Black History Moment 2020: Freedom Summer

Freedom Summer, or the Mississippi Summer Project, was a 1964 voter registration drive aimed at increasing the number of registered black voters in Mississippi. Over 700 mostly white volunteers joined African Americans in Mississippi to fight against voter intimidation and discrimination at the polls. The movement was organized by civil rights organizations like the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE) and the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and run by the local Council of Federated Organizations (COFO). Freedom Summer volunteers were met with violent resistance from the Ku Klux Klan and members of state and local law enforcement. News coverage of beatings, false arrests and even murder drew international attention to the civil rights movement. The increased awareness it brought to voter discrimination helped pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

By 1964, the civil rights movement was in full swing. The Freedom Riders had spent 1961 riding buses throughout the segregated South, fighting Jim Crow laws that dictated where black riders could sit, eat, and drink. Martin Luther King, Jr. had given his famous “I Have a Dream” speech at the August 1963 March on Washington as 250,000 people gathered before him at the Lincoln Memorial.

Despite all of this progress, the South remained segregated, especially when it came to the polls, where African Americans faced violence and intimidation when they attempted to exercise their constitutional right to vote. Poll taxes and literacy tests designed to silence black voters were common. Without access to the polls, political change in favor of civil rights was slow-to-non-existent. Mississippi was chosen as the site of the Freedom Summer project due to its historically low levels of African-American voter registration; in 1962 less than 7 percent of the state’s eligible black voters were registered to vote.

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Source: History.com