1 Jun 1964 Jahr - Freedom Summer

Beschreibung:

Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP): A multiracial political party founded in Mississippi during the Freedom Summer of 1964, in order protest the exclusion of black voters from the state’s mainline Democratic Party


The Civil Rights Act was a law with real teeth, but it did not remove the obstacles to black voting. So protesters went back into the streets. In 1964, in what came to be known as Freedom Summer, black organizations mounted a major campaign in Mississippi, where only 5 percent of the state’s eligible black residents could vote. The effort drew thousands of volunteers from across the country, including nearly one thousand white college students from the North. Led by the charismatic SNCC activist Robert “Bob” Moses, the four major civil rights organizations (SNCC, CORE, NAACP, and SCLC) spread out across the state in a major voter registration drive. This effort resulted in a brutal white backlash that left four civil rights workers murdered and thirty-seven black churches bombed or burned.

Shaken by the opposition’s bloody tactics but undeterred, Moses and other Freedom Summer activists turned to electoral politics. The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), founded that summer, took on the state’s official “whites only” Mississippi Democratic Party. MFDP leaders sought to disqualify Mississippi’s segregationist delegation to the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey, and take its place as the legitimate representatives of their state. MFDP co-founder Fannie Lou Hamer, a former sharecropper turned civil rights activist, eloquently challenged the Democratic power structure, including President Johnson himself. “Is this America?” Hamer asked party officials in her demand that the MFDP be recognized at the August convention. But Democratic leaders refused, and seated the white Mississippi delegation instead. Demoralized and convinced that the Democratic Party would not change, Bob Moses told television reporters: “I will have nothing to do with the political system any longer.” Freedom Summer had ended with bitter disappointment.

Women in the Movement

Though often overshadowed by men in the public spotlight, women were crucial to the black freedom movement. Here, protesting at the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, are (left to right) Fannie Lou Hamer, Eleanor Holmes, and Ella Baker. The men are (left to right) Emory Harris, Stokely Carmichael, and Sam Block. Hamer had been a sharecropper before she became a leader under Baker’s tutelage, and Holmes was a Yale University–trained lawyer who went on to become the first female chair of the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

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