Time for another “Freedom Summer” (The Arizona Summer Project)

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

I never thought I would see the day that we would have to refight battles already won during my lifetime and within my memory. I'll be damned if I am going to allow nativist and racist conservatives to unravel fifty years of racial progress and roll back the clock to the 1950s. If we all have to recommit ourselves to a new Civil Rights Movement in a new century to fight the nativist and racist conservatives of Arizona, then so be it.

There are many organizations already calling for an economic boycott of Arizona, and economic boycotts have proved to be a highly effective tool of the Civil Rights Movement in the past.

But I want to suggest another way to focus the attention of the nation and the world on Arizona. It is time to shine a bright light on the nativists and racists in Arizona who hide behind the legitimizing label of the Republican Party, particularly in the Arizona Legislature, and hold them up to public ridicule and scorn, and public shame. Their extremist views need to be de-legitimized, something our local Arizona media has failed miserably to do.

Make Arizona the new Mississippi. It is time for another "Freedom Summer" (The Arizona Summer Project).

First, some history. Freedom Summer (June–August 1964):

Civil rights activists had been organizing in Mississippi for years, yet little had been achieved. In order to force a national response and focus attention on the brutal racism of Mississippi, a coalition of national and community groups, including the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE), along with local community groups, organized the 1964 Summer Project.

“Freedom Summer,” as it was known, brought over a thousand middle-class, mostly white college students from the north to work with Black community groups and movement activists in Mississippi. The focus of the project was twofold: first, an ambitious voter registration drive, and second, community organizing. The summer was enormously successful as a crucible for civil rights activists, and also marked a turning point for the militant wing of the movement. At the same time, Freedom Summer brought to national attention the lengths to which white supremacists would go to uphold segregation: before the project even started, three volunteers, one black (James Chaney) and two white (Michael H. Schwerner and Andrew Goodman), were murdered by a group of white police officers and vigilantes. Thousands more would be arrested and there would be scores of bombings, shootings, and beatings before the summer was over.

The voter registration drive was the main focus of the project. When efforts to register Black people were largely unsuccessful, volunteers formed the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), a racially nonexclusive grassroots party that aimed to challenge the official, all-white, segregationist Democratic Party delegation at the 1964 Democratic Party convention. [The MFDP delegation was denied credentials.]

The attention that the organizers of Freedom Summer focused on Mississippi served as the catalyst for the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In this respect, the project was a huge success.

In January 2008, then Secretary of State Jan Brewer issued a press release regarding voter registration in Arizona which, at that time, stated "The Census 2000 data announced by the Arizona Department of Economic Security reports the state’s voting age population to be 3,763,685. Using that figure, 72 percent of eligible Arizonans are registered to vote." When these numbers are readjusted for the Census 2010 data currently being collected in the field, I expect that the percentage of the eligible voting age population actually registered to vote in Arizona is less than 72 percent due to population growth over the past decade.

The unregistered but eligible voting age population in Arizona is concentrated among the economically disadvantaged and minority populations. And it is they who are bearing the brunt of the conservative extremism of this Arizona Legislature because they have no voice and are disenfranchised from representation. (In fact, the Republicans in the Arizona Legislature have disenfranchised almost half of Arizonans who are registered to vote and who voted to elect Democrats to the Arizona Legislature. Democrats are effectively shut out of the legislative process by Republican leadership.)

So I call upon civil rights organizations, voting rights organizations, church and interfaith organizations, labor organizations, tribal governments, lawyer organizations, teachers and students on summer break, community organizers, and Democratic Party organizations from across America to come together and to work together in a voter registration and public education project in Arizona this summer. Arizona's conservative extremists have invited making Arizona ground zero for the new Civil Rights Movement of the 21st Century. Answer the call.

By registering large numbers of disenfranchised residents of Arizona to vote and turning them out to vote in Arizona's August 24, 2010 primary election (where most legislative races are effectively decided due to gerrymandered "safe" districts) we can begin to reverse the extremism of the Arizona Legislature. It will require a massive voter turnout in November to defeat conservative extremists in their "safe" districts. Maybe voters in their districts will be sufficiently ashamed of their representatives making Arizona a pariah state and the laughingstock of the nation, and rediscover a conscience before November.

This "Freedom Summer" (The Arizona Summer Project) will require the focus of intensive media attention on Arizona. In the modern media era, this will require a commitment from a media organization, in the way that FOX News works in tandem with the Tea Party organizations of FreedomWorks and Americans for Prosperity. Perhaps NBC/MSNBC with political talk show hosts like Ed Schultz, Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow will take up this challenge, as they did by sponsoring Free Health Care Clinics during the debate over health care reform.

Time is short. Your organizations should pick up the phone and call other organizations and begin the process of organizing the coalition for this Freedom Summer project. The future of Arizona depends on you.