The 1964 Mississippi Summer Project, which brought about 1,000 volunteers to register Black voters, teach Freedom Schools, and build the MFDP.
Freedom Summer was the 1964 Mississippi Summer Project of the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO), a coalition formed in 1962 to coordinate the voter registration work of SNCC, CORE, and the NAACP in the state. Directed by SNCC’s Robert Moses, COFO had learned that Black Mississippians who tried to register faced literacy tests, poll taxes, economic reprisal, and murder, and that the nation paid little attention. The project’s answer was to bring roughly 1,000 volunteers, most of them white Northern college students, into Mississippi. Training began on 14 June 1964 at the Western College for Women in Oxford, Ohio.
Within a week the violence the organizers had predicted arrived. On 21 June 1964 James Chaney, a 21-year-old Black Mississippian from Meridian, and two white New Yorkers, Andrew Goodman, 20, and Michael Schwerner, 24, were murdered by Klansmen in Neshoba County after investigating the burning of a Black church. FBI agents found their bodies under an earthen dam on 4 August. In 1967 a federal jury convicted eight men of civil rights conspiracy; Edgar Ray Killen was convicted of manslaughter by the state of Mississippi only in 2005.
The summer’s work went on. Some 41 Freedom Schools taught more than 3,000 young Black students reading, mathematics, Black history, and the philosophy of the movement. About 17,000 Black Mississippians attempted to register, but registrars accepted only about 1,600 applications. Organizers also built the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, founded that April and open to all races. In August 1964 it sent 68 delegates to the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City to challenge the all-white state delegation, and Fannie Lou Hamer’s televised testimony before the credentials committee drew national attention to the movement. The MFDP rejected a compromise of two at-large seats, but its challenge helped push the national party to open its delegations, and the summer’s exposure of Mississippi helped build support for the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
See also: Literacy Test, Poll Tax, Voting Rights Act of 1965, Freedom Rides, Black Power
Sources
- Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute, Stanford University, “Freedom Summer.” Link
- SNCC Digital Gateway, “Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP).” Link
- U.S. Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division, “Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman.” Link
- Mississippi Department of Archives and History, “Freedom Summer,” Freedom Summer 60. Link
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