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A newspaper in education Supplement to THE WASHINGTON TIMES
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WEDNESDAY • AUGUST 28 • 2013
The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Com-
mittee (SNCC) with CORE, the NAACP, and other
civil-rights groups organized a massive African
American voter registration drive in Mississippi
known as "Freedom Summer" and the “Summer
Project.”
Over 1,000 out-of-state volunteers participated
in Freedom Summer alongside thousands of black
Mississippians. Most of the volunteers were young,
most of them from the North, 90 percent were
white and many were Jewish.
Organizers focused on Mississippi because it
had the lowest percentage of African Americans
registered to vote in the country, in 1962 only 7%.
Many of Mississippi's white residents deeply
resented the outsiders and any attempt to change
their society. Locals routinely harassed volunteers.
Newspapers called them "unshaven and unwashed
trash." Their presence in local black communities
sparked drive-by shootings, Molotov cocktails,
and constant harassment. State and local govern-
ments, police, the White Citizens' Council and
the Ku Klux Klan used murder, arrests, beatings,
arson, spying, firing, evictions, and other forms
of intimidation to oppose the project and prevent
blacks from registering to vote for achieving social
equality. Over the course of the ten-week project:
• Four civil rights workers were killed & four criti-
cally wounded
• 80 Freedom Summer workers were beaten
• 1,062 people were arrested (volunteers and
locals)
• 37 churches & 30 black homes and businesses
were bombed or burned.
Until then I’d never
heard of no mass
meeting and I didn’t
know that a Negro
could register and vote.
Bob Moses, Reggie
Robinson, Jim Bevel
and James Forman
were some of the SNCC
workers who ran that
meeting. When they
asked for those to raise
their hands who’d go
down to the courthouse
the next day, I raised
mine. Had it up as high
as I could get it. I guess
if I’d had any sense I’d
a-been a little scared,
but what was the point
of being scared? The
only thing they could do
to me was kill me and it
seemed like they’d been
trying to do that a little
bit at a time ever since I
could remember
— Fannie Lou Hamer
In Neshoba Country, near Philadelphia, Miss.,
the bodies of three civil-rights workers—two
white, one black—were found in an earthen dam,
six weeks into a federal investigation backed by
President Johnson. James E. Chaney, 21; Andrew
Goodman, 21; and Michael Schwerner, 24, had
been working to register black voters in Missis-
sippi.
On June 21, 1964, they had gone to investigate
the burning of a black church. They were arrested
by the police on suspicion of arson, incarcerated
for several hours, and then released after dark into
the hands of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), who mur-
dered them. Their bodies, beaten and shot, were
recovered August 4.
Freedom Summer’s Effect
Freedom Summer had a significant effect on
the course of the Civil Rights Movement. It helped
break down the decades of isolation and repres-
sion that were the foundation of the Jim Crow
system. Before Freedom Summer, the national
news media paid little attention to the persecu-
tion of black voters in the Deep South and the
dangers endured by black civil rights workers, but
when the lives of affluent northern white students
were threatened, the full attention of the media
spotlight was turned on the state. This evident
disparity between the value that the media placed
on the lives of whites compared with blacks embit-
tered many black activists. However, the volun-
teers consider that summer as one of the defining
moments of their lives
In the five years following Freedom Summer,
black voter registration in Mississippi rose from a
mere 7 percent to 67 percent.
Mississippi Burning
Freedom Summer
“We had a system where people were to call in every half hour or call at appointed
times. And if the call didn’t come, then within 15 minutes, whoever was receiving the call-
ins was supposed to call the Jackson, MS [main] office. We had a security system we would
then put into operation, which involved calling the FBI and calling the Justice Department
and calling the local police… So we did that…and nothing was happening. …We assumed
that they were in real danger or dead. We…anticipated…violence, but I remember
thinking, ‘Boy, they [KKK] are really quick.’ We had a lot of fear.”
— Sandra Cason (Source: Voices of Freedom, Bantam, New York, 1990, p. 188-189.)
Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, and Michael Schwerner
