Freedom Summer (1964): Voter Registration in Mississippi

Freedom Summer, officially the Mississippi Summer Project, was a civil rights campaign in the summer of 1964 to register Black voters in Mississippi, the state with the lowest Black voter registration in the United States. Hundreds of volunteers, most of them white college students from the North, joined local Black activists to canvass voters, run Freedom Schools and organise the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. The campaign was marked by violence, including the murders of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, and it helped build national pressure for the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Background: Mississippi in 1964

Mississippi had the largest proportion of Black residents of any US state, about 42 per cent, yet in the early 1960s only around 7 per cent of eligible Black adults were registered to vote. Registrars used complex literacy tests, poll taxes, and the requirement to interpret sections of the state constitution to reject Black applicants. Those who tried to register risked losing their jobs or homes, and some were murdered; the killing of Emmett Till in 1955 and the murder of the voting rights activist Herbert Lee in 1961 showed the dangers.

Since 1961 workers from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), many of them young Black Mississippians, had been organising in the state. They and others formed the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) to coordinate the work of SNCC, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), the NAACP and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

In November 1963 COFO held a “Freedom Vote”, a mock election in which around 80,000 disenfranchised Black Mississippians cast ballots for an integrated slate, showing that they wanted to vote. White students from Yale and Stanford helped, and the press attention they attracted influenced the next step.

Planning the summer

Bob Moses, SNCC’s leading organiser in Mississippi, argued that bringing large numbers of white Northern volunteers would draw national attention and federal protection, because the country cared more when white students were in danger. The idea was debated intensely within SNCC, where some feared that white volunteers would dominate local Black-led work.

Volunteers were recruited from colleges across the North. They had to pay their own expenses and bring money for bail. In June 1964 they attended training sessions at the Western College for Women in Oxford, Ohio, where they were taught nonviolent techniques and warned plainly about the risks.

Murders in Neshoba County

On 21 June 1964, as the second group of volunteers was being trained, three workers went missing in Neshoba County. James Chaney, 21, was a Black CORE worker from Meridian, Mississippi; Michael Schwerner, 24, a white CORE field worker from New York; and Andrew Goodman, 20, a white volunteer from New York who had arrived the day before.

They had gone to investigate the burning of the Mount Zion Methodist Church, which had agreed to host a Freedom School. Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price arrested them near Philadelphia, Mississippi, held them for several hours and released them at night. Klansmen, including Price, then stopped their car and shot them dead.

Their disappearance became national news. President Lyndon B. Johnson ordered a large FBI investigation and sent navy personnel to help search. The bodies were found on 4 August 1964, buried in an earthen dam, after an informant’s tip. During the search, the remains of several other Black men were found in the area, a reminder of how little attention earlier killings had received.

The volunteers

Estimates of the number of volunteers vary, but roughly 700 to 1,000 people took part over the summer, most of them white students from elite Northern universities. Many came from comfortable families, and their parents included lawyers, doctors and politicians who could press Washington for protection. They lived with local Black families, who took great risks by housing them.

Relations were not always easy. Some local activists and SNCC staff resented the attention given to white newcomers, and differences of class, race and experience caused tension. Yet many volunteers later described the summer as a turning point in their lives, and lasting friendships and political alliances grew out of it. The sociologist Doug McAdam’s study of the volunteers found that many remained politically active for decades afterwards.

The summer’s work

Volunteers and local activists went door to door urging Black residents to try to register, and accompanied them to county courthouses. The results were meagre: according to commonly cited figures, about 17,000 Black Mississippians attempted to register during the summer, but only around 1,600 were accepted.

The project also opened about 40 Freedom Schools, attended by some 2,500 to 3,000 students, children and adults alike. Besides basic subjects, they taught Black history and encouraged students to discuss their own lives and rights. Community centres offered libraries, health information and other services.

The violence was relentless. COFO’s own tallies, widely cited by historians, recorded more than 1,000 arrests, dozens of beatings, and the burning or bombing of dozens of churches, homes and businesses over the summer.

The Freedom Democratic Party

Because Black Mississippians were shut out of the regular state Democratic Party, activists founded the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) in April 1964, open to all races. During the summer it enrolled tens of thousands of members and chose a delegation of 68 to attend the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey, in August.

On 22 August the sharecropper and activist Fannie Lou Hamer testified before the convention’s Credentials Committee. She described being beaten in a Winona jail in 1963 after trying to register to vote. Johnson, worried about losing Southern white support, held a hastily arranged press conference at the same time, but television networks broadcast her testimony later that evening.

Party leaders offered a compromise: two at-large seats for MFDP members Aaron Henry and Ed King, while the official all-white delegation would be seated. The MFDP rejected it. The episode left many activists disillusioned with liberal politicians and influenced SNCC’s later turn towards Black Power.

Consequences and legacy

Freedom Summer did not transform Mississippi registration that year, but it changed national awareness. Together with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Selma marches the following year, it helped secure the Voting Rights Act of 1965, after which Black registration in Mississippi rose to around 60 per cent by 1967.

Justice for the Neshoba County murders came slowly. In 1967 a federal jury convicted seven men, including Price and the Klan leader Samuel Bowers, of civil rights conspiracy; none served more than about six years. In 2005 the state of Mississippi convicted the former Klan organiser Edgar Ray Killen of manslaughter, 41 years to the day after the killings.

Many volunteers went on to play roles in the student, anti-war and women’s movements of the late 1960s.

Timeline

• 1963, November: COFO’s Freedom Vote draws around 80,000 ballots.
• 1964, 26 April: The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party is founded.
• 1964, June: Volunteers train in Oxford, Ohio.
• 1964, 21 June: Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner are murdered in Neshoba County.
• 1964, 2 July: The Civil Rights Act is signed.
• 1964, 4 August: The three men’s bodies are found.
• 1964, 22 August: Fannie Lou Hamer testifies in Atlantic City.
• 1965, 6 August: The Voting Rights Act becomes law.
• 2005, 21 June: Edgar Ray Killen is convicted of manslaughter.

Why it matters

Freedom Summer exposed the violence and legal obstruction that denied Black Mississippians the vote, and forced the rest of the country to pay attention. It created new forms of grassroots organising, such as the Freedom Schools and the Freedom Democratic Party, and helped bring about the federal voting rights protections of 1965.