From Volume 3, Issue Number 25 of Electronic Intelligence Weekly, Published June 22, 2004
This Week in History

June 21-27, 1964

Mississippi Freedom Summer

We move this week to June 21, 1964, the day on which three civil rights workers—James Chaney (21) of Meridian, Miss.; Micky Schwerner (24) of New York; and Andrew Goodman (20) of New York—disappeared in Mississippi, after having visited a church which had been burned on June 17. All three were eventually found to have been murdered, their bodies discovered on Aug. 4, under a vast mound of dirt, on a farm near Philadelphia, Mississippi.

The three—one of them black, and the two New Yorkers white—had been part of a project called Mississippi Freedom Summer, which had been pulled together by the joint efforts of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). The three organization formed COFO (Council of Federated Organizations), which was aimed at coordinating mass voter registration and education efforts in the state with the fewest registered voters among African-Americans in the nation.

Hideous as these deaths were, they had been anticipated. The organizers of the voter registration project, who had been working in Mississippi for a long time, and seen black people beaten or even killed for their efforts at getting their rights, had calculated that bringing in large numbers of Northern white youth would put a national spotlight on the ongoing atrocities. Those who went South as part of Freedom Summer, were all told to communicate constantly with their families, their Congressmen, and others. SNCC's James Forman told them to be prepared for death: "I may be killed, You may be killed. The whole staff may go." They were also taught to practice non-violence in response to persecution and attacks.

Approximately 1,000 young people, mostly white and middle class, responded to the call from civil rights organizations to go to Mississippi in the summer of 1964. Some ministers joined them, for varying lengths of time. They were entering a situation which had been prepared by SNCC voter-registration project head Bob Moses, and which was geared toward preparation for the Presidential elections of 1964.

Freedom Summer can be seen as the high point of the student civil rights movement, before the pressures from black nationalism began to cause dissension in the ranks of SNCC and other organizations. The philosophy of SNCC (born in 1960 out of the sit-in movement) at that time was reflected in the organization's statement of purpose:

"We affirm the philosophical or religious ideal of nonviolence as the foundation of our purpose, the presupposition of our faith, and the manner of our action. Nonviolence as it grows from Judaic-Christian tradition seeks a social order of justice permeated by love.

"Through nonviolence, courage displaces fear; love transforms hate. Acceptance dissipates prejudice; hope ends despair. Peace dominated war; faith reconciles doubt. Mutual regard cancels enmity. Justice for all overthrows injustice. The redemptive community supersedes systems of gross social immorality.

"Love is the central motif of nonviolence. Love is the force by which God links man to himself and man to man. Such love goes to the extreme; it remains loving and forgiving even in the midst of hostility. It matches the capacity of evil to inflict suffering with an even more enduring capacity to absorb evil, all the while persisting in love."

While it cannot be said that every young person who went to Mississippi to expose him or herself to the dangers of the voter-registration project believed in this credo, there is no doubt that many did. They put themselves in danger of beatings, firebombings, and other harassment, simply by congregating, white with black. They were constantly being attacked in the local press as "race-mixers," or worse. They canvassed for voter registration, picketed outside voter-registration places, held Freedom schools, and worked toward the growth of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party.

Through the course of the summer, 17,000 black residents of Mississippi attempted to vote, although only 1,600 of their completed applications were accepted. But, more than the short-term gains in voters, was the fact that the focus of the nation was put on Mississippi and its brutal inequities. The murders of Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman were never successfully solved—but their deaths on behalf of the cause of racial equality, and the dignity of every man and woman, served to bring a moral challenge to the nation, which was at least partially fulfilled in the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and which resonates among fighters for justice even today.

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