COFO Workers from Harvard Give Reports and Opinions of Mississippi

A politely curious but unemotional audience last night heard three students discuss their summer's experience working with COFO in Mississippi.

One of the major issues discussed was the place of voter registration in the total movement. Claude Weaver '65-3, who spent a year in the state and a summer as project director in Panola County, explained that the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, while perhaps the most significant accomplishment of COFO, is only a start, a way to get at "bread and butter issues." The larger economic problems, like land distributions, will have to be worked out by "traditional political tactics of discussion and compromise" by all the people of the state.

And the MFDP, the first political protest group for the Negroes in 20-30 years and in Weaver's opinion, hopefully the eventual replacement for the official Democratic party, may be the means of enabling all the people of Mississippi to work out their problems together.

All three members of the panel seemed to feel that the most valuable gain of the summer had been an intangible change in the mood of the Mississippi Negroes. Ellen Lake '66, who worked on community organization and voter registration in Gulfport, told of organizing "block captains" there to lead integration, in opposition to more conservative factions like the Negro ministry. She said that the withholding of official COFO support from a bus boycott that Gulfport Negroes were planning only increased their determination to carry it out; and she commented that such independence and initiative was a sign that within Mississippi there is the potential for leading the nation.

Describing the summer in a fairly quiet town like Gulfport, Miss Lake reported that there were "three or four arrests, one beating, and about 1000 obscene phone calls." She spoke of one white assailant, who called out to a nearby policeman "I got 'em Jack!"

Peter Orris '67, who travelled throughout the state, saw the relations between the White Citizens' Council and COFO as "two hands brushing against each other, occasionally hitting a snag, but not yet actually making any full contact."

Weaver, speaking for the "old leadership" of the movement, expressed mild surprise that things had stayed as quiet as they had, "that there had been a few killings, perhaps, but no massacres. Most Mississippians must have felt," he said, "that if they just gritted their teeth and waited it out, like in 1865, pretty soon the outsiders would give up and go home."

They described the Freedom Vote planned for Nov. 1-3, in which "mock election" COFO hopes more people will vote than in the real one, making it possible for them to challenge the legitimacy of the elected officials later.