By Tamara Shiloh

It was 1964 and the Civil Rights Movement was in full swing. Three years before, unforgettable history had been made: Freedom Riders (groups of white and African American civil rights activists who participated in Freedom Rides) traveled via bus throughout the segregated South fighting Jim Crow laws; and Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech at the March on Washington in 1963. What took place then was called “progress.”

Still, the South remained segregated, especially at polling places. Blacks were abused, attacked, threatened, and some were killed when attempting to exercise their right to vote.

Devices used to deter voters included literacy tests and poll taxes, a fee that must be paid by Blacks in order to vote. And Mississippi led the pack, boasting the lowest number of Black registered voters: less than 7% of those who were eligible.

These issues led to a 1964 voter registration drive aimed at increasing the number of registered Black voters in Mississippi. It was called Freedom Summer, also dubbed the Mississippi Summer Project.

The project was organized by civil rights groups such as the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE) and the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and run by the local Council of Federated Organizations. More than 700 volunteers (mostly white) joined Mississippi Blacks in the fight against voter intimidation and discrimination.

They, too, were met with the same level of violence, all perpetrated by the Ku Klux Klan alongside some local and state law enforcement officers. Reports from the press drew international attention to America’s racist treatment of its Black citizens.

As the summer grew hotter, the violence escalated.

Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, white students from New York, and James Chaney, a Black man from Meridian, Miss., arrived in Philadelphia, Miss., on June 15. There, the trio was tasked to investigate a church burning. The arson was not resolved, and the three men had been kidnapped.

Six weeks later, their bodies were recovered: beaten and lynched by a Klan mob.

Public outcry mounted as the hunt for their killers began. Schwerner, Goodman, and Chaney became nationally known. The press dubbed the crime “the Freedom Summer murders.”

Distrust crept in between white and Black volunteers and staff. There were 17,000 Blacks in Mississippi that summer attempting to register to vote. Sadly, only 1,200 were successful. Still, progress was made.

The project established 40-plus Freedom Schools serving 3,000 adults and children to read. National attention spurred by the press convinced then-president Lyndon B. Johnson and Congress to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964, squashing segregation in public places and banning all employment discrimination.

The violence of Freedom Summer eventually cooled, as did some relationships among those active within the Civil Rights Movement. Anger over the violence and deaths spurred a split: those who continued to believe in non-violence and those who had begun to doubt whether equality could be reached through peaceful means. After 1964, more militant factions would rise as the struggle for equality continued.

The events of Freedom Summer led to the passing of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. And still, the struggle continues.

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