~ a column by Colleen O’Brien
It was 1964. She was between her junior and senior years at Drake when she told her parents she had signed up to travel south to the Mississippi Summer Project. She would be gone for a month. Right before she left, the news of three missing young men was all over the media; these boys, two white and one black, had been registering Blacks to vote in Mississippi when they disappeared. Her father said to her, “If this is what you need to do, I support you.”
As one of about 700 students from Harvard to Hawaii who joined activists in a massive effort to force the media, and thus the rest of the country, to take notice of the shocking violence and injustice toward African Americans in the south, Patti Miller from Jefferson was 21 when she rode 24 hours in a bus to Meridian, Miss.issippi, and moved in with a black family who had three little boys. She worked in a community center reading to African American kids, feeding them lunch, talking endlessly with her host mother Alice, and often fearing the day ahead of her. “There were always moments when I just wondered if I could make it through that day to the next one…. Each time I walked out on the street I, in my mind, expected a bullet to hit me.”
Growing up in 1950’s Jefferson, Patti was my older sister’s pal, one who deigned to talk to me. She had a voice like a bell. She won a jitterbug contest with my boyfriend once, and what I liked most about her was her ingenious solution to ears that she thought stuck out too far — she scotch-taped them back and wore her hair long.
When I as a young married woman learned that Patti had gone to the Deep South to work for voting rights, I was struck by her courage. Although the Civil Rights movement had been going on since the mid-Fifties, I was not exactly conversant with the troubles. Many in the north were oblivious like me, but that someone I’d known much of my life had volunteered to help in what according to the nightly news was a dangerous situation, I was mightily impressed.
Just last week, 50 summers later, the first of a two-part special on PBS aired and told the story of that summer and those kids. (Part two airs in September.) Patti is featured in the documentary, and because of her ongoing involvement in civil rights since she became one of those freedom kids, contributed much to the understanding of what actually went on in Meridian, even to being in the church when folk singer/human rights activist Pete Seeger announced that the bodies of the three young men were found. “I kept a journal then,” she said. “And I took photos. I couldn’t do what I do now without that.”
What she does now: Patti has a website – keepinghistoryalive.com – that was a result of a documentary for Iowa Public TV she did 10 years ago of the 40th reunion of Freedom Summer; Patti has done speaking engagements throughout Iowa since, and has one at the Des Moines Historical Society coming up on Oct. 20. Perhaps she could do it at the Greene County Historical Society some day, too.
Patti’s history of following her passion after graduating with a voice, piano, choral music degree is impressive. She joined Dr. Martin Luther King in Chicago, her job to round up volunteers from area colleges to work on bettering the living conditions in the housing projects on Chicago’s west side. Then she taught music in the biggest all-black school in the area – Marshall High – and then she became a touring folk singer. ”It had been my dream since I was a little girl to be a singer,” Patti said. “I wanted to change the world, and it was the folk singers of the sixties and seventies who inspired the people, in keeping with what I wanted to do.” She auditioned with the Coffee House Circuit agency in New York and for four years was booked in colleges from upstate New York, through the Midwest and as far west as Colorado.
All of my adult life, I’ve used Patti Miller as the only example of intrepidness I ever knew. This column is a mere sketch of a big life, a valuable life, a life of constant paying attention. I feel privileged to know her.
