My Turn | Where have you gone, Robert Moses? (2024)

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This June marks the 60th anniversary of what would ever be known as “Freedom Summer,” and on June 21, the murder of three civil-rights workers in east central Mississippi. Sad to even suggest here that far too few in America can recall either event. More importantly, far too many have never even heard of them.

In 1964, a long-simmering American civil-rights movement was approaching both a bifurcation and a boiling point on a worthy road to true freedom and justice for all. The Freedom Summer was an essential leg of that journey, pursuing voter registration of the disenfranchised in Mississippi.

Many thoughtful volunteers participated in the venture. Each of them did so across any line of station or location. They also did so across any line of so-called “color.”

The late Robert P. Moses was one of many true American heroes behind the Freedom Summer. So were Andrew Goodman, James Chaney and “Mickey” Schwerner. Moses exuded a gentle spirit and a wise and patient intellect that was almost superhuman.

Sixty years ago this month, Moses participated in training many volunteers from across the country for their foray into Mississippi on the voter-registration drive. Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner were part of the project. The training was conducted in Oxford, Ohio (perhaps at the time the polar cultural opposite of Oxford, Miss.).

In addition to being thoughtful, the volunteers were brave. They were explicitly informed that their work was fraught with real peril. Perhaps some participants understandably withdrew from the training in the wake of the warning. Yet far more stayed the course.

Indeed, a bedrock component of the registration drive — and, thus, the training — was nonviolence. If one cares to look, one can find now-grainy film footage of volunteers being trained to sustain a physical beating without resisting. The courageous spirit at root almost defies description and might ever shine through, even on aged celluloid.

Thus did Moses and many akin offer a lesson that is valuable beyond time; a lesson that at once crosses and transcends any boundary of philosophy, creed or color: to find a peaceful path between the respective roles of victim and offender; ever aspiring to be a person instead of a thing.

On June 21, Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner drove from Meridian, Miss., to Philadelphia, Miss., in Neshoba County, to meet with the victims of a racially motivated arson of a church. They were arrested and detained incommunicado by a local deputy sheriff. They were released that night and told to return to Meridian. They complied, only to encounter true darkness down Highway 19 in the form of the deputy sheriff and a group of fellow thugs.

What happened thereafter is not for the faint of heart. It is difficult even to imagine the terror the three faced. There are several books about the case. One of the best is “Three Lives for Mississippi.” It is perhaps summer reading at its best and most painful. It is worth the price alone for the moving introduction written by Martin Luther King Jr..

Sixty years later, America still struggles with matters of “race” and “color.” All too often, discourse on any matter of social policy rapidly devolves along those lines. It is as though melanin, a mere determinant of skin color, were instead some sort of neurotransmitter that governs the process of thought.

Such a form of “thinking” is to some extent unavoidable. Within insular circles, it presents no broad cultural threat. Yet it is truly unsettling to watch meetings of public bodies across the nation — whether of legislatures, school boards or city councils — and see elected officials and constituents alike literally and figuratively think only skin deep.

Among his many gifts, Moses was a person of keen intellect, holding a degree in mathematics from Harvard. He once observed that fundamental human rights include a quality education.

One might find it cruelly ironic that a right to “an efficient system of high-quality public educational institutions and services” is enshrined in the very text of the Illinois Constitution. One might further find that notion to be little more than a malignant hoax in light of the abysmal student-performance statistics that are being reported in many school districts across the state.

Rights embedded in a constitution are not self-executing. Instead, they must be recognized and reified by the government and the governed alike.

The Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution formally abolished slavery. Yet neither did much of anything to abolish stupidity.

For good or for ill, that has long been left to us, with the likes of Moses left to weep.