LITMIR.BIZ

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SNCC’s most productive financial supporters in the nation. In the fall of 1963, SNCC sent word out to Northern students and lawyers to help reverse seven decades of voter suppression. Dubbed the Mississippi Summer Project and later “Freedom Summer,” the project’s goals were threefold: registering voters, organizing the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party as an alternative to the white-controlled Democratic Party of Mississippi and conducting Freedom Schools. Coming out alive from some areas of the state would itself be an achievement. Training would include the Magnolia State’s grim history of race violence and what to do if arrested. The planners were also concerned about how local blacks would react to Northern white volunteers, particularly white women who might be seeking their “summer Negro.”¹

      Fay and Marvin joined the growing faction of lawyers lobbying the National Lawyers Guild to endorse the project. Fay had joined the fifty-member San Francisco branch of the Guild shortly after starting at the Garry, Dreyfus firm in 1961, but was rarely active in it while her children were toddlers. In 1962, the FBI duly noted her as a new Guild member. Fay enjoyed the ringside seat Guild membership gave her to the fight among Old Leftists over shifting the entire Guild’s focus to civil rights abuses in the South. Though SNCC welcomed the Guild’s help in launching Freedom Summer, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund threatened to cancel its own participation. Dr. King’s SCLC was also unwelcoming.

      Undaunted, Fay’s mentor Barney Dreyfus, the long-time executive director of the San Francisco Guild chapter, had made civil rights work a priority when he assumed leadership of the national association in 1963. Dreyfus then collaborated with Detroit labor lawyer Ernest Goodman, the Guild’s new president, and his partner George Crockett, the Guild’s first black vice president. Crockett proposed to head a new Guild outpost to document abuses in Jackson, Mississippi — “the belly of the beast.”² Fay and Marvin eagerly recruited young blood to support this effort.

      Momentous changes were already in the air. Responding to a dire report from the federal Commission on Civil Rights on the situation in Mississippi, Congress passed the 1964 Civil Rights Act. President Johnson would soon add his signature to abolish all remaining Jim Crow laws, prohibit mandatory racial segregation in schools, housing, or hiring by the government or private sector. Mississippi officials geared up as if they were refighting the Civil War.

      Two teenage black civil rights workers, Charles Moore and Henry Dee, had just gone missing in May of 1964. In early June of 1964, Fay joined the other members of her office at a luncheon at the Sheraton Hotel to hear Goodman speak about the Guild’s summer plans in the Cotton Belt. Ironically, three months earlier Fay had gone to the Sheraton to observe picketing and arrests of activists protesting the hotel’s own racist hiring policies.

      Goodman sought volunteers to offer legal assistance in Mississippi during the coming summer: one or two weeks each; pay your own way. Fay was inspired to sign up. Marvin agreed to watch Neal and Oriane in her absence. He planned to go to Mississippi on a different week that summer, equally impressed with the historic occasion it presented. In late June, three other civil rights workers were declared missing, two whites and one black student — New Yorker Andrew Goodman and CORE workers Michael Schwerner and James Chaney. At George Crockett’s request, the trio had planned to investigate the burning of a church in Philadelphia, Mississippi. The assumption among SNCC staff and volunteers was that all three were dead. The mutilated bodies of Moore and Dee, along with two unknown other bodies, would be found that summer in the Mississippi River while search teams looked for Schwerner, Goodman and Chaney.

      The danger did not dissuade Fay from her plans to go to Jackson in August. Before she left, she began volunteer work in her own office library, doing research for the Guild’s Mississippi Project. Under Barney Dreyfus’s direction, Fay helped address the constitutional issues raised in three cases arising from prosecutions of volunteers in the City of Greenwood, including SNCC leader Stokely Carmichael, charged with willfully obstructing public streets and a creative array of other charges. To the Guild lawyers, the official’s real purpose was obvious — to intimidate local blacks from registering to vote.

      Less than a week before Fay’s departure for Mississippi, searchers found the bodies of the three missing civil rights workers buried in a red clay dam in Neshoba County. When Fay arrived on August 10, 1964, tensions in Jackson remained high. Local newspapers reinforced the hostility that filled the air. The Clarion-Ledger and the Jackson Daily News repeatedly referred to the 1964 summer volunteers as “unkempt agitators” and “race mixing invaders.”³ Crockett and his volunteers kept risks down by sleeping on cots in the Guild’s new office.

      During Fay’s short stay, local toughs beat a voter registration worker over the head with a baseball bat outside his office; others shot at a carload of volunteers. No one saw who set crosses on fire in front of the hotel where many visiting lawyers, doctors, ministers and news correspondents stayed. A city commissioner speculated that blacks had likely burned the crosses themselves to “agitate trouble.”⁴

      Five days after Fay’s arrival, on the evening of August 15th, a black man was shot while sitting in a parked car in Greenwood. Segregationists targeted Silas McGee for trying to integrate “whites only” movie theaters. On August 16th, several hundred blacks gathered at a local church to protest McGee’s shooting and were met by Mississippi police in full riot gear. The FBI responded slowly. Its agents preferred to document suspected subversives like Fay, noting the dates of her short visit to Jackson, Mississippi, to work at its newly opened Guild office.

      Shortly after Fay returned, Marvin went to Mississippi to take depositions to support suits challenging the way state and local taxes shortchanged black neighborhoods. Nearly half of the state’s black housing units lacked piped water; almost two-thirds had no flush toilets or lacked other municipal and state services routinely provided to white neighborhoods. The pervasive antagonism, the smell of fear and the risk of death in Mississippi left Fay and Marvin with the shared impression of having just been observers in a war zone.

      On her return, Fay felt energized. She relished seeing the Berkeley campus develop into a hotbed of Movement fervor. One of her new acquaintances, Mario Savio, a twenty-year-old junior at Cal, had just been named SNCC’s spokesperson on the Berkeley campus. An FBI agent showed up when they both spoke at a Berkeley middle school about Mississippi Freedom Summer and noted their radical affiliations.

      When Mario returned to Berkeley in September of 1964 from Mississippi, he became incensed that his own university was banning all political activities, including solicitation of SNCC volunteers and funds to support civil rights efforts. In mid-September Mario helped lead a demonstration and was suspended with five other students. That led to more demonstrations and arrests. Peter Franck, a new Guild Board member recruited by Fay and Marvin, had just set up his first law practice in Berkeley. Franck began representing students in the dispute.

      On December 2, 1964, thousands of students amassed at noon on the plaza outside Sproul Hall to protest the threatened suspension of Mario Savio and other student activists. Savio then gave his famous call to action:

      There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part; and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus and you’ve got to make it stop … to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.⁵

      When he finished, Savio and singer Joan Baez began singing “We Shall Overcome” as they led more than 1000 students inside the building to occupy all four floors. The students set up study areas, a first aid station, a food station and space for recreation. Some, for inspiration, watched Operation Abolition, a slanted HUAC documentary widely disseminated to sway public opinion against the San Francisco protesters on “Black Friday,” May 13, 1960, that had also involved students from Cal. The FSM demonstrators planned a prolonged protest until the administration heeded their demands.

      Over six hundred uniformed police officers showed up that night to reinforce the University and Berkeley Police Departments as they carried out orders from Governor Edmund G. Brown for the largest mass arrest in California history.⁶ Savio had earlier contacted Bob

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