In June 1964, the Mississippi Summer Project was launched to attempt to register African
Americans in Mississippi, which historically excluded most blacks from
voting.
Southern states had effectively disfranchised most African
Americans and many poor whites in the period from 1890 to 1910 by passing state
constitutions, amendments and other laws that imposed burdens on voter
registration: charging poll taxes, requiring literacy tests administered
subjectively by white registrars, making residency requirements more difficult,
as well as record keeping to document required items. They maintained this
exclusion from politics into the 1960s.
Most means survived
US Supreme Court challenges and, if overruled, states had quickly developed new
ways to exclude blacks, such as use of grandfather clauses and white primaries.
In some cases, would-be voters were harassed economically, as well as by physical
assault. Lynchings had been high at the turn of the century and continued for
years.
Blacks attempting to register to vote in Mississippi meant
faced terror and intimidation. It meant braving routine violence perpetrated by
police, sheriffs and others in Mississippi. It’s not surprising that
Mississippi had the lowest percent of African Americans registered to vote in
the country. In 1962 only 6.7% of eligible black voters were registered.
The Mississippi Project aka Freedom Summer was organized by
the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO), a coalition of the Mississippi
branches of Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), CORE (Congress of Racial Equality), NAACP and SCLC (Southern Christian
Leadership Conference). The leadership and financing came from SNCC. Robert
Parris Moses, SNCC Field Secretary and Co-director of COFO, directed the
project.
Well over 1,000 out-of-state volunteers participated in
Freedom Summer alongside thousands of black Mississippians. Most of the
volunteers were young, most of them from the North, 90 percent were white, and
many were Jewish. During the ten weeks of Freedom Summer, a number of other
organizations provided support for the COFO Summer Project. More than 100
volunteer doctors, nurses, psychologists, medical students and other medical
professionals from the Medical Committee for Human Rights (MCHR) provided emergency
care for volunteers and local activists, taught health education classes, and
advocated improvements in Mississippi's segregated health system.
Volunteer lawyers
from the NAACP Legal Defense Fund Inc ("Ink Fund"), National Lawyers
Guild, Lawyer's Constitutional Defense Committee (LCDC) an arm of the ACLU, and
the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law (LCCR) provided free legal
services — handling arrests, freedom of speech, voter registration and other
matters. 
Many of Mississippi's white residents deeply resented the
outsiders and any attempt to change their society. Locals routinely harassed
volunteers. Newspapers called them "unshaven and unwashed trash."
Their presence in local black communities sparked drive-by shootings, Molotov
cocktails, and constant harassment. State and local governments, the
Mississippi Sovereignty Commission (which was tax-supported and spied on
citizens), police, the White Citizens' Council, and the Ku Klux Klan used
murder, arrests, beatings, arson, spying, firing, evictions, and other forms of
intimidation and harassment to oppose the project and prevent blacks from
registering to vote or achieving social equality.
Over the course of the ten-week project:
·
four civil rights workers were killed (one in a
head-on collision)
·
at least three Mississippi blacks were murdered
because of their support for the civil rights movement
·
four people were critically wounded
·
80 Freedom Summer workers were beaten
·
1,062 people were arrested (out-of-state
volunteers and locals)
·
37 churches were bombed or burned
·
30 Black homes or businesses were bombed or
burned
Volunteers were attacked almost as soon as the campaign
started. On June 21, 1964, James Chaney (a black CORE activist from
Mississippi), CORE organizer Michael Schwerner, and summer volunteer Andrew
Goodman (both of whom were Jews from New York) were arrested by Cecil Price, a
Neshoba County deputy sheriff. Price was a member of the White Knights of the
Ku Klux Klan. They were held in jail until after nightfall, then released. They
drove away into an ambush on the road by Klansmen, who abducted and killed
them. Goodman and Schwerner were shot at point-blank range. Chaney was chased,
beaten mercilessly, and shot three times. They were later found to have been
buried in an earthen dam. The disappearance of the three men the night of their
release from jail was reported on TV and on newspaper front pages, shocking the
nation. It drew massive media attention to Freedom Summer and to "the closed
society" of Mississippi.
For the next seven weeks, FBI agents and sailors from a
nearby naval airbase searched for the bodies, wading into swamps, and hacking
through underbrush. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover went to Mississippi on July 10
to open the first FBI branch office there.
Throughout the
search, Mississippi newspapers and word of mouth perpetuated the common belief
that the disappearance was "a hoax" designed to draw publicity. The
search of rivers and swamps turned up the bodies of eight other black men.
Herbert Oarsby, a 14-year old youth, was found wearing a CORE T-shirt. Henry
Hezekiah Dee and Charles Eddie Moore had been expelled from Alcorn A&M for
participating in civil rights protests. The other five men were never
identified. On August 4, 1964, the bodies of Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman
were found buried beneath an earthen dam.
In Mississippi, controversy raged over the three murders.
Mississippi state and local officials did not indict anyone. The FBI continued
to investigate. Agents infiltrated the KKK and paid informers to reveal secrets
of their "klaverns". In the fall of 1964, informants told the FBI
about the murders of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner. On December 4, the FBI
arrested 19 men as suspects.
All were freed on a technicality, starting a three-year
battle to bring them to justice. In October 1967, the men, including the Klan's
Imperial Wizard Samuel Bowers, who had allegedly ordered the murders, went on
trial in the federal courthouse in Meridian. Seven were ultimately convicted
for federal crimes related to the murders. All were sentenced to 3–10 years,
but none served more than six years. This marked the first time since
Reconstruction that white men had been convicted of civil rights violations
against blacks in Mississippi.
Freedom Summer did not succeed in getting many voters
registered, but it had a significant effect on the course of the Civil Rights
Movement. It helped break down the decades of isolation and repression that had
supported the Jim Crow system. Before Freedom Summer, the national news media
had paid little attention to the persecution of black voters in the Deep South
and the dangers endured by black civil rights workers. The events that summer
had captured national attention (as had the mass protests and demonstrations in
previous years). Some black activists felt the media had reacted only because
northern white students were killed and felt embittered. Almost all the
volunteers have recounted believing that summer was one of the defining periods
of their lives.
"We had sneakers...they had guns." That how
illustrator and journalist Tracy Sugarman described his experiences covering
the voting registration efforts during the 1964 "Freedom Summer." As
we remember those who lived it and died for it, the struggle for freedom
continues... today.
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