Freedom Summer Recollections; circa 1964

              Looking back, it is apparent that the weeklong orientation session at Western College for Women in Oxford, Ohio, should have prepared us for everything that happened this summer.  We were exposed to every possibility and given guidelines for behavior in almost any contingency.

But experience is the best teacher and we were still raw recruits when we drove south on highway ____ on June 20. 

I use the military term advisedly.  The similarities between the MS P [Mississippi Project] and a military operation were obvious from the first.  The military overtones seemed incongruous on the serene, spacious campus of the college founded as the "Mt. Holyoke of the West," but they were there.

Under the shade trees of this sedate girls school, lessons were given in how to protect your vital organs while being beaten and what happens when a mob gets out of hand.  In an auditorium more often used for assemblies and class days, stories were told of beatings and shootings and bombings, by the witnesses themselves, some of whom, like Ed King, white chaplain of Tougaloo Christian College, bore fresh scars of the battle.  And in the quiet of the famous Romanesque chapel where every afternoon a June wedding was held, a memorial service was held for Medgar Evers and other Mississippians who died violently for the crime of being born black.