Professors Jim Matlack and Mel Zarr spoke April 7 about their experiences in assisting black residents of Mississippi to register to vote in 1964. Their talk was part of a speaker series sponsored by Coastal Senior College and held at the Friends Meeting House in Damariscotta.

“It was like entering a foreign land,” said Matlack of his first contact with Mississippi race relations when he traveled there in 1963 with a friend to attempt to register blacks in the Mississippi Democratic Freedom Party. At the time, Matlack was a graduate student at Yale University.

“It was a parallel election,” Matlack said. The mock registration was aimed at encouraging blacks to overcome their fear of registration in the upcoming real elections.

According to Matlack, ever since the Mississippi Constitution was rewritten in 1890 imposing a literacy test and the subsequent intimidation by white supremacists, black enrollment had shrunk from the majority to nearly nonexistent by the middle of the 20th century.

Zarr said intimidation was coupled with a requirement that the applicant produce identification such as a birth certificate, which was often not available. He said that the registrars’ office hours varied widely to make it difficult for blacks.

“It was total white control. The police were not friendly,”  said Matlack of his 1963 visit.

Both men returned to Mississippi in 1964 for what became known as the “Freedom Summer.” Zarr, two years out of law school, came under the auspices of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) with the object of getting black demonstrators out of jail.

“We didn't want to defend cases in the state courts,” said Zarr.

Their efforts were somewhat successful in moving cases to the federal Fifth Circuit Court, which freed many activists who were then able return to the demonstration lines, he said.

Matlack returned to Mississippi with his wife and child the same summer in an exchange program which brought teachers and volunteers to southern schools and blacks into the North. He was stationed at Rust College in Holly Springs, Mississippi. There he experienced first-hand the segregation, intimidation and violence against blacks. None of the faculty at the all-black college nor any of the teachers in Marshall County had attempted registration without being fired, he said.

“Sixty black churches were burned that summer,” Matlack said. Three white Freedom Riders were also murdered.

When 45 blacks finally were encouraged to register, they had to march three at a time several blocks to the courthouse then pass a gauntlet of jeering locals before entering.

“It was an enormous risk for something as simple as registering to vote,” said Matlack, who spoke with emotion as he remembered that day.

Zarr said that the passage of federal voting rights legislation in 1965 turned the tide in favor of black registration, but by then most White voters in southern states had switched to the Republican Party.

Matlack said that today new restrictions including voter ID cards threaten to suppress the black votes in future elections.

Program organizer Bruce L. Rockwood of the Coastal Senior College led an audience discussion after the talk.

Zarr is a law professor at the University of Maine School Of Law. Matlack is a retired professor of English at Cornell University.