Miller remembers struggle for civil rights

    Many businesses and public buildings around the country took the day off Monday to celebrate Martin Luther King Jr. Day. King was famous for leading efforts to end racial discrimination and segregation during the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Patti Miller, a resident of Fairfield, came to know King personally through her involvement in the civil rights movement in Mississippi and later in Chicago. She spoke to the Washington High School on Friday about what life was like for blacks in the segregated South and the dangers she faced as a civil rights advocate.

    Miller grew up in Jefferson and Audubon, a couple of small towns in west central Iowa. When she was 19, she took a bus trip through the deep South, where she saw racial segregation first hand. She said that she was appalled at the institutionalized racism she witnessed and that she felt the need to do something about it.

    ?I believed so strongly that all people are equal that I had to get involved,? said Miller.

    In the summer of 1964, when Miller was a junior at Drake University, she took part in what was called the ?Mississippi Summer Project? and later known as ?Freedom Summer ?64.? The Mississippi Summer Project sought to increase voter registration among blacks, set up ?Freedom Schools? for high school students and also to build community centers to serve as libraries and facilities for increasing adult literacy.

    Miller got on a bus in Des Moines that took her to Jackson, Miss. She remembers having a conversation with a female passenger about why she was going to Jackson.

    ?I lied about why I was going and told her I was going to visit my family,? said Miller. ?She told me about how there were people in Mississippi who were stirring up a lot of trouble. The whole trip I was afraid she would find out the real reason I was going there.?

    It turned out there was much more that Miller had to worry about than disapproval from her fellow bus passengers. Miller arrived in Mississippi just one day after the bodies of three slain civil rights workers, two white and one black, had been uncovered in an earthen dam. After a federal trial, seven defendants were found guilty of murdering the civil rights workers, including a deputy sheriff who acted in concert with members of the Ku Klux Klan.

    Lynchings were a common occurrence in the south when Miller made her trek in 1964.

    ?When they were looking for the bodies of the civil rights workers, the FBI discovered nine black men who had been lynched and whose bodies were thrown into a lake,? said Miller. ?Black families didn?t tell the police when a family member was lynched. White men, women and children all watched lynchings and the police didn?t do anything about it.?  

     Miller was also aware of how dangerous life was for civil rights advocates in Mississippi.

    ?I feared for my life,? recounts Miller. ?The white civil rights workers were treated as badly as blacks in the South. We couldn?t call law enforcement because many of them were in the Klan. Not even the hospitals would help.?   

    Miller worked in a community center that gave blacks the opportunity to read books and become literate. She said blacks were not allowed in libraries at that time and that that was a contributing factor in the widespread illiteracy among blacks.

    In the early 1960s, many Southern states required literacy tests to register to vote. Miller said that the tests were not given to whites and that the questions on the tests were ludicrous.

    ?The test asked you to name all the states the Mississippi River ran through, or to ask you to interpret a portion of the Mississippi State Constitution,? said Miller. ?It was also dangerous for blacks to register to vote because newspapers printed the registration rolls and so those blacks became a target.?  

For the full article, see our Jan. 19 print edition.