Explanation:Freedom Summer was a nonviolent effort by civil rights activists to integrate Mississippi's segregated political system during 1964.
Planning began late in 1963 when the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) decided to recruit several hundred northern college students, mostly white, to work in Mississippi during the summer. They helped African-American residents try to register to vote, establish a new political party, and learn about history and politics in newly-formed Freedom Schools.
Because black Mississippians were barred from Democratic Party primaries and caucuses, they challenged the right of the Party's all-white delegation to represent the state at the Democratic National Convention (DNC) in August.
Because black Mississippi residents were not allowed to vote, they held a parallel "Freedom Election" in November and challenged the right of the all-white Mississippi congressional delegation to represent the state in Washington in January 1965.
Residents and volunteers were met by extraordinary violence, including murders, bombings, kidnappings, and torture. Much of this was covered on national television and focused the country's attention on civil rights issues for the first time.
Public outrage helped spur the U.S. Congress to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
"Freedom Summer" is a term invented after these events occurred. At the time, participants usually called it the Mississippi Summer Project.
Why Did Freedom Summer Happen?
EnlargeExterior view of the segregated entrance for African-Americans at Malco Theater.
Colored Entrance at Malco Theater, 1953
Memphis, Tennessee. In southern states, a closed society was enforced by laws created by white supremacists. The laws stipulated that African Americans would enter stores through separate entrances as a sign of being treated as a lower class of citizens. View the original source document: WHI 83204
For nearly a century, segregation had prevented most African-Americans in Mississippi from voting or holding public office. Segregated housing, schools, workplaces, and public accommodations denied black Mississippians access to political or economic power. Most lived in dire poverty, indebted to white banks or plantation owners and kept in check by police and white supremacy groups such as the Ku Klux Klan. African-Americans who dared to challenge these conditions were often killed, tortured, raped, beaten, arrested, fired from their jobs, or evicted from their homes.
SNCC and CORE leaders believed that bringing well-connected white volunteers from northern colleges to Mississippi would expose these conditions. They hoped that media attention would make the federal government enforce civil rights laws that local officials ignored. They also planned to help black Mississippians organize a new political party that would be ready to compete against the mainstream Democratic Party after voting rights had been won.
Who Participated in Freedom Summer?
EnlargeAn elderly black woman reading a pamphlet on her porch.
CORE Brochure on 'The Right to Vote,' 1962
Sumter, Mississippi. Photograph of a local resident by Bob Adelman. View the original source document: Congress of Racial Equality. Southern Regional Office Records, 1954-1966
More than 60,000 black Mississippi residents risked their lives to attend local meetings, choose candidates, and vote in a "Freedom Election" that ran parallel to the regular 1964 national elections. Several hundred African-American families also hosted northern volunteers in their homes.
Nearly 1,500 volunteers worked in project offices scattered across Mississippi. They were directed by 122 SNCC and CORE paid staff working alongside them or at headquarters in Jackson and Greenwood. Most volunteers were white students from northern colleges, but 254 were clergy sponsored by the National Council of Churches, 169 were attorneys recruited by the National Lawyers Guild and the Lawyers Constitutional Defense Committee, and 50 were medical professionals from the Medical Committee for Human Rights.
Administratively, the project was run by the Council of Federate Organizations (COFO), an umbrella group formed in 1962 that included not just SNCC and CORE but also the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and others. SNCC provided roughly 80 percent of the staff and funding for the project and CORE contributed nearly all of the remaining 20 percent. The Mississippi Summer Project director was Bob Moses of SNCC and the assistant director was Dave Dennis of CORE.
