Freedom Summer changed the nation 60 years ago: How the effort still inspires voters today

WASHINGTON – Charles McLaurin initially disagreed with the plan to bring college students – many of them white, many from the North ‒ to Mississippi 60 years ago to help register Black residents to vote. He thought it would do more harm than good.

Black Mississippians already had to overcome their fear of white supremacists and violence to register to vote. He doubted it would work to mix educated white students and professionals with local Black residents, many of them sharecroppers who couldn’t read.

“But just the opposite happened,’’ recalled the 84-year-old civil rights veteran.

They worked together to set up Freedom Schools in Black communities and take Black residents to courthouses to register to vote. They ate dinner together, talked on porches.

“They melded into the community. It was very successful ...’’ said McLaurin, a veteran of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. ‘‘It created a sense of power.’’

During that summer in 1964, Black and white college students and others led by the Council of Federated Organizations, an umbrella group which included SNCC, joined locals in Mississippi to help register Blacks citizens to vote. Freedom Summer, as it was dubbed, was a critical turning point in the civil rights movement and helped lead to passage of major legislation, including the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

That summer of activism “helped changed the political landscape across the country,’’ said Zikaya Summers, a state representative in Mississippi.

Across the country, veterans of the civil rights movement, community activists, scholars and students are marking the 60th anniversary with a host of events, including voter registration drives.

On July 17, Rep. John Lewis, a SNCC veteran who worked to register Black voters across the South, will also be remembered with dozens of events marking the fourth anniversary of his death.

The National Civ i l Rights Museum will hold a symposium on Freedom Summer July 27 in Memphis. In June, veterans hosted a two-day conference in Indianola, Mississippi.

To go deeper: Freedom Summer 60 conference in Indianola

Earlier this year, California launched a statewide voter registration campaign commemorating the anniversary. And in May, the African American Policy Forum held a rally at the U.S. Supreme Court kicking off its “Freedom Summer 24’’ campaign to urge more people to vote.

“People need to remember that a lot of young people from all over the country gave up their summer to come and try to make a difference in a part of the country that needed help, that on its own those people could not make it,’’ said Mississippi Rep. Bennie Thompson, a Democrat whose district was at the heart of the effort. “It was a violent time. It was a time that very idealistic young people (came). Some lost their lives. Others were abused.”

Saluting the power of local activists

More than 200 people, including civil rights veterans, gathered in Indianola in June to commemorate the milestone anniversary.

Beyond a reunion, organizers wanted to train younger activists and strategize to protect rights they fought for decades ago. They pointed to recent efforts to ban books, block access to voting and restrict the teaching of Black history.

“There seem to be those in some higher places who are trying to erode some of the changes that we made,’’ said McLaurin, a native Mississippian who helped organize the conference. “So what we want to do is alert our people especially that we need to register and we need to vote. ... We need to build economic power as well as political power so that we can protect the gains we've made.’’

At the conference, veterans shared stories of their experiences during that summer and told how it changed their lives.

At the heart of that effort were local residents, said Charlie Cobb, 81, also an SNCC veteran who worked in Mississippi.

“The power of local people at the grassroots, that's the most overlooked aspect of the Southern movement, certainly in Mississippi,’’ said Cobb, author of “This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible.”  “The whole movement was powered by grassroots community organizing.’’

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What was Freedom Summer?

Local activists had been working for years in hostile territory to register Black residents.

For Freedom Summer, they turned to outsiders , namely white college students from the North, to draw national attention to their efforts. Many of the students stayed in the homes of Black families or slept in pews at Black churches.

The project also drew national media attention after the murders of civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner that June. Goodman and Schwerner were white. The prior murders of Black activists had not garnered much national attention.

Activists, spurred in part by Cobb, also created Freedom Schools to help educate young and old Black residents . The 40 free schools were staffed by volunteers and included voter education classes.

That same year, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party was also formed to counter the all-white state Democratic Party. The MFDP held a convention , drawing thousands.

“Freedom Summer refuted in absolute terms this whole idea, which we ran into frequently with the press, this whole idea that Black people were apathetic, that they didn't want civil rights, that they didn't want the right to vote,’’ Cobb said. “You could no longer say that in the aftermath of the Freedom Summer.”

Later that summer, delegates from the MFDP went to the national Democratic Party convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey where civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer gave her impassioned speech about the struggle for voting rights for Black Mississippians. Today, there’s a statue of Hamer in Atlantic City.

“It's this groundswell of advocacy and support that comes from within that actually makes these movements a success,’’ said Daphne Chamberlain, a Mississippi civil rights historian. “And it also comes from the bravery of the people at the local level to be able to make these moments of success. … Black folks already understood what the racial climate was like here. The Black folks were also organizing and organizing, particularly around politics and how do we insert our voices.”

'Still work to be done'

Lessons learned from Freedom Summer are still important, said Cobb.

“It's more relevant because a lot of these lessons from '64 and earlier in the South particularly are forgotten,’’ he said. “They need to be understood in these more complex times when the Black community has really become less of a rural community and more of an urban community and therefore a more complex community.”

Mississippi, where the population is nearly 40% Black, is now among the states with the highest number of Black elected officials ‒ mostly at the local level . In 2022, about 72% of Black Mississippians were registered to vote, according to census data.

Following that summer, many activists started organizations back home or joined other civil rights efforts.

“They helped America create the kind of atmosphere at that time that would allow an African American to become president of the United States of America,’’ McLaurin said.

Activists said the effort 60 years ago to increase Black political power with Freedom Summer isn't finished yet.

The anniversary is “not just about looking back with admiration, but looking forward with the determination to bridge political power and knowledge for liberation,” said Kimberlé Crenshaw, co-founder and executive director of the African American Policy Forum, a New York-based social justice think-tank, that is hosting a weeklong summer schoo l on civic engagement.

“It’s also a time to rededicate ourselves to the same ideals and principles that people came with 60 years ago,’’ said Thompson, who spoke recently at two commemoration events in Mississippi.

Remembering that summer at those events was somber, he said , "but it was also exhilarating in the fact that people recognized that there’s still work to be done.’’

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Freedom Summer changed the nation 60 years ago: How the effort still inspires voters today