HATTIESBURG - My parents were natives of the South and often gave their baby boy healthy doses of Dixie life.
Growing up in the so-called liberal North, an individual can come away with a distorted "I'm OK, you're OK" concept of the social environment. My parents knew better - not everyone is blessed with good fortune.
So the black-and-white images flickering across the television set of the civil rights protests erupting across the Deep South had a profound impact on me.
As a teenager growing up in suburban New Jersey, I often wondered how people in the South - Mississippi especially - managed to cope with the everyday life of disenfranchisement and subjugation under American apartheid.
I have vivid memories of my parents taking great pains in explaining what was taking place in Mississippi during the advent of Freedom Summer in 1964.
What these enthusiastic young volunteers were about to do gave blacks from Harlem to the Buttermilk Bottom of the Deep South reason for hope and anticipation.
It was also a time when Medgar Evers, then-NAACP field secretary, and the Delta's Fannie Lou Hamer, the matriarch of the renegade Mississippi Freedom Party, brought the racial inequities of the Magnolia State screaming to the front of the national news pages.
"We fought during the war for America, Mississippi included," said Evers, who was gunned down in front of his Jackson home a year before the start of Freedom Summer. "Freedom has never been free."
Freedom Summer was a grassroots effort coming on the heels of the Rev. Martin Luther King's eloquence nearly a year before, when he implored America to become more progressive in terms of racial diversity.
Activist civil rights organizations such as the Congress of Racial Equality, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the NAACP all came together under the guidance of Robert Moses, and Freedom Summer evolved.
James Chaney of Meridian, Mickey Schwerner of New York City and Andrew Goodman, also of New York City, were martyred after their Ku Klux Klan-ordered executions in Neshoba County.
Nevertheless, the Freedom Summer thrust went beyond the tragic murders of Chaney, Schwerner and Goodman, because the mind set of the movement did not die with them, but became even stronger in the legions of America's youth who were determined to bring about a transformation in the racial mosaic in Mississippi and the rest of the Deep South.
One thing that came out of the Freedom Summer experience was a resounding human resolve that change - although kicking and screaming at times - was indeed going to come to the Magnolia State.
Over the next year, with President Lyndon Johnson tooting the trumpet for social change, Congress eventually passed civil rights, voting rights and fair housing legislation in an effort to level the landscape for people of color.
The intense lessons taught during Freedom Summer are still being administered today by a new generation. But one thing is certain:
Mississippi will never return to those dark days of exclusion.
