Beforehand

All throughout the state of Mississippi, the Ku Klux Klan marked their dominance by burning crosses on lawns of black homeowners, and hundreds of black churches, homes, and businesses were bombed during the 1950s and ‘60s. No black man dared to even look a white person in the eyes in public, lest they may be threatened, beaten, or—in the case of Emmit Till—murdered. Law enforcement made things especially one-sided, too. A white man could beat a black man on the street and not face a single charge while police officers could pull over a black man for any reason and promptly send them to the county jail. Even if a black man were to sue, white violators would be acquitted by an all-white jury and return to southern life with little consequence.

Suffice to say it was turbulent times for Mississippi. Racial acts of hostility ran rampant in the Magnolia State with no end in sight. Below are a few of the DOCUMENTED injustices against black people:

In response to the harassment, Civil Rights movements began cropping up all over Mississippi, but change was swiftly met with intense resistance and violence. In 1961, “Freedom Riders”—seven Black and six white activists—protested segregated bus terminals by taking a bus tour across the South. They departed in Washington DC; their bus was bombed in Anniston, Alabama; they were brutally attacked in Montgomery, Mississippi; and they were jailed for trespassing in a “whites-only” facility in Jackson, Mississippi. In 1962, James Meredith became the first African American to enroll at the University of Mississippi. During protest riots of his enrollment, two people were killed, which prompted President John F. Kennedy to send federal marshals and soldiers to campus to restore order.

All of this terror was to keep black people down and to keep them uneducated, to keep them from voting, and, ultimately, to keep them from challenging white-supremacy. The Brown v Board of Education results overturned Jim Crow laws in 1954 and the federal government declared segregation by race as unconstitutional. However, Mississippi senator James Eastland claimed that “the South will not abide by nor obey this legislative decision by a political body.” Many other southern senators and politicians agreed to defy the court. In the wake of this political backlash, institutions servicing the black community received continued neglect. Black schools were often dilapidated and worn down. In 1950, 1 in 10 black adults graduated from high school compared to 4 in 10 white adults, and black Mississippians averaged about five years of schooling. 

As a result of the lack of educational resources, job opportunities were limited to physically-intensive cotton fields, and 86% of black Mississippians lived below the poverty line.

Counties typically employed rigged literacy tests. With these policies—on top of the constant physical harassment—black people were disenfranchised, unable to change regulation through voting. As a result, the voter disparity was massive: 49% of the Mississipian population was black but only 6.7% of voters were black. Efforts to bar black citizens from polling places were so successful that many white people didn’t even believe black people wanted to vote—and this perception made its way into national media coverage. The fear and violence that upheld disenfranchisement and white dominance remained largely unseen.

To challenge this, the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) launched the Freedom Vote to send a clear message to Washington and the nation: if allowed to register and vote without discrimination, black people would participate in large numbers. From November 2 to 4, 1963, black Mississippians cast their votes at Sunday church services, beauty salons, and pool halls. Mike Miller, a field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), recalled, “[Though this] was obviously not the quote, unquote, ‘legal ballot,’ everybody realized that it was a test of whether we can really get people to put their bodies on the line for the right to vote, because they would have to show up in a public place and check a ballot.” 83,000 Mississippians cast their ballot in the 1963 Freedom Vote, which, as SNCC chairman John Lewis wrote, “laid the foundation for a powerful, Black-led, state-wide, political organization…”

SNCC began playing around with the idea of Freedom Summer during a five-day workshop in mid-November 1963 in Greenville, Mississippi. Many staff veterans were immediately opposed to sending 100 white volunteers to Mississippi. Charlie Cobb, Ivanhoe Donaldson, MacArthur Cotton, and Sam Block argued that the entire premise of the strategy contradicted SNCC’s principle of developing local leaders in their headquartered area of Atlanta, Georgia. On the other hand, local people like Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer and Amzie Moore almost unanimously supported the idea of bringing in white volunteers. “If we’re trying to break down segregation, we can’t segregate ourselves,” Mrs. Hamer reminded the group.

SNCC recognized the unprecedented living conditions of Mississippi black people—along with their willingness to participate in government—and decided to take action. A proposed idea was to send 100 white volunteers down to Mississippi to encourage voting in poll stations and for the creation of the Mississippi Democratic Freedom Party. After 3 months of deliberation and arguing over the project’s potential success amongst SNCC staff, Louis Allen was found dead in his home of Amite County. The Black logger was a witness to the first murder of someone involved with SNCC—Herbert Lee. Bob Moses knew SNCC had to act before Mississippi grew any more violent and before any more lives were unceremoniously taken. The number of white volunteers grew to 1,000, and the Freedom Summer project was underway.