The Main Goal of the Freedom Summer Campaign Was

Freedom Summer, or the Mississippi Summer Project, was a 1964 voter registration drive aimed at increasing the number of registered Blackness voters in Mississippi. Over 700 generally white volunteers joined African Americans in Mississippi to fight confronting voter intimidation and discrimination at the polls.

The movement was organized by ceremonious rights organizations like the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE) and the Educatee Non-Trigger-happy Coordinating Commission (SNCC) and run by the local Council of Federated Organizations (COFO). Liberty Summer volunteers were met with violent resistance from the Ku Klux Klan and members of state and local law enforcement. News coverage of beatings, false arrests and even murder drew international attention to the civil rights movement. The increased awareness information technology brought to voter discrimination helped lead to the Voting Rights Human activity of 1965.

What Was The Crusade of the Freedom Summer?

By 1964, the civil rights movement was in total swing. The Freedom Riders had spent 1961 riding buses throughout the segregated Southward, fighting Jim Crow laws that dictated where Black riders could sit down, eat, and drink. Martin Luther King, Jr. had given his famous “I Accept a Dream” speech at the August 1963 March on Washington equally 250,000 people gathered before him at the Lincoln Memorial.

Despite all of this progress, the S remained segregated, particularly when it came to the polls, where African Americans faced violence and intimidation when they attempted to practice their constitutional right to vote. Poll taxes and literacy tests designed to silence Black voters were common. Without access to the polls, political change in favor of ceremonious rights was irksome-to-non-existent. Mississippi was chosen every bit the site of the Freedom Summer project due to its historically low levels of African American voter registration; in 1962 less than 7 percent of the country’s eligible Black voters were registered to vote.

READ More: When Did African Americans Get the Correct to Vote?

Freedom Summertime Begins

On June xv, 1964, the first three hundred volunteers arrived in Mississippi. Mississippi Project Manager Robert “Bob” Moses had pledged his staff and volunteers to “nonviolence in all situations.” Few could have foreseen how dire the situation would become.

Volunteers and staff had been warned about the high probability of being arrested and the need to accept enough money for bail. They had likewise been encouraged to mentally prepare themselves for the experience by reading books like Dr. Rex’s memoir,
Pace Toward Liberty, and Lillian Smith’s novel
Killers of the Dream. No books could have prepared them for what happened adjacent.

Among the offset wave of volunteers to arrive on June fifteen were ii white students from New York, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney, a local Black man. The 3 disappeared after visiting Philadelphia, Mississippi, where they were investigating the called-for of a church building. Their names became nationally-known as the hunt for their killers began. Spooked but still determined, the staff and volunteers of the Mississippi Project continued on with their mission to register voters and foster a grassroots liberty move that would go along afterwards their departure.

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Six weeks later, the browbeaten bodies of the missing volunteers were recovered, killed past a Ku Klux Klan lynch mob that had the protection and help of a local policeman. Public outcry over the killings mounted:
Where was Federal protection? Why had the investigations been so slow?
Distrust grew between white and Black volunteers and staff.

Was The Freedom Summer A Success?

Voter registration in Mississippi was not greatly impacted past the Liberty Summer. While 17,000 Black Mississippians attempted to register to vote that summertime, only 1,200 were successful.

The Mississippi Project did establish more than twoscore Freedom Schools serving a combined 3,000 students. The Freedom Summer besides raised sensation for the Mississippi Liberty Democratic Party, about which Dr. King said: “If y’all value your party, if you lot value your nation, if you value democratic government you accept no culling but to recognize, with full voice and vote, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party.”

But at the August 1964 Democratic National Convention held in Atlantic City, New Jersey, MFDP delegates were refused seats, dealing some other accident to organizers who had risked their lives to make a change.

Touch of The Freedom Summer

Some believe the national attention the Freedom Summer garnered for the civil rights movement helped convince President Lyndon B. Johnson and Congress to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which concluded segregation in public places and banned employment discrimination on the footing of race, color, religion, sexual practice or national origin, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Afterwards the violence of the Freedom Summer, divisions within the civil rights movement grew betwixt those who connected to believe in non-violence and those who had begun to doubt whether equality could be reached through peaceful ways. After 1964, more militant factions would rise as the struggle for equality continued.

READ More: Civil Rights Movement Timeline

Sources

Liberty Summer. King Institute of Stanford.
The 1964 Miss. Freedom Summer Protests Won Progress At a Bloody Price. The Daily Beast.
The Tragic Success of Freedom Summertime. Politico.
Freedom Summer of 1964 was a mission in hostile territory. USA Today.