CARBONDALE, Ill. -- As the car without lights drove slowly past the house where the civil rights workers were having a party, the people inside the house stopped dancing. Someone turned off the record player. In the following silence, someone else turned out the lights. Two brothers got their shotguns and stood by the door.

It was the summer of '64, this was Harmony, Miss., and just days earlier, three civil rights workers named James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner had gone missing in the next county over. No one was taking any chances.

"But it wasn't really tense -- it was more, 'This is just how we do things,'" said Jane Adams, recalling her days as a Freedom Summer volunteer nearly 40 years ago.

"The car drove off, the lights and music came back on, and people started dancing again. There was this tremendous normalcy at the same time all this weird stuff was going on. That's always stayed with me."

Adams, now an associate professor of anthropology at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, was a 21-year-old Latin American studies major at SIUC when organizers sent out a call for volunteers to spend a summer in the Deep South. During what came to be known as "Freedom Summer," these volunteers registered black voters, helped organize a political party to challenge the traditional "whites-only" Democrats, opened community centers and ran "freedom schools" where black children learned about black history and civil rights along with reading and arithmetic.

Thousands of people, many of them college students, responded to the Freedom Summer call, among them Adams, her brother and a number of friends.

"We had a very large contingent go from SIU," Adams said. "It was probably the largest group from a non-elite university."

Before heading south, Adams spent seven days at a training center in Oxford, Ohio -- the same one Goodman and Schwerner had attended just a week earlier. She was there when word came that the three volunteers had disappeared.

"We knew they were dead," Adams said. "It wasn't official for another month or so, but we knew."

Everyone felt afraid; few let that stop them.

"When you're 21 years old, you go into battle -- that's what youth is for," Adams said.

With their training behind them, Adams and a carload of volunteers hit the highway.

"When we saw that big sign that said, 'Welcome to Mississippi,' we felt like we had just crossed into enemy territory," she recalled.

"Mississippi had geared up for war. They saw us as invaders coming in for a complete assault on their way of life. Everybody on both sides expected that there would be a bloodbath. We all expected we could die."

There were some heart-stopping moments. The incident at the house took place her second night there. Another time, in broad daylight, "guys with guns" in two pickup trucks chased her and another female volunteer as they were driving back to Harmony, an encounter Adams remembers chiefly for the amazing maneuvering skills of the woman who drove their car. Yet these bits of terrorism did not terrorize her.

"It was a little breathtaking, but in this community I felt really safe," Adams said.

"I think I had an advantage over a lot of other volunteers, most of whom were from big cities -- they had no idea what they were getting into. I grew up on a farm (near Ava) in a rural region that is, in many ways, like the south, though not as violent. It gave me a much greater feel for Mississippi and the codes that in rural areas restrain people in ways that don't restrain them in urban areas."

Code or no, by summer's end, according to records kept by the Congress of Racial Equality, 37 black churches and 30 black homes and businesses in Mississippi had been bombed or burned. More than 1,000 volunteers were arrested there, 80 were beaten, three were killed.

At the same time, more than 3,000 children attended Mississippi Freedom Schools. More than 80,000 people joined the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, which, though it failed to seat its 68 delegates at the Democrats' national convention in Atlantic City, drew so much attention to the mainstream party's racial skew that all later Democrat conventions dropped the lily-white bias. The federal voting rights act passed in 1965.

When Adams thinks back to that summer so long ago, she remembers it best as "a unique time when we discovered resources we didn't know we had. People with no education, who had been agricultural workers all their lives, would say and do the most profound things. The true story is one of ordinary people risking everything and how they changed the world."

(Adams is now an associate professor of anthropology at Southern Illinois University Carbondale.)

(Photo courtesy of Jane Adams)

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