Those who opposed this movement were mainly Mississippi’s elected officials, who at all levels denounced the Summer Project. Man with vote sign, still from Freedom Summer (Stanley Nelson, 2014)
Julian Bond and Mary King ran the SNCC Communications Section, making sure that the national media was available to cover events and that project staff stayed informed and in touch about the constant dangers. Another was Dave Dennis who was a veteran of earlier sit-ins and freedom rides he was the leader of CORE’s operations in Mississippi and Louisiana and assistant director of COFO (Council of Federated Organizations). Some key figures that participated in Freedom Summer included Robert Moses, who proposed the idea of Freedom Summer to SNCC and COFO leaders in the fall of 1963 and was chosen to direct it early in 1964. Most volunteers were white students from northern colleges, but 254 were clergy sponsored by the National Council of Churches, 169 were attorneys recruited by the National Lawyers Guild and the Lawyers Constitutional Defense Committee, and 50 were medical professionals from the Medical Committee for Human Rights. They were directed by 122 SNCC and CORE paid staff working alongside them or at headquarters in Jackson and Greenwood. Nearly one thousand five hundred volunteers worked in project offices scattered across Mississippi. Several hundred African-American families also hosted northern volunteers in their homes.
More than sixty thousand black Mississippi residents risked their lives to attend local meetings, choose candidates, and vote in the “Freedom Election” that ran parallel to the regular 1964 national elections. In response, they held a parallel “Freedom Election” in November and challenged the right of the all-white Mississippi congressional delegation to represent the state in Washington, D.C. Ineligible to vote in the Democratic Party primaries in what was a one-party state effectively meant they were barred from participating in politics. They helped African American residents try to register to vote, establish a new political party, and learn about history and politics in newly-formed Freedom Schools.īecause black Mississippians were barred from Democratic Party primaries and caucuses, they challenged the right of the party’s all-white delegation to represent the state at the Democratic National Convention (DNC) in August in Atlantic City, New Jersey. It began late in 1963 when the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) decided to recruit several hundred northern college students, mostly white, to work in Mississippi during the summer. Freedom Summer (June-August, 1964) was a nonviolent effort by civil rights activists to integrate Mississippi’s segregated political system.
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