The Mississippi summer project was a coordinated effort among four civil rights organizations—SNCC, the Congress of Racial Equality, the NAACP, and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference—working together as the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO). But mostly it was SNCC. It placed volunteers at the knife’s edge of jail, beatings, and death. Volunteers, college-aged youth, were asked to bring at least $500 in bond money with them. As SNCC staff, Gwen Robinson (now known as Zoharah Simmons) was spared this request.
It was irrelevant anyway, since the only money to her name was her $10 weekly salary. SNCC had dubbed the initiative the Mississippi Challenge: the frontal assault on racism in what seemed to be the most racist state. Gwen viewed Mississippi as hell on earth—the most terrifying place she could imagine.
As the Freedom Summer training wrapped up in Ohio, SNCC staff informed Gwen that she would be working on a project in a town called Laurel. They introduced her to the two men she would be working with, Lester McKinnie and Jimmy Garrett. While both men had been Freedom Riders, Lester had worked in Laurel as SNCC’s field secretary in 1962 and was selected as project director. Gwen was glad to be paired with someone who knew the area, and she was eager to begin teaching the Freedom School curriculum she helped develop.
But she was shocked that the other project staff were both Black. To her, the whole point of Freedom Summer was to leverage the possible protection that white Northern volunteers might bring with them to Mississippi. Black suffering had long failed to force federal intervention against the segregationist state government.
In building support for the project, SNCC had made it plain that a “large number of students from the North making the necessary sacrifices to go South would make abundantly clear to the government and the public that this is not a situation which can be ignored any longer, and would project an image of cooperation between Northern and white people and Southern Negro people to the nation.” Yet Gwen observed that her group included neither white nor Northern students (Jimmy was from Los Angeles, by way of Texas and Louisiana). She protested: Why create an all-Black project?
The answer from SNCC staff was not encouraging: It’s too dangerous to send any white people there. To make matters worse, Laurel had little movement infrastructure. They would have to create it from scratch. She wished, in that moment, that she still had a home to return to.