The year is 1964, the location Mississippi. Captain America suddenly appears hurling backwards through the air, apparently flung from some faraway place and crashing into a chicken coup. He is discovered by the African American couple who live there – they recognize him, confirm he is not dead, and then transport his unconscious body to their rundown home in a wheel barrel.
Steve Rogers – the man behind the Captain America mask – awakens in the middle of the night by the sound of a gunshot. Donning a pink bathrobe and clutching a metal garbage can lid, he goes to investigate and finds a group of armed white men confronting the African American. As the men raise their rifles, Rogers throws the garbage can lid and breaks one of their noses. The group immediately flees but the African American simply says, “They’ll be back. You just pissed them off.”
In the morning, Steve Rogers again offers his assistance but the African American will have none of it. “I know exactly who you are, Captain,” he replies. “The problem is that you don’t know me. I’m a damn Black man trying to keep my family alive.”
Although African Americans in other parts of the South were already registering to vote in earnest at the time – forty-four percent in Georgia, fifty-eight percent in Texas, and sixty-nine percent in Tennessee – only 6.7 percent of black Mississippians were registered in 1964. As a result, the Council of Federated Organizations, a coalition of four major Civil Rights groups, launched Freedom Summer.
In his 2010 book, Freedom Summer: The Savage Season of 1964 That Made Mississippi Burn and Made America a Democracy, historian Bruce Watson offers a detailed account of the project’s efforts. Beginning in June and lasting through August, hundreds of white college students from the North joined their Black counterparts in the South to register African Americans. The undertaking inevitably came with a heavy cost – over the course of ten weeks, eighty Freedom Summer workers were beaten, thirty-seven churches were bombed or burned, four civil rights workers were killed, and 1,062 volunteers were arrested.
“Don’t come to Mississippi this summer to save the Mississippi Negro,” Bob Moses, the architect of Freedom Summer, told volunteers beforehand. “Only come if you understand, really understand, that his freedom and yours are one. Maybe we’re not going to get very many people registered this summer…. Maybe all we’re going to do is live through this summer. In Mississippi, that will be so much.”
The African American who rescued Captain American offers a similar assessment. “You been out of the ice long enough to hear of Medgar Evers,” he says. “Shot through the heart in his driveway last year. His wife and kids saw the whole thing. Or those boys that disappeared – they still haven’t found their bodies, but they’re dead. This is Mississippi. People don’t come back from being missing, and two of those boys were white.”
On June 11, 1963, President John F. Kennedy announced his support for a comprehensive civil rights bill. “We are confronted primarily with a moral issue,” he told the American people. “It is as old as the scriptures and is as clear as the American Constitution. The heart of the question is whether all Americans are to be afforded equal rights and equal opportunities.” That night in Jackson, Mississippi, NAACP field secretary Medgar Evers watched the President’s speech at his office before returning home to his wife and three children shortly after midnight. As he got out of his car, a sniper shot him three times in the back, with one of the bullets passing through his heart.
Close to one year later, Freedom Summer volunteers James Chaney, who was Black, and Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, who were white, headed for Neshoba County, Mississippi, to investigate a church bombing. Neshoba was farmland surrounded by thickets, hills, and bogs, with a population of twenty thousand – seventy-five percent white – spread over 570 square miles that was notorious for its bootleg whiskey, corruption, and violence. They were never heard from again.
Under direct orders of President Lyndon Johnson, a frantic search ensued afterwards. On July 12, a partial body was found in an offshoot river in Louisiana. FBI agents converged on the scene, where they found a second partial body as well. Both were Black but neither were James Chaney, instead two college students who had been abducted in May. “Mississippi is the only state where you can drag a river any time and find bodies you were not expecting,” a Freedom Summer volunteer wrote in a letter home. “Negroes disappear down here every week and are never heard about.”
Despite the risks, there were African Americans in Mississippi willing to make a stand, no matter how small. “Now, my Mae, she’s doing what she can,” the African American tells Captain America in regards to his wife. “She went to the courthouse on the one day a month she’s allowed to take an impossible test, hoping this time she might pass. And I’m going to make sure she doesn’t get hurt.”
The task of convincing African Americans to register to vote by Freedom Summer volunteers was daunting. Most Blacks worked twelve-hour days in menial jobs – cooking, cleaning, and toiling in the fields – and were exhausted by the end of the day. Even more feared the repercussions of losing their job, their home, their very lives. Doors were gently closed, promises made but never kept. It took patience, understanding, faith, and commitment to keep trying.
Mario Savio, who would be the main proponent of the student-led Free Speech Movement at the University of California, Berkely later that year, was among those who went door-to-door in Mississippi. In his 2009 biography Freedom’s Orator: Mario Savio and the Radical Legacy of the 1960s, Robert Cohen notes that Savio was almost always greeted with words like, “If I go down and register to vote I’m going to lose my work,” “They’ll kick me off my land,” “I’m not going to be able to feed my family,” and “I may get beaten up.”
Those who did consent were then ridiculed and humiliated by the registrar at the local courthouse, a sight that Savio could only silently watch from the doorway. After witnessing one eighty-year-old African American press on in his determination to register despite the verbal abuse, Mario Savio remarked, “That man’s courage changed my life.”
“Let me tell you why I admire Mae,” the African American says to Captain America. “Because she’s right. The only way anything is going to change is if the law is forced to treat black people the same as everybody else. Forced. Down here, the law beats us. The law kills us.”
Fannie Lou Hamer was the daughter of sharecroppers who began working in the cotton fields of Alabama during the 1920s. By the time the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s emerged, she was tired of the segregation and racism of the Deep South and attended a Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) meeting in 1962. Civil rights activist James Forman explained at the meeting that if enough African Americans registered to vote, change would follow.
Hamer immediately volunteered to register but was unable to pass the civics exam. When she returned to her small shack on the plantation where she had labored for eighteen years, she was told by the owner to withdraw her registration or she would be thrown off the land. She chose the latter. The following year, Fannie Lou Hamer was arrested while sitting at an all-white lunch counter and then beaten relentlessly in her jail cell. She not only persevered, but quickly became a powerful voice within the Civil Rights Movement.
Mae failed her registration test as well and found her home in flames afterwards. Her husband blames Captain America, and Steve Rogers finally realizes that even he is helpless in the face of the violent racism of Mississippi in 1964. “I am the greatest soldier who ever existed,” he says to himself as he walks away. “I fight America’s enemies. How can I fight America?”
(Captain America: Home of the Brave appeared in Marvel Comics Presents #3, published in 2019 and written by Andrew Aydin. As a congressional aid to legendary Civil Rights icon John Lewis, Ayden was co-author of Lewis’s three volume graphic novel memoir, March.)
Anthony Letizia