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Freedom Summer

Freedom Summer, also known as the Freedom Summer Project or the Mississippi Summer Project, was a volunteer campaign in the United States launched in June 1964 to attempt to register as many African-American voters as possible in Mississippi. Blacks had been restricted from voting since the turn of the century due to barriers to voter registration and other laws. The project also set up dozens of Freedom Schools, Freedom Houses, and community centers such as libraries, in small towns throughout Mississippi to aid the local Black population.

This article is about the 1964 voter registration campaign in the U.S. state of Mississippi. For other uses, see Freedom Summer (disambiguation).

The project was organized by the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO), a coalition of the Mississippi branches of the four major civil rights organizations (SNCC, CORE, NAACP, and SCLC). Most of the impetus, leadership, and financing for the Summer Project came from SNCC. Bob Moses, SNCC field secretary and co-director of COFO, directed the summer project.[1]

February 1964 planning[edit]

By 1964, students and others had begun the process of integrating public accommodations, registering adults to vote, and above all strengthening a network of local leadership. Building on the efforts of 1963 (including the Freedom Vote and registration efforts in Greenwood), Moses prevailed over doubts among SNCC and COFO workers, and planning for Freedom Summer began in February 1964. Speakers recruited for workers on college campuses across the country, drawing standing ovations for their dedication in braving the routine violence perpetrated by police, sheriffs, and others in Mississippi. SNCC recruiters interviewed dozens of potential volunteers, weeding out those with a "John Brown complex"[4][5] and informing others that their job that summer would not be to "save the Mississippi Negro" but to work with local leadership to develop the grassroots movement.


More than 1,000 out-of-state volunteers participated in Freedom Summer alongside thousands of black Mississippians. Volunteers were the brightest of their generation, who came from the best universities from the biggest states, mostly from cities in the North (e.g., Chicago, New York City, Detroit, Cleveland, etc.) and West (e.g., Berkeley, Los Angeles, Portland, Seattle, etc.), usually were rich, 90 percent were white. About half of them were Jewish.[6] Though SNCC's committee agreed to recruit only one hundred white students for the project in December 1963, Jewish civil rights leaders such as Allard Lowenstein went on and recruited a much larger number of white volunteers, to bring more attention.[7] Two one-week orientation sessions for the volunteers were held at Western College for Women in Oxford, Ohio (now part of Miami University), from June 14 to June 27,[8] after Berea College backed out of hosting the sessions due to alumni pressure against it.[9]


Organizers focused on Mississippi because it had the lowest percentage of any state in the country of African Americans registered to vote, and they constituted more than one-third of the population. In 1962 only 6.7% of eligible black voters were registered.[10]


Southern states had effectively disenfranchised most African Americans and many poor whites in the period from 1890 to 1910 by passing state constitutions, amendments and other laws that imposed burdens on voter registration: charging poll taxes, requiring literacy tests administered subjectively by white registrars, making residency requirements more difficult, as well as elaborate record keeping to document required items. They maintained this exclusion of blacks from politics well into the 1960s, which extended to excluding them from juries and imposing Jim Crow segregation laws for public facilities.[11]


Most of these methods survived US Supreme Court challenges and, if overruled, states had quickly developed new ways to exclude blacks, such as use of grandfather clauses and white primaries. In some cases, would-be voters were harassed economically, as well as by physical assault. Lynchings had been high at the turn of the century and continued for years.[12]


During the ten weeks of Freedom Summer, a number of other organizations provided support for the COFO Summer Project. More than 100 volunteer doctors, nurses, psychologists, medical students and other medical professionals from the Medical Committee for Human Rights (MCHR) provided emergency care for volunteers and local activists, taught health education classes, and advocated improvements in Mississippi's segregated health system.


Volunteer lawyers from the NAACP Legal Defense Fund Inc ("Ink Fund"), National Lawyers Guild, Lawyer's Constitutional Defense Committee (LCDC) an arm of the ACLU, and the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law (LCCR) provided free legal services — handling arrests, freedom of speech, voter registration and other matters.


