In Freedom Summer, Doug McAdam traces the lives of these serious activists through interviews, analyses of documents, etc. Freedom Summer was the immediate milieu from which sprang the antiwar movement, the women's movement, the free speech movement, etc.
"many of the volunteers continued to organize their lives around the movement long after the summer ended. Jobs were taken as a means of furthering the struggle. Marriages were conceived of as political partnerships. Decisions about where to live often turned on which cities were viewed as the most politically progressive; for example, by 1970, nearly 40 percent of the volunteers were living in California's Bay Area.
...
But what of their lives during this (post 60s) period? While there exists a voluminous literature on activists during the Sixties, the trail grows cold as we enter the Seventies. Apparently, like old soldiers, old radicals "just fade away." Or, if we are to believe the pop8ular media accounts, become stockbrokers or born again Christians. Judging from the questionnaires and interviews, the truth is neither as simple nor as reassuring as these accounts suggest. The volunteers did not "fade away" or "sell out." Instead, they struggled through the Seventies to reconcile the personal and political lessons of Mississippi with an America that was increasingly apolitical and individually oriented. Their efforts to do so mark their lives during the Seventies as much more continuous with the Sixties than the popular accounts suggest. While they made accommodations to a changing America, their first allegiance still is to the conceptions of politics and self formed in Mississippi.
POLITICS AS USUAL
We tend to stereotype decades in the same way we stereotype people. Whatever factual base the stereotype rests on is soon overwhelmed by the stereotype itself. ... There are three distortions to (the characterization of the 70s as the "Me Decade."
1. "personal concerns" (self-interest) have probably always functioned as the dominant motivation underlying social life.
2. The roots of the "Me Decade" preoccupation with self are to be found in the Sixties, not the Seventies. It was the twin emphases on personal liberation and social action that marked the Sixties as distinctive. Initially, the two were joined together, as the concern with personal liberation was intended to encourage people to overcome the vestiges of racism and sexism that hampered social action. Over time, the rhetoric of personal liberation fostered forms of behavior (e.g., drug use, sexual experimentation) whose connection to social action was tangential at best. Thus, the focus on self that we have come to associate with the Seventies did not so much arise, then, as represent a depoliticized holdover from the Sixties.
3. While activisms may have declined in the 70s, it certainly did not disappear. The women's, environmental, and antinuclear movements grew stronger, not weaker, during the decade. The 70s also saw the proliferation of local neighborhood movements throughout the country. The volunteers were active in all of these efforts.
He goes on to compare the volunteers and the no-shows to Freedom Summer (the people who applied, were accepted, but didn't show up). HE shows that their careers/work lives were very different. The volunteers continued to subordinate career to politics. Many of them "evidenced more continuity in their political lives, than their work lives. The Volunteers also suffered career-wise because of their political commitments. The no shows were the ones who settled in to career tracks, bought homes in the suburbs and lead conventional family lives.
pp. 213-220