Jo Freeman - Civil Rights Activist

Civil Rights Activist

When the civil rights movement came to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1963, it picketed local employers who didn’t hire blacks. Demonstrations were organized at Lucky supermarket and Mel's Drive-In to get them to sign hiring agreements. Success here was followed by unsuccessful negotiations with San Francisco’s most elegant hotels and several automobile dealers. Freeman was one of 167 demonstrators arrested at the Sheraton-Palace Hotel in March 1964, and one of 226 arrested at the Cadillac agency in April. She was acquitted in her first trial and convicted in her second, resulting in a fifteen-day jail sentence. Her second trial kept her from attending the 1964 Freedom Summer project in Mississippi. After it ended she hitchhiked to the 1964 Democratic National Convention in August in Atlantic City, New Jersey to support the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party’s petition to be seated in place of the all-white regular Mississippi delegation.

Following graduation from UC Berkeley, Freeman joined the Southern Christian Leadership Conference's (SCLC) summer project, SCOPE (Southern Community Organization and Political Education). When the summer was over, she joined the SCLC staff as a field worker. For the next year she did voter registration in Alabama and Mississippi, spending a few days in jail in both states. In August 1966, when she was working in Grenada, Mississippi, the Jackson Daily News published an expose of her work as a “professional agitator” on its editorial page, implying that she was a communist sympathizer. Accompanied by five photographs, including one taken at Cal during the FSM, this made her a potential target for Mississippi death squads. Thirty years later a federal court order disclosed that these were provided to the newspaper by the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission. An informant had documented Freeman’s participation in the FSM and recognized her in Grenada. Concerned for her safety, SCLC sent Freeman back to Atlanta, where she worked in the main office and also as Coretta Scott King’s assistant for six weeks. In October she was sent to work with SCLC’s Chicago project. As the SCLC ‘s Chicago project faded out, Freeman went to work for a community newspaper, the West Side TORCH. When this job ended she tried to find jobs as a journalist and photographer in Chicago, where she was told that girls can't cover riots. Eventually she found work as a re-write editor for a trade magazine, later becoming a freelance writer.