It is 60 years since Freedom Summer. Originally known as the Mississippi Summer Project, what came to be known as Freedom Summer brought together more than 1,000 college-age students to travel to Mississippi to support the Black freedom movement in one of the most systematically racist states of the United States. Most of the participants were from universities of the Northeast and West Coast, places like Yale, Columbia, Cal-Berkeley, and others. They were more than three-quarters white, about half were Jewish, and about three hundred were women.
The project was officially organized by a coalition of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). It was the young student activists of SNCC who took the lead to provide both the vision and the organization for the summer actions. Since at least 1961, SNCC activists had been organizing in Mississippi, but had not seen significant progress in terms of membership or participation in larger Black working-class movements. It was this lack of early success that led many in SNCC especially to think about sending in outside, mostly white, activists to support organizing efforts.
Although organizers like Bob Moses, Julian Bond, James Foreman, Ella Baker, Stokely Carmichael, Staughton Lynd, Charlie Cobb and others were among the well-known outside activists, tens of thousands of mostly Black Mississippians also worked on and participated in the project. Despite being the targetsof racist violence for their work during the summer, the vast majority of these did not plan to leave Mississippi. If they failed to make change, they would be subjected to punishment and violence for years to come, unlike the mostly white activists from outside the state. Yet by the thousands they not only helped organize and carry out Freedom Summer initiatives, they also housed and in many cases protected white activists from physical harm. Many local Black people sat up at night with their guns at the ready, prepared to protect themselves, their property, and their activist guests. They were, what one young SNCC activist called, “this cadre of older people who had been fighting.” But in the face of systematic violence, they had so far not achieved their goals. The summer activities helped to begin larger, longer-term changes.
The most famous goal of the summer was to register 400,000 Black Mississippians to vote, giving them a voice in the supposed democracy in which they lived. If Black people could vote, they could remove from office a sheriff who had violently abused them and limited their daily free will for years or even decades. This focus on voting rights became the most well-known demand.
But there were many other aspects to the summer project. It helped create the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), a direct challenge to the hard-core racist Democratic Party that blocked all avenues for change and didn’t even allow Blacks membership. The MFDP not only challenged the entrenched racism in Mississippi politics, it also challenged the national Democratic Party and President Lyndon Johnson to push for reforms for which he would later be known. Eighty thousand Black Mississippians joined the MFDP. It was Fannie Lou Hamer, a Mississippi-born activist, who led this charge for change.
They also created and ran small Freedom Schools that taught literacy, the Constitution, Black history, and more. At least a few thousand young people attended these places of learning. Dozens of Freedom Libraries were created to provide reading material and knowledge to otherwise academically deprived people. And, where white activists couldn’t find space to stay in people’s homes, they organized Freedom Houses, where Black and white activists lived together. The Freedom Summer experience was the seed of much more than just expanded voting rights.
In the end, the summer project registered very few people to vote. Not only were many local Blacks afraid of the violence that might come their way if they did, many were denied registration through sabotage by local and state bureaucrats, and many were swayed against voting by economic considerations, fearing that they would be kicked out of their homes or off the land they were working, or that they would be denied loans or have their loans called in as reprisal for registering. The combined threats of violence and economic punishment convinced many poor, working class Blacks that they should avoid making themselves targets.
These fears were real. Despite the lack of significant success in registering people, the racist authorities reacted aggressively and violently to crush the summer project. Not only were the local and state government bureaucracies and all the economic powers of the region united to stop the change, they in turn relied heavily on groups like the Citizen’s Council and the Ku Klux Klan. The Ku-Klux-Klan called Freedom Summer the “N—– Communist invasion” of Mississippi, combining the two major fears of white racists in capitalist society – Black freedom and any sort of egalitarian, democratic society.
Both of these groups were either made up of, or heavily financed by the businessmen and landowners throughout the state. They benefitted from segregation because it kept Blacks from voting, meaning that nearly half of the working-class people in a district could not vote, stifling the ability of workers to use their collective power at the polls to challenge the political dominance of the business interests. At the same time, Jim Crow violence and the racist and anti-communist fears that they stoked discouraged white workers from uniting with Black workers into a class force that could challenge their economic dominance of the region. Both of these groups either supported or practiced outright terrorist violence to stop activity by local Black activists as well as to try to keep Freedom Summer activists from accomplishing their goals. Threats and intimidation were the norm, arrests and official intimidation were common, and torture and death were the ultimate punishment for some, like James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman. A simmering fear of violence was present throughout for most of the participants.
In 1964, the summer project proposed and carried out mostly by SNCC had been ambitious. While it had little immediate effect in creating a large pool of registered Black voters, it did succeed in encouraging more Black organizing that would later lead to larger changes. And it also succeeded in drawing the attention of many other layers of the population to the horrors of Jim Crow violence, which led to larger political reforms, most directly the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965. Lyndon Johnson and other politicians, most in the northern wing of the Democratic Party, realized the need to implement at least limited reforms in order to ward off larger political challenges to their rule. More and more, formal Black political participation became the norm, and most white people across the country came to see outright segregation and violent repression as unacceptable. Freedom Summer, by aggressively attacking the contradictions of U.S. law and society, effectively called attention to them, thereby stimulating much larger changes in both law and social attitudes.
The Civil Rights Movement, including the Freedom Summer project, and the thousands of Black and white freedom fighters who took part in it, modeled the courage, hard work and organizational skill that is needed today to stand up to the resurgent reactionary forces that we still face. If young Black and white activists could organize and fight for a better world in the violent context of 1964 Mississippi, working people today can do the same thing across the U.S. And if we learn from their experiences, both their accomplishments and limitations, we can go far further than they were able to.
Two online sources provide broad overviews with the chance to explore the events of Freedom Summer more deeply. One is the PBS companion website to the documentary Freedom Summer. The documentary itself, at 2 hours long, also offers a thorough overview. For further research, this website offers various resources to explore.
