We all like to tell stories, especially our own. But it helps if someone asks. This is the story of seven years in the life of the author's cousin, who disappeared from her extended birth family for seven years, but no one in that family ever asked where she went or what she did.
The cousin is Iris Geller, a Philadelphia native who spent fifteen months in the Southern civil rights movement in 1965-66, and married one of the young Black men she worked with in Mississippi. During these months, Iris worked in two different civil rights projects; one she found frustrating and the other she enjoyed.
Former law professor Arnold Rochvarg took on the task of telling her story as a retirement project, never dreaming that he would find himself standing in Columbia MS, staring at a vacant lot — where the shack that Geller had resided in with three young men for most of 1966 once stood. He visited other places she had worked and people she had known, who were still alive. Of course he interviewed Iris several times.
The child of liberal Democratic parents, she was easily drawn into political activism. Her introduction to the civil rights movement came in August of 1964 when the Democrats held their national convention in Atlantic City only 60 miles from home. There, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party was contesting the credentials of the all-white delegation from Mississippi. Iris joined those demonstrating on the boardwalk outside the convention center. She entered Temple University wanting to do more.
In the Spring she saw a flyer on campus inviting students to join SCOPE — a voter registration project in the South run by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, headed by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. She called SCLC and was sent an exhaustive, and exhausting, application. Eventually she caught a bus to Atlanta in time to attend orientation. What she didn't have was her parents signature on her application, required of anyone under 21. Indeed they were adamant that she not go at all because of the danger. She forged the necessary signature and lied to her parents about her summer plans. As she was leaving for the bus station, she told them the truth. If you go, don't come back, was their rejoinder.
After orientation she was one of several people sent to Savannah, GA, where she did not have a good experience. Having studied numerous SCOPE projects myself, I rated Savannah one of the few failures. Why was not clear to Geller, so I won't go into it here. Suffice it to say that in late July, Hosea Williams, SCOPE's director, sent Iris and many other SCOPErs to Americus GA, where major demonstrations were taking place. Geller loved the action; it made her feel the overall summer was worthwhile.
She did not go home again, but moved in with a friend when she started classes at Temple. Bored, she was disappointed at the lack of action in Philadelphia. On November 27, she went to Washington DC to participate in an anti-VietNam war demonstration outside the White House. She fell in with a group who stayed to talk, and ended up going to Detroit with one of them. Curtis Styles, a field worker for SNCC, was going to Detroit to pick up a donated car to drive to his project in Columbia, MS.
When he asked Iris to come to Colombia with him, she said yes. After detouring to Philadelphia to withdraw from Temple and pick up necessary personal items, she joined Curtis in Mississippi, working with him until August. She loved the work, and felt accepted by the Black community, but SNCC had decided that whites should only organize other whites. Iris decided to return to Temple for the fall semester to finish her degree.
While working together for many months, Iris and Curtis had fallen in love. A few weeks later he joined her in Philadelphia. In June of 1967 they got married. In 1968, their daughter was born. In 1971 they divorced and went their separate ways. I'd really like to know what caused them to separate, but Rochvarg says nothing about this. Once Curtis was no longer with her, Iris reached out to and was accepted back into her extended family. No one asked her what she had been doing for the last seven years. They acted as though she had never left, even though she had a biracial child.
In an Epilogue, Rochvarg says each eventually married someone of their own race, with whom they stayed married. By the time the book ends, Curtis was long dead, and Iris was declining from Alzheimer's disease.
This book adds one more volume to a short list of books about SCOPE — some of which, like this one, are embedded in books about participation in the Southern civil rights movement. The only comprehensive volume which describes and compares many different SCOPE projects is my manuscript on The Second Freedom Summer. With between 300 and 350 volunteers working in six Southern states, SCOPE was the largest of the 1965 summer projects run by the major civil rights organizations.
Generally, this book is well researched and well written. There's an occasional factual error. The author says "about six hundred college students actually participated" in SCOPE (p. 33). My research found that the number was closer to half that; not all were college students and some only stayed a few days. The back of this book has 16 pages of chapter notes as well as an index. I hope the author donates his notes and the material he collected to the SCOPE project at the Library of Congress so future researchers can benefit from all his work.
Copyright © Jo Freeman
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