Frances O’Brien decided she needed to help make a difference

By Patric Hedlund, TME

Frances O’Brien of Frazier Park helped to change history in the summer of 1964.

Just after the passage of the United States Civil Rights Act, O’Brien volunteered with a thousand other college students to help end legalized segregation and racially-based voter suppression in Mississippi.

Today, retired from a long career as a teacher for children with special needs, O’Brien is a quiet woman with a soft smile and bright white hair. Her cabin in Frazier Park is a cheerful mix of books, family photos, floral furniture, scrapbooks of her travels, and a collection of children’s toys, such as a lovely doll house she has had since childhood.

As the nation celebrated Martin Luther King Jr. Day on Monday, Jan. 15, O’Brien recalled meeting the man who became a symbol of the struggle for equal rights under the U.S. Constitution. She arrived in Ohio to be trained in peaceful nonviolence before getting on the bus for Mississippi that summer of 1964, just as three other Freedom Riders who’d left ahead of her were arrested by…(please see below to view full stories and photographs)

Photo captions:

Frances O’Brien of Frazier Park joined the call for volunteers to help Martin Luther King Jr. with the nonviolent
civil rights movement in the summer of 1964.

This historic photo from the Vicksburg Post in 1964 shows FBI agents sorting through the rubble of what remained of Freedom House on Sunday, Oct. 4, 1964. A bomb placed under the building used as a community center and a schoolhouse in Vicksburg, Mississippi exploded in the night with 14 people inside. Most people (including a family with small children) were in bed. Walker Wright (inset, left) was 14 at the time. He lived just down the hill from Freedom House and went to school there. Fran O’Brien, now of Frazier Park (inset, right), had just finished her junior year at college in Oregon when she went to teach small children at this house during Freedom Summer.

Above: Civil rights workers (l-r) Andrew Goodman, James Chaney and Michael Schwerner were arrested while registering voters in Mississippi. They were released from jail in the middle of the night, ambushed and murdered by Ku Klux Klan members. The murders galvanized the rest of America to end the terrorism used to suppress the right to vote.

Martin Luther King Jr. holding a photo of the Freedom Summer workers who were kidnapped and killed as Fran O’Brien was arriving in Mississippi. O’Brien and young Walker Wright both heard him talk that summer.

“Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”

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This is part of the January 19, 2018 online edition of The Mountain Enterprise.

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