The Commission on Religion and Race (CORR), an endeavor of the National Council of Churches (NCC), brought Christian and Jewish clergy and divinity students to Mississippi to support the work of the Summer Project. In addition to offering traditional religious support to volunteers and activists, the ministers and rabbis engaged in voting rights protests at courthouses, recruited voter applicants and accompanied them to register, taught in Freedom Schools, and performed office and other support functions.

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1,062 people were arrested (out-of-state volunteers and locals)

80 Freedom Summer workers were beaten

37 churches were bombed or burned

30 Black homes or businesses were bombed or burned

4 civil rights workers were killed (one in a head-on collision)

4 people were critically wounded

At least 3 Mississippi blacks were murdered because of their support for the Civil Rights Movement

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Many of Mississippi's white residents deeply resented the outsiders and any attempt to change the residents' society. Locals routinely harassed volunteers. The volunteers' presence in local black communities drew drive-by shootings, Molotov cocktails thrown at host homes, and constant harassment. State and local governments, the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission (which was tax-supported and spied on citizens), police, White Citizens' Council, and Ku Klux Klan used arrests, arson, beatings, evictions, firing, murder, spying, and other forms of intimidation and harassment to oppose the project and prevent blacks from registering to vote or achieve social equality.[13]


Over the course of the ten-week project:[14]


Volunteers were attacked almost as soon as the campaign started. On June 21, 1964, James Chaney (a black Congress of Racial Equality [CORE] activist from Mississippi), Andrew Goodman (a summer volunteer), and Michael Schwerner (a CORE organizer) - both Jews from New York City - were arrested by Cecil Price, a Neshoba County deputy sheriff and KKK member. The three were held in jail until after nightfall, then released. They drove away into an ambush on the road by Klansmen, who abducted and killed them. Goodman and Schwerner were shot at point-blank range. Chaney was chased, beaten mercilessly, and shot three times. After weeks of searching in which federal law enforcement participated, on August 4, 1964, their bodies were found to have been buried in an earthen dam.[15] The men's disappearance the night of their release from jail was reported on TV and on newspaper front pages, shocking the nation. It drew massive media attention to Freedom Summer and to Mississippi's "closed society."


When the men went missing, SNCC and COFO workers began phoning the FBI requesting an investigation. The parents of the missing children were able to put so much pressure on Washington that meetings with President Johnson and Attorney General Robert Kennedy were arranged. Finally, after some 36 hours, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy authorized the FBI to get involved in the search. FBI agents began swarming around Philadelphia, Mississippi, where Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner had been arrested after they had investigated the burning of a local black church that was a center for political organizing. For the next seven weeks, FBI agents and sailors from a nearby naval airbase searched for the bodies, wading into swamps and hacking through underbrush. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover went to Mississippi on July 10 to open the first FBI branch office there.


Throughout the search, Mississippi newspapers and word-of-mouth perpetuated the common belief that the disappearance was "a hoax" designed to draw publicity. The search of rivers and swamps turned up the bodies of eight other blacks who appeared to have been murdered: a boy and seven men. Herbert Oarsby, a 14-year-old youth, was found wearing a CORE T-shirt. Charles Eddie Moore was among 600 students expelled in April 1964 from Alcorn A&M for participating in civil rights protests. After he returned home, he was abducted and killed by KKK members in Franklin County, Mississippi on May 2, 1964 with his friend Henry Hezekiah Dee.[16] The other five men were never identified. When they disappeared, their families could not get local law enforcement to investigate.

Freedom Libraries[edit]

Approximately fifty Freedom libraries were established throughout Mississippi. These libraries provided library services and literacy guidance for many African Americans, some who had never had access to libraries before. Freedom Libraries ranged in size from a few hundred volumes to more than 20,000. The Freedom Libraries operated on small budgets and were usually run by volunteers. Some libraries were housed in newly constructed facilities while others were located in abandoned buildings.[21]

African-American–Jewish relations

Carpenters for Christmas

Summer in Mississippi

In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s (Harvard University Press, 1981). ISBN 0-674-44726-3

Clayborne Carson

Freedom Summer (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988). ISBN 0-19-504367-7

Doug McAdam

Bruce Watson, Freedom Summer: The Savage Season That Made Mississippi Burn and Made America a Democracy (New York, NY: Viking, 2010).  978-0-670-02170-3

ISBN

The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer: To Tell it Like it is', Univ. Press of Mississippi, 2011. ISBN 9781604738230.

