Review: Freedom Summer

Freedom Summer by Doug McAdam
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Beside being an important analysis of race relations in America, this reminded me of Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age in another way. Like it, there is a lot of dry, scientific, textbook like data analysis. Heck you can get the Logint Regression details in an appendix! Good stuff, really - very good that that is all here. What comes through is the work of the volunteers up to and including the 1964 Freedom Summer in voter registration and other efforts in racially tense Mississippi. Some things I learned is about how this spawned the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) as a threat to the traditional Democratic Party. This, for me, shades LBJ's motivation - SNCC and company were really shaking up the establishment! Also, the sexual mores of volunteers in the trenches, their radicalization, and the impact they had taking their commitment and organizing skills to other areas is detailed. The core data here is with over 200 volunteers that participated and some that applied but did not participate.

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