Digital Snapshots

The Mississippi Freedom Summer Project was a 1964 voter registration drive aimed at increasing the number of registered Black Mississippians and forcing the federal government to protect Black lives. In 1962, fewer than 7 percent of eligible Black voters in the state were registered. Their lack of voter participation was not due to political apathy but rather to racism, intimidation, and violence dating back to the end of Reconstruction. White voter registrars systematically refused to add African Americans to voter rolls.

Moreover, White supremacists killed with impunity a number of Black Mississippians who actively encouraged Black voting. For example, Lamar Smith was murdered on the courthouse lawn in Brookhaven in 1955. That same year Reverend George Lee was murdered in Belzoni. In 1961, a White state legislator killed Herbert Lee after Lee attended voter registration classes in Amite County. In 1963, civil rights leader Medgar Evers was shot from behind after exiting his car and died in his carport in Jackson.

The complete disregard for Black life in Mississippi led Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) organizer Bob Moses to call for a summer project involving hundreds of White northern volunteers. The project drew on the resources of SNCC, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), all civil rights organizations that had worked in the state for years. These groups came together under an umbrella organization called the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO). COFO recruited nearly 1,000 volunteers, including college students, lawyers, law students, physicians, and nurses who came to Mississippi and worked and lived in Black communities during the 1964 Freedom Summer. Most volunteers were White, affluent, and students at prestigious universities. They received training during a week-long orientation in Oxford, Ohio, before traveling to Mississippi where they assisted with voter registration, promoted the interracial Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), and taught in forty freedom schools established to supplement the underfunded and inadequate education offered to Black children in the state’s public schools. Local Black residents welcomed the volunteers into their homes and received them warmly forming lifelong relationships in many cases. COFO leaders expected violence and knew that with White lives in danger, the federal government would finally pay attention to the lawlessness in the state.

The danger inherent in Freedom Summer became evident early on. On the summer project’s first day, June 21, three civil rights workers—James Chaney, Michael “Mickey” Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman—were kidnapped and murdered in Neshoba County. The three workers went missing while investigating the burning of a Black church that had hosted civil rights meetings. After forty-four days of searching, the FBI discovered the bodies of the three men. In just the first two weeks of the project, in addition to the murders of the three workers, there were at least seven bombings of movement-related businesses, numerous shootings, and several beatings. Moses’ gamble to bring the White volunteers into the state paid off as their presence brought unprecedented national scrutiny to the state.

Freedom Summer culminated with the MFDP’s challenge to Mississippi’s all-White Democratic delegation at the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey. COFO had established the MFDP earlier in the year since Black Mississippians were barred from participating in the meetings of the state’s Democratic Party. Using official Democratic Party rules, the MFDP held caucuses and statewide conventions to elect sixty-eight delegates to the 1964 convention. At the convention, Fannie Lou Hamer, a sharecropper from Senator James O. Eastland’s home county of Sunflower, vividly described the violent and repressive life Black Mississippians experienced. President Lyndon Johnson, concerned with the possibility of losing White southern support, maneuvered a compromise that offered the MFDP two at-large seats, which the delegation refused, with a promise not to seat segregated delegations from the 1968 convention onward. Thus, the MFDP and the summer project that supported its national ascendancy are directly responsible for more diverse convention delegations ever since.

Freedom Summer raised the consciousness of millions of Americans to the plight of Black citizens and the need for change. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 passed Congress in part because voters had been educated about these issues during Freedom Summer in Mississippi.