jun 19, 1964 - Freedom Summer
Description:
In 1964, rejecting the finality of Mississippi's opposition to racial equality, Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) leaders decided to flood Mississippi with volunteers in order to change the status quo.
The campaign, called Freedom Summer, was to combine voter education, registration and political activism, as well as running Freedom Schools to teach literacy and civics to both adults and children.
It was to be a fully integrated project, bringing in middle and upper class white student volunteers from across the nation, adding to voter education work done in the same area by a small group of college students volunteers in 1963.
Beyond the notion of the "Beloved Community" ideal espoused by Martin Luther King, Jr, however, was a reason that could only be shared privately among the COFO leadership: only if middle or upper class white Americans were threatened or became victims of violence would the federal government provide the protection the White House claimed it was powerless to give.
The nationwide reaction to photos of beaten and bloodied white Freedom Riders James Peck and James Zwerg in 1961 supported this supposition.
A total of 41 Freedom Schools were established, many in churches and under the threat of arson, and more than 3,000 African American youths attended.
Thousands came to voter registrations classes and 17,000 applied for the right to vote, but obstacles to registration were such that only 1,600 were accepted.
However, the SNCC recorded "35 shooting incidents, with three persons injured; 30 homes and other buildings bombed; 35 churches burned; 80 persons beaten; at least six persons murdered".
In addition, during the summer, the bodies of James Chaney, a black Mississippian from Meridian, and white-Jewish New Yorkers Mickey Schwerner, a veteran CORE activist, and Andrew Goodman were discovered underneath an earthen dam by a search team headed by the FBI.
But as persistent as the threats, harassment and violence were, the overwhelming majority of Freedom Summer volunteers survived and worked but left to go back to college at the end of the summer.
The African American residents of Mississippi remained, their churched burned, homes destroyed, and jobs and property lost.
As Freedom Summer progressed, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), formed in April to challenge the all-white Mississippi Democratic Party, prepared to offer alternative candidates at the Democratic National Convention (DNC) in Atlantic City, New Jersey.
Interestingly, all but three of the regular (segregationist) Mississippi delegates left the convention following the MFDP's participation.
Freedom Summer was a series of setbacks with few successes, if progress is measured at the summer's end.
However, the lack of registered voters most emphatically demonstrated the need for federal enforcement of voting rights, thus paving the way for the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
The need was further demonstrated early in 1965 by three voting rights marches from Selma, Alabama, to the capital, Montgomery, infamous for its police beating of civil rights leaders and marchers.
Efforts to enfranchise African Americans continued in the south into the 1970s and were usually met with substatial resistance, sometimes violence.
The controversy at the DNC in Atlantic City suprred the Democratic Party to change its rules.
In 1968, the MFDP delegation was seated to represent Mississippi at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Illinois.
Added to timeline:
U.S. Civil Rights Movement
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