Welcome to Litsy!

I turned 11 in the summer of ‘64, the same summer that hundreds of volunteers travelled to Mississippi to register Black residents to vote and to open Freedom Schools. This book describes the experiences of those volunteers and the terror they and the Black sharecroppers they wanted to help faced that summer. Bruce Watson‘s telling of those stories brought their hopes and fears, their successes and failures alive for me. A compelling read.

I was telling my history geek friend about reading this book. He brought up the story I told him years ago about how I unknowingly attended a segregation academy in southern Georgia.
Back in elementary school my parents were having marital problems and sent my sister and I to live with my grandparents in Meigs, Georgia...

Whoa, this was a super hard read but an interesting and important read. Not only was the violence hard, but hearing the oppositions reasoning and rhetoric was extremely unsettling. I am hearing it from our POTUS and his supporters; same arguments, same reasons, same mindset, different target. Each of these people walked into a war zone but not all made it. Courage abounds. I don't know how the narrator, David Drummond, did it. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!

Day20: Summer/Winter Reads. I figure a book about a snow child counts as winter. Freedom Summer is my current audiobook read. #junebookbugs @RealLifeReading

The volunteers merely dropped in for a summer, then went home to question America. Some would spearhead the events that defined the 1960s—the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, the antiwar movement, the women‘s movement. Others, spreading ideals absorbed in Mississippi, would be forever skeptical of authority, forever democrats with a small d, and forever touched by this single season of their youth. But first, they had to survive Freedom Summer.