Hamer, Fannie Lou

Lyon, Danny (1992). Memories of the Southern Civil Rights Movement. Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press.  9780807843864.

ISBN

Freedom Summer (University of Virginia Press, 1965, reissued 1990). ISBN 978-0-8139-1299-8

Sally Belfrage

Susie Erenrich, editor, Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: An Anthology of the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement (Montgomery, AL: Black Belt Press, 1999).  1-881320-58-8

ISBN

Matt Herron, Mississippi Eyes: The Story and Photography of the Southern Documentary Project, Talking Fingers Publications, 2014  978-1933945187

ISBN

Finding the Trapdoor: Essays, Portraits, Travels (Syracuse University Press, 1997), "Summer of Violence," pp. 140–150. ISBN 978-0-8156-0594-2.

Adam Hochschild

Martinez, Elizabeth, ed. (2014). Letters from Mississippi: Reports from Civil Rights Volunteers & Poetry of the 1964 Freedom Summer. Zephyr Press.  9781938890024.

ISBN

William Sturkey and Jon Hale, eds., To Write in the Light of Freedom: Newspapers of the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Schools (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2015)

Steven M. Gillon "10 Days That Unexpectedly Changed America" (Three Rivers Press, New York, 2006)

Digital documentary website created by the SNCC Legacy Project and Duke University, telling the story of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee & grassroots organizing from the inside-out

SNCC Digital Gateway: Freedom Summer

Mississippi Freedom Summer (Amistad Digital Resource)

. C-SPAN. 15 June 2010. Retrieved 24 April 2015. Bruce Watson recalls the "Freedom Summer"of 1964 when over 700 college students arrived in Mississippi to register African-American voters and create Freedom Schools to assist in the education of the populace. Their work was met with resistance exemplified through the disappearance of three volunteers, indiscriminate beatings, and the burnings of churches. Bruce Watson discussed his book at Lemuira Books in Jackson, Mississippi.

"Book Discussion on Freedom Summer"

Archived 2016-04-01 at the Wayback Machine - Miami University of Ohio

Freedom Summer Digital Collection

- Miami University of Ohio

Freedom Summer National Conference - 2009

Miami University of Ohio, 2014

Freedom Summer 50th

- University of Virginia

Mississippi Burning (LBJ tapes and documents)

~ Civil Rights Movement Archive

Freedom Summer, Mississippi 1964

~ Civil Rights Movement Archive

Photos of Freedom Summer

a documentary distributed by California Newsreel

Freedom On My Mind

. Webcast and event flier essay from the Library of Congress, American Folklife Center, May 5, 2009 lecture. Illustrator and journalist Tracy Sugarman describes his experiences covering the voting registration efforts during the 1964 "Freedom Summer." The talk is related to the publication of Sugarman's book of the same title. Retrieved August 25, 2009.

"We had Sneakers, They Had Guns,"

- The Civil Rights Movements of the 1960s

Mississippi & Freedom Summer

Archived 2008-04-30 at the Wayback Machine - University of Southern Mississippi

1964: Freedom Summer

from the Mapping American Social Movements project at the University of Washington

SNCC History and Geography

Civil Rights in Mississippi Digital Archive (USM)

- American RadioWorks

Oh Freedom Over Me

Original photographs, documents oral history, letters from the Mississippi freedom movement

Mississippi Digital Library

Project to Rebuild Antioch Missionary Baptist Church, Tippah County, Mississippi, burned after a speech held there by Fannie Lou Hamer

Carpenters for Christmas

~ Education and Democracy

The 1964 MS Freedom School Curriculum

Civil Rights Digital Library

Freedom Summer

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