At present, about 20,000 Negroes, of a total of over 400,000 eligible, are registered in the state. The registration campaign will enroll new voters in Freedom books, closely resembling the official state rolls but lacking a literacy requirement. These books will then serve as a basis for challenging the official records and the outcome of the coming elections.

On a more direct level, workers will conduct the campaigns of four congessional candidates, (one of whom will challenge the senate seat of John Stennis (D-Miss.). They will also organize a Freedom delegation to the Democratic National Convention in an attempt to upset the official Mississippi delegation.

To help in the development of political leadership, COFO will establish ten daytime and three resident Freedom Schools--"to de-brainwash the kids," one SNCC worker said. The schools, which will operate five days a week, will include remedial work in reading, math, and grammar, as well as seminars in political science, the humanities, journalism, and creative writing. About 100 teachers--many of them professionals on summer vacation--will instruct the students, who will be 10th, 11th, and 12th graders.

In addition to the Freedom Schools, community centers will provide social services normally denied the Negro community in Mississippi. Staffed by experienced social workers, nurses, librarians, and teachers in the arts and crafts, the centers will provide instruction in hygiene, pre-natal and infant care, adult literacy and vocational training. The 30,000 books now in SNCC's Geenwood, Miss. office will be distibuted to the six centes now being planned.

Several smaller projects will complete the COFO campaign. Some workers will do extensive research into the political and economic structure of Mississippi to provide background material for COFO's political work. Others--about 30 Southern white students who have recently joined the civil rights movement--will enter white communities to try to extend to poor white areas the movement's attack on bigotry, poverty, and ignorance.

Mississippi's Reaction

One thing is sure: Mississippi isn't going to take the invasion lying down. The state legislature has been busy in recent months making laws to welcome visitors--enlargement of the state highway patrol and restrictions on picketing, demonstrations, breach of the peace and boycott. One bill currently before the legislature would effectively outlaw all of COFO's Freedom Schools.

"If the school bill goes through, it's guaranteed that everyone--all the demonstrators and teachers--will go to jail this summer," Mrs. Dorothy Zellner, head of the Boston Friends of SNCC, said recently.

Other preparations include the purchase of an armored vehicle by Jackson police and the contruction of large compounds to serve as emergency jails. In addition, a number of Mississippi cities have agreed to pool their police forces in case of civil rights demonstrations.

How much these tactics will be used is anybody's guess. The rumors which make their way northward range from "wholesale jailing" to "sporadic harrassment." COFO recruiters do not hesitate to warn prospective applicants of the possibility that they may be beaten, or shot at, and are discouraging northern white girls from applying. The real truth right now is that probably no one--not even Mississippi officials--really knows what will happen.

The Two Souths

One of the questions confronting SNCC is whether or not nonviolence can succeed in Mississippi and the "hard-core" South. Howard Zinn, former chairman of the History Department of Spelman College and presently a SNCC advisor, offered the Theory of the Two Souths at the conference. In the First South, which inclcdes Atlanta, Ga., Richmond, Va., and Nashville, Tenn., nonviolent sitins, mass demonstrations, and boycotts eventually result in integrated lunch-counters and de-segregated schools, he said. But in the Second South, the Black Belt area--Albany, Ga., Danville, Va., and Jackson, Miss.--nonviolent actions end only in broken bones, jail terms, and death.

SNCC field workers are now seeking methods to make nonviolence work in the Second South, where Zinn says, "the smell of slavery still lingers." The worst regions are Southern Virginia, Southwestern Georgia, Eastern Arkansas, and all of Mississippi. In these areas machine guns and bombs are freely used against the Negro population. According to Robert Moses, SNCC project director in Mississippi, there have been 180 cross burnings, five killings, several shootings, and at least three whippings in Mississippi since the Ku Klux Klan reorganized shortly after President Kennedy's death.

Zinn insisted that only federal intervention and protection could make nonviolence successful in the Second South. He expressed the hope that a SNCC lobby in Washington, D. C., could convince the President that he must act to prevent the failure of nonviolence.

Staff workers spoke bitterly of federal inaction. "When we phone and tell them that a Negro has been beaten, they do nothing. Maybe they'll act this summer when they realize the racists are going to be shooting at white girls."