement.

But we have got to pull ourselves up, we have to pull from the spirit of Freedom Summer, and we have to act, and we have to do it right now.

- All righty, thank you.

All right, President Brown, we're gonna go to you.

Give you 30 seconds, sir.

Can you weigh in with us?

- Well, Frederick Douglass once said, "If there is no struggle, there is no progress."

And I think "Training for Freedom" is such an important way to identify how to move forward and to continue that progress.

I think that in our unit, I hope that we would try to enlighten some of our young folks to make sure that they know the past in order to progress and move forward for the future.

- Absolutely, sir.

All righty, Bruce, you have the final word, sir.

- (laughs) If I could sing, I would, because there's an old song, one of the many inspiring freedom songs, said freedom is a constant struggle.

And that is the lesson, I think, this shows us.

Nothing boils my blood more than seeing people throw the vote away, not vote.

There are people, as we saw in Freedom Summer, who risked their lives, some who gave their lives for this franchise and you simply have to get out and vote.

That is the final word.

- All right, well thank you so much for your final word.

And we want to thank each of our panelists for their insight on this discussion.

We want to thank you so much for your reflection and your insight.

Ladies and gentlemen, this conversation does not have to end here.

Each of us is a living example of how we all can make a positive difference in the lives of others.

Each of us has the power as those students from the Western College for Women, now part of Miami's Western Campus, broke down barriers of race, class, and gender to organize the most comprehensive campaign of the Civil Rights Movement.

The struggle continues and the right to vote and civic engagement will always be important, So carry this new found knowledge into the barbershop, classroom, community meetings.

Even contact your elected officials if you can.

And as John Lewis said, we have to get into good trouble.

Good trouble to redeem the soul and consciousness of America.

It's been a pleasure to be with you.

My name is Ben Holbert.

Thank you for watching and have yourself a very good day.