Freedom summer1/1/2023 ![]() ![]() The training sessions were intended to prepare volunteers to register black voters, teach literacy and civics at Freedom Schools, and promote the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party’s (MFDP) challenge to the all-white Democratic delegation at that summer’s Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Of the approximately 1,000 volunteers, the majority were white northern college students from middle and upper class backgrounds. ![]() On 14 June 1964 the first group of summer volunteers began training at Western College for Women in Oxford, Ohio. Volunteers were also asked to prepare for the experience by reading several books, including King’s memoir of the Montgomery bus boycott, Stride Toward Freedom, and Lillian Smith’s novel Killers of the Dream. #FREEDOM SUMMER DRIVERS#Letters to prospective volunteers alerted them to conditions in Mississippi, explaining the likelihood of arrest, the need for bond money and subsistence funds, and the requirement that drivers obtain Mississippi licenses for themselves and their cars. Capitalizing on the successful use of white student volunteers in Mississippi during a 1963 mock election called the “Freedom Vote,” Moses proposed that northern white student volunteers take part in a large number of simultaneous local campaigns in Mississippi during the summer of 1964. In 1962, he became director of the Council of Federated Organizations, a coalition of organizations led by SNCC that coordinated the efforts of civil rights groups within the state. #FREEDOM SUMMER REGISTRATION#When SNCC activist Robert Moses launched a voter registration drive in Mississippi in 1961, he confronted a system that regularly used segregation laws and fear tactics to disenfranchise black citizens. The 1964 Freedom Summer project was designed to draw the nation’s attention to the violent oppression experienced by Mississippi blacks who attempted to exercise their constitutional rights, and to develop a grassroots freedom movement that could be sustained after student activists left Mississippi. Although the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) had labored for civil rights in rural Mississippi since 1961, the organization found that intense and often violent resistance by segregationists in rural areas of Mississippi would not allow for the kind of direct action campaigns that had been successful in urban areas such as Montgomery and Birmingham. ![]()
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