Letter to the Editor (re Mississippi Burning movie)
I still have my application for Freedom Summer in my files. I didn't submit it because I came out of college that summer ridden with debt, and since my parents had signed the loans, I felt obligated to pay some of it off so I went to work instead, in retrospect the wrong choice.
I went to Mississippi under the auspices of the Delta Ministry in June of 1965 (Greenville), did some voter registration and then worked with the Freedom Information Service (Mt. Beulah, Tougaloo) (Curtis Hayes Muhammad was its first director) getting out information about what was happening there to the North and researching and writing educational material, mostly at the request of local groups like the MFDP. However, I fear the Freedom Movement's education of me was greater than any help I gave to it. The nine months I spent in Mississippi were a turning point and a deepening in my consciousness of both racism and the workings of capitalism and totally changed the course of my life.
in 1966, following the challenge of SNCC to organize in the white community, I went to New York City and worked in the SCEF office for three years. The Freedom Movement had taught me much about how to make a freedom fight and I became a founder of the Women's Liberation Movement in New York in 1967. I returned to the south in 1969 to set up a women's liberation project for SCEF, which lasted only three months, but led to activism in Gainesville, Florida, on many fronts for the next three years before I moved back North.
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