Читать книгу Freedom Facts and Firsts - Jessie Carney Smith - Страница 69

Freedom Summer 1964 was an intensive voter registration project in the magnolia state of Mississippi. As a part of a larger effort launched by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the goal was to increase the number of African American voters in the South. Initially started by SNCC activist Robert Moses in 1961, the 1964 Freedom Summer project was designed to draw the nation’s attention to the violent oppression faced by African Americans in Mississippi when they attempted to exercise their constitutional rights and develop a grass-roots freedom movement that could be sustained after student activists departed the state. By August 4, 1964, however, four people were killed, eighty were beaten, a thousand had been arrested, and 67 churches, homes, and businesses were set ablaze or bombed.

Although African American men were given the right of the franchise with the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1870, almost a hundred years later many were still denied their constitutional right. Local and state functionaries used legal and extralegal methods to prevent this, such as poll taxes, literacy tests, and sinister methods such as beatings and lynchings. Even though SNCC activists had been striving to secure civil rights in rural Mississippi since 1961, they found that zealous and often vicious resistance by whites wanting to maintain the racial status quo in the state would not allow the direct action campaigns that proved successful in municipal areas like Montgomery and Birmingham.

In 1962 Moses became the director of the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO), an association of organizations that included CORE, the NAACP, and the SNCC. Responding to an upsurge of racial violence in 1963 that the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights described as a total collapse of law and order, he proposed that northern white student volunteers take part in a large number of simultaneous local campaigns during the summer of 1964. Moses and SNCC volunteers played the largest role in providing the majority of the funding and headquarters staff. The COFO sent letters to prospective volunteers alerting them to the possibility of arrest, the need for money to make bond and sustain themselves, and the necessity of obtaining Mississippi driver’s licenses and tags for their cars.

The Freedom Summer project attracted more than a thousand volunteers, the majority of whom were affluent white northern college students. Training sessions attempted to prepare them to register African American voters, teach literacy and civics at Freedom Schools, and promote the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party’s challenge to the all-white Democratic delegation at the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey, which was to be held in August. On June 21, 1964, civil rights workers Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, and Michael Schwerner were reported missing after having left Meridian to investigate the burning of a black church near Philadelphia, Mississippi. The disappearance of Goodman and Schwerner, both white, captured the attention of the national media and the national government. While the abduction of Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner deepened the volunteers’ fear, the Freedom Summer project moved forward with the planned program of voter registration. Even though approximately 17,000 African Americans attempted to register to vote, local registrars honored only 1,600 voter applications, an action that demonstrated the necessity for federal voting rights laws. The efforts of the Freedom Summer volunteers and refusal of local registrars to accept registrants’ applications created momentum for the Voting Rights Act of 1965. As the lines of demarcation between the objectives of King and the younger, more revolutionary splinter group of the African American freedom struggle became more pronounced, Freedom Summer marked one of the last key interracial civil rights efforts of the 1960s.

Linda T. Wynn