My Friend Mickey and The Gutting of Voting Rights, 'Freedom Summer' 1964: Robert Reich
- My Friend Mickey and the Gutting of Voting Rights, The Roberts-Alito court has midwifed the rebirth of the Confederacy. By Robert Reich, Truthdig, May 4, 2026.
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When I learned what Samuel Alito and the other Republican appointees to the Supreme Court did to the Voting Rights Act last week, I thought of Mickey. I met Mickey the summer after third grade. His family had rented one of the summer cabins in the Adirondack Mountains where my grandmother also had a tiny summer cabin. I was 8, and Mickey was a teenager. We were not friends, yet I came to love him.
Mickey was kind and gentle, with a ready smile. I don’t recall asking him to protect me. He wasn’t the kind of hulking kid I usually chose as protector from bullies who’d torment and ridicule me. Mickey was on the short side and thin. He wore a sailor’s cap and seemed forever cheerful. I don’t remember him fighting to defend me or even quieting the kids who made fun of me, but I do remember his warmth and reassuring presence. His calm good nature seemed to cast a positive spell over kids who might otherwise turn to teasing or bullying.
Years went by and I grew into a teenager who no longer needed older boys to protect me from bullies, and I lost track of Mickey.
It wasn’t until September 1964, the start of my freshman year at Dartmouth College, that I heard what had happened to him. Mickey was kind and gentle, with a ready smile. Early that summer, Mickey — whose full name was Michael Schwerner — had traveled to Mississippi. The Civil Rights Movement was gaining strength. The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. had given his famous “I Have a Dream” speech at the August 1963 March on Washington, where 250,000 people had gathered at the Lincoln Memorial to hear him.
“Freedom Summer” of 1964 had brought college students, both Black and white, Mickey among them, from Northern schools together with Black people from Mississippi to educate and register Black voters, under the aegis of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Mississippi was chosen because only 7% of the state’s eligible Black voters were registered, in a state whose population was about 40% Black. Most had been frozen out of the polls with poll taxes, subjective literacy tests and brutality. It had been that way since 1877. The system was enforced by white supremacists who could commit crimes with impunity because the entire region had become a one-party state run by white supremacists... - More,
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/my-friend-mickey-and-the-gutting-of-voting-rights/
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