![]() ![]() The broad link between America’s racial past and present is one that Bob Moses, now in his seventies, finds compelling. The values it stood for are under siege again-this time by modern voter suppression legislation that, instead of brutalizing minorities, uses onerous ID requirements to keep them from the polls. What he could not foresee was that a half century later Freedom Summer would not be ancient history. Lewis was right about the impact Freedom Summer would have. “If we can crack Mississippi, we will likely be able to crack the system in the rest of the country,” said John Lewis, today a long-serving Democratic congressman from Georgia, in 1964 chairman of SNCC. On June 13 the first group of Freedom Summer volunteers began arriving at Western College for Women in Oxford, Ohio, for their training session. The aim of Freedom Summer, officially the Mississippi Summer Project, was to turn the national spotlight on Mississippi in 1964 by bringing in hundreds of college students to help register black voters and start Freedom Schools designed to supplement the education black children received in Mississippi’s predominantly segregated schools. In a year in which Malcolm X had staked out the territory that he believed the fight for racial justice should take with his essay, “The Ballot or the Bullet,” all sides knew how big a gamble Freedom Summer was when, as Moses publicly announced, “All workers, staff, and Summer Volunteers alike, are pledged to nonviolence in all situations.” Today when people think of Freedom Summer, they recall the horrifying murders-which occurred 50 years ago today-of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, but their deaths are far from the whole story. ![]() Under the direction of Bob Moses, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) organizer who had been doing voter registration in Mississippi since 1961, Freedom Summer sought to challenge the racism of the state that with its long history of lynching (534 between 18) epitomized how far the Deep South would go to preserve segregation. ![]() Fifty years ago this June, Mississippi Freedom Summer began. ![]()
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