Freedom Summer 1964: Freedom Schools, the MFDP and Neshoba County Murders

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In 1962 just 6.7 percent of eligible Black voters in Mississippi were registered, held back by poll taxes, a 21 question form and a test requiring applicants to interpret any of 285 sections of the state constitution to a white registrar's satisfaction. SNCC's 1963 Freedom Vote, a mock election held in churches and barbershops, drew tens of thousands and convinced Bob Moses to scale up. The Council of Federated Organizations, joining SNCC, CORE, the NAACP and the SCLC, recruited more than a thousand mostly white Northern college volunteers, a choice Allard Lowenstein pushed because organizers judged the national press would only pay attention if such students were at risk. Applicants with a John Brown complex were screened out, and volunteers were trained in Ohio to support local Black leaders.

The project built parallel institutions: 30 to 40 Freedom Schools teaching more than 3,500 students, about 50 Freedom Libraries, clinics run by the Medical Committee for Human Rights, and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, which Lyndon Johnson blocked from replacing the all white delegation at the Atlantic City convention. On June 21, Neshoba County deputy and Klansman Cecil Price jailed James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, released them after dark, and a Klan mob killed them. The FBI search turned up eight other murdered Black Mississippians. Federal civil rights convictions came in 1967, and Edgar Ray Killen was convicted of manslaughter in 2005.

• The summer saw more than 1,000 arrests, 80 workers beaten, 37 churches bombed or burned and 30 homes or businesses destroyed.
• The state funded Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission spied on civil rights workers.
• Among the bodies found was 14 year old Herbert Oarsby, wearing a CORE T-shirt, and college student Charles Eddie Moore, killed with Henry Hezekiah Dee.
• Volunteers carried their experience home: Mario Savio led Berkeley's Free Speech Movement and Marshall Ganz organized farm workers with Cesar Chavez.
• Stanford historian James T. Campbell argues Mississippi's divisions persist because of conflicting historical narratives.