Freedom Summer and Democracy Today

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Freedom Summer 1964 in Mississippi was a pivotal moment in the Black freedom struggle or Civil Rights Movement.

Listen to the Teaching Hard History Podcast, Season 3: The Civil Rights Movement, with host Hasan Kwame Jeffries.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries, Ph.D., points out that after emancipation,  “African Americans’ primary goal was securing … freedom rights — the combination of civil rights and human rights that enslaved people identified as the crux of freedom.” For a century, the goal remained freedom. 

Jeffries goes on to explain: “In the 1960s, during the height of the modern Civil Rights Movement, this universal aim found expression in the use of the term freedom to describe various movement elements. Volunteers who journeyed South to test compliance with desegregation mandates in interstate travel were Freedom Riders. The songs played at mass meetings were freedom songs. The singing group founded by SNCC activists was the Freedom Singers. The literary journal of the movement was Freedomways. Field organizers bedded down in freedom houses. All Black political parties were freedom parties. Agricultural cooperatives were named freedom farms. Schools designed to empower Black students were known as freedom schools. And the effort undertaken by SNCC activists in 1964 — to break the vise grip that segregationists had on the Magnolia State — was dubbed Freedom Summer.”  

Voter Suppression

In 1964, Mississippi had the lowest voter registration rate for Black Americans in the nation, with only 6.7% of eligible Black voters registered. Across the South, Black citizens who attempted to register faced barriers such as “literacy tests,” scored at the discretion of the local white registrars and often based on arbitrary criteria, and job loss or other types of reprisals, including violence. Local White Citizens Councils (WCC) preserved the white supremacist social order by targeting those who sought to vote or to oppose segregation.

Freedom Summer 1964

Freedom Summer was an ambitious project to bring attention to the dire situation in Mississippi by ushering in an onslaught of volunteers to register Black voters. 

Watch a video clip of John Lewis explaining the Mississippi Freedom Summer Project (from the Choices Program).

Initially the brainchild of Bob Moses of the Mississippi chapter of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the leadership of the project was collective and included civil rights workers from all the major civil rights organizations working under the umbrella of the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO). The Freedom Summer project grew to involve thousands of people, including local civil rights workers over 1,000 student volunteers, and all of the Black families who welcomed the young volunteers into their homes, often at great personal risk. The majority of the volunteers from the North were white college students, and many of them were Jewish. They helped with voter registration and with education for Black children.

The key elements of Freedom Summer were the Freedom Schools, the formation of the Mississippi Democratic Freedom Party (MDFP) and helping Black community members register to vote. The Freedom Schools offered over 2,000 students of varying ages an inquiry-based approach to education, both in more traditional subjects as well as social justice topics. The goal was to help young people realize their power. 

Watch a video clip of Fannie Lou Hamer's testimony at the Democratic National Convention (from PBS.Org American Experience).

The Mississippi Democratic Freedom Party was formed by Fannie Lou Hamer, Ella Baker, Bob Moses and James W. Wright as an alternative to Mississippi’s segregationist Democratic Party, which excluded Black people from the vote. After holding a statewide convention in Mississippi, the MFDP sent delegates to the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey, in an effort to be seated as the official delegates from Mississippi.  

Watch a video clip summary of the 1964 murders (from Voices of the Civil Rights Movement).

Freedom Summer workers and volunteers faced hostile opposition from the white community, including several murders and dozens of beatings, bombings and fires. Among those murdered that summer in 1964 were three civil rights workers, whose deaths resulted in intensive media attention — James Chaney, a young Black CORE volunteer, and Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, two Jewish activists from New York, who were murdered on June 21, 1964. 

In the search for the three activists, eight other murdered Black men were found, including Charles Eddie Moore, a college student, and Henry Hezekiah Dee. These are but a handful of the people, the vast majority Black Americans, who were murdered or experienced violence during Freedom Summer and the momentous decades of the Civil Rights Movement.  

The Movement Continues

Learn more:  

“Understanding Voter Suppression in Today’s Election Process”

Today, many communities across the U.S. are falling prey to policies that discourage the teaching of honest history and inclusive education more generally. And strategies to suppressing voting continue to undermine our democracy and have increased over the past two decades as a backlash to more pluralistic political participation.

We can learn a great deal from those who engaged in Freedom Summer and — even amid tremendous violence and oppression — insisted upon the ideals of democracy. We can continue to honor their lives and work by participating in the nation’s election process and exercising our hard-won right to vote.

With the ongoing movement today to ensure access to voting and fair elections, we honor those who risked their lives to cast a ballot, those who held firm to demand equality in the face of hate and white supremacy, and those who were killed trying to ensure the right to vote for others.