around the campus were engaged in battles for nuclear disarmament, educational reform, and civil rights. This emerging sensibility was nurtured and welcomed by a Bay Area political and cultural left-wing community that had managed to survive McCarthyism and the fifties. With the International Longshore and Warehouse Union providing jobs and ballast, and the North Beach poets contributing a spirit of uncompromising cultural rebellion, the West Coast version of the new student politics not only enjoyed a sense of being new but also had a healthy connection to the old. Marshall dropped right into the middle of it. He got a job in an insurance office in Oakland and an apartment in Berkeley, and started attending night classes at the university. He went to concerts by Barbara Dane and Malvina Reynolds, attended a few Dubois Club meetings, and grew increasingly interested in the civil rights movement. One event he remembers in particular was Pete Seeger singing at the ILWU hall in San Francisco. The place was packed with an impressive combination of African American longshoremen, Old Left veterans, and student radicals. Seeger brought down the house with a roaring medley of “Wasn’t That a Time,” in which the last line became, “Isn’t this a time, isn’t this a terrible time, isn’t this a time to try the souls of men, isn’t this a wonderful time.” It was the spring of 1963.
Marshall returned to Harvard, invigorated. He wanted to study, to figure out how politics and culture fit together. He took on Brecht. He wanted to understand what had happened to artists in the Soviet Union. He had a whole agenda he intended to explore. But the study of politics took second place to politics itself. He went to the first meetings of the campus SDS chapter. He got involved with the local Friends of SNCC. During the spring break he went to a SNCC staff meeting in Atlanta, where he learned that Harvard owned stock in the Mississippi Power and Light Company. He came back, he remembers,
. . . as a man with a mission, to try to get something going on that. A number of us got involved. We had articles in the newspaper, and we picketed. That would have been in early 1964. By that time I was a banjo player, singing civil rights songs. And I got more attracted to the whole thing. People would come to Harvard and speak. And Barney Frank, the tutor in Winthrop House, was pushing us to get involved in civil rights stuff. There were a lot of connections. So when the Mississippi Summer Project came along, it was just made to order.
Ganz was in the second group of volunteers to arrive for training at the Western College for Women in Oxford, Ohio, where he met Bob Moses, the SNCC organizer most responsible for the Summer Project. Soon after Marshall arrived, Moses announced that Andrew Goodman, one of the students from the first group that had already left for Mississippi, was missing and probably dead along with two comrades, Michael Schwerner and James Chaney. Moses carefully explained the Summer Project strategy, accepted SNCC’s own measure of moral responsibility for the murders of civil rights activists, and allowed the volunteers maximum space to return home with honor if they did not agree with the strategy or did not want to take the inevitable risks. Ganz was impressed. He soon came to share the almost universal opinion among the white volunteers that Moses was an organizer of unparalleled stature.
Later, Marshall Ganz saw many similarities between Bob Moses and Cesar Chavez: both were quiet, a little mysterious, critical of extravagant demonstrations and rhetoric. But this was still the spring of 1964, a year and a half before Ganz would meet Chavez. In Mississippi, he was assigned to Holmes County to help organize the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP). His roommate was Mario Savio, who had been assigned to teach in a Freedom School. Whoever was making those assignments gets five stars as a casting director: Ganz went on to be a principal organizer of the United Farm Workers; Savio became the leader of the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley. Amid the thrill and danger of Mississippi nights, Ganz and Savio stayed up late talking. Through his heavy stutter, Savio agonized about how to make political sense of his Jesuit training, and about the relationship between education and liberation, while Ganz wondered about alternative political strategies and how radical change actually happened.
Marshall and Mario were willing, conscious instruments of people with large political plans. The short-term goal of Mississippi Summer was to increase pressure on the Democratic Administration to protect voter registration in the South by putting white students from affluent, influential families and prestigious colleges in harm’s way. But SNCC wanted more than that. It hoped that the sacrifices of Mississippi Summer could force the national Democrats to seat the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party in Atlantic City, and thus begin a serious realignment of the Democratic Party, with new southern African American voters replacing the old-time Dixiecrats, southern segregationist members of the Democratic Party. Once burned—the Kennedy brothers had not lived up to their backroom promise to protect southern civil rights workers—SNCC now proposed to rush into the fire through the front door, and force an open, public, televised defeat of President Lyndon Baines Johnson at the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City. This strategy had been put together by Moses and Democrats such as Allard Lowenstein and Joseph Rauh. Lowenstein was a wild-card Democratic Party youth operative who had made a career out of keeping liberal student organizations within the limits set by the party leaders. Rauh was general counsel for Walter Reuther’s United Automobile Workers, vice president of Americans for Democratic Action, and a leading practitioner of then-triumphant cold war liberalism. SNCC, a band of self-defined nonviolent revolutionaries with less than four years of political experience, now intended to push its radical vision of direct democracy into American establishment politics. Of all SNCC’s wildest dreams, this was probably the most outrageous. Most everyone sensed that the times were changing. But changing enough so that SNCC could beat the regular Democrats on their own turf, at their own convention?
Ganz accompanied the 200-strong Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party delegation to Atlantic City. His job there was to try to convince members of the California delegation to support a floor debate on the question of seating the MFDP delegates. Although by the summer of 1964, most people in SNCC doubted the power of liberal conscience, they calculated that they had a good chance of winning an open floor debate, especially after the highly publicized killings and church bombings in Mississippi and Alabama. What SNCC didn’t count on was the inexorable logic of presidential politics. Lyndon Johnson, facing both Dixiecrat defection in the South and the George Wallace–led beginnings of white backlash in the North, decided that the MFDP was not a useful part of his coalition. Georgia’s Governor Carl Sanders made the point most clearly in a telephone call to the president at the start of the convention: “It looks like we’re turning the Democratic Party over to the nigras.”2 That impression would only be reinforced by an open floor fight between pro–civil rights liberals and southern segregationists. Since Johnson already had the pro–civil rights part of his coalition in his pocket, he could sacrifice the MFDP.
Ganz saw firsthand the pressure being put on California delegates not to support the Mississippi Freedom Democrats—all the typical moves like threatening to deny judicial appointments or to withdraw administration support for locally favored legislation. He was not at the various high-level meetings where Hubert Humphrey, Walter Mondale, and Reuther tried to force an unwanted compromise on SNCC and other civil rights leaders, or at the final, phony negotiations that tied up the MFDP leadership while party operatives maneuvered an unannounced voice vote by the credentials committee on the very question supposedly being negotiated. But he heard all about it in wrenching detail afterward. SNCC leaders were sure they had been the victims of a typical backroom ruse executed by the very people who had encouraged them to come to Atlantic City in the first place.
Ganz, like most of the SNCC organizers and those sympathetic to them around the country, was furious. He stood vigil with others from SNCC across the street from the convention center on the Boardwalk, amid a replica of Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney’s burned-out car, a bell from a bombed Mississippi church, and huge photographs of the three martyrs. He was there when Johnson came out on the balcony after his nomination and received the applause of the Atlantic City crowd, many of them deep into the drunken revelry of postconvention celebration. Huddled around the destroyed car, the SNCC vigilers had a good view of the triumphant president. Marshall hated him. August 1964: emotionally and politically as well as chronologically, the early sixties were just about over.
After
