What was freedom summer in mississippi

Many of the white college students were assigned to teach in these schools, whose curriculum included black history, the philosophy of the Civil Rights Movement, and leadership development in addition to remedial instruction in reading and arithmetic. The Freedom Schools had hoped to draw at least students that first summer, and ended up with The schools became a model for future social programs like Head Start, as well as alternative educational institutions.

Freedom Summer activists faced threats and harassment throughout the campaign, not only from white supremacist groups, but from local residents and police. Freedom School buildings and the volunteers' homes were frequent targets; 37 black churches and 30 black homes and businesses were firebombed or burned during that summer, and the cases often went unsolved.

More than black and white volunteers were arrested, and at least 80 were beaten by white mobs or racist police officers. But the summer's most infamous act of violence was the murder of three young civil rights workers, a black volunteer, James Chaney, and his white coworkers, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner.

On June 21, Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner set out to investigate a church bombing near Philadelphia, Mississippi, but were arrested that afternoon and held for several hours on alleged traffic violations. Their release from jail was the last time they were seen alive before their badly decomposed bodies were discovered under a nearby dam six weeks later. Goodman and Schwerner had died from single gunshot wounds to the chest, and Chaney from a savage beating.

The murders made headlines all over the country, and provoked an outpouring of national support for the Civil Rights Movement. But many black volunteers realized that because two of the victims were white, these murders were attracting much more attention than previous attacks in which the victims had been all black, and this added to the growing resentment they had already begun to feel towards the white volunteers.

There was growing dissension within the ranks over charges of white paternalism and elitism. The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute. Search form Search. Back to the King Encyclopedia. Freedom Summer. June 14, to August 20, Share this article on Facebook Share this article on Twitter. Footnotes Carson, In Struggle , Martinez, Letters from Mississippi , McAdam, Freedom Summer , African-Americans who dared to challenge these conditions were often killed, tortured, raped, beaten, arrested, fired from their jobs, or evicted from their homes.

They hoped that media attention would make the federal government enforce civil rights laws that local officials ignored. They also planned to help black Mississippians organize a new political party that would be ready to compete against the mainstream Democratic Party after voting rights had been won.

Sumter, Mississippi. Photograph of a local resident by Bob Adelman. View the original source document: Congress of Racial Equality. Southern Regional Office Records, More than 60, black Mississippi residents risked their lives to attend local meetings, choose candidates, and vote in a "Freedom Election" that ran parallel to the regular national elections. Several hundred African-American families also hosted northern volunteers in their homes.

Nearly 1, volunteers worked in project offices scattered across Mississippi. Most volunteers were white students from northern colleges, but were clergy sponsored by the National Council of Churches, 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.

Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party candidate. SNCC shunned the concept of powerful leaders. It made all its important decisions as a group, and conceived Freedom Summer as a grass-roots movement of people rising up to seize control of their own destinies.

More than individuals worked on the project full-time during the summer of A handful of those who played key roles were:. Its overarching goal was to empower local residents to participate in local, state, and national elections. Its other main goal was to focus the nation's attention on conditions in Mississippi. Specific goals for the summer included:. View the original source document: Lucile Montgomery Papers, The search for their killers dominated the national news and focused public attention on Mississippi until their bodies were discovered on August 4.

Only a few hundred new black voters were able to register, but the harassment and reprisals against them were widely covered in the national media.