"Freedom Summer"(June- August 1964)

By 1964,the civil rights movement had scored numerous victories through boycotts,student sit ins,and mass marches.The state of Mississippi,seen as "stronghold of segregation,"was the next testing ground.In Mississippi activists faced an entrenched system of segregation and white supremacy upheld by both vigilante violence and state-sanctioned repression.Civil Rights activists had been organizing in Mississippi for years,yet little had been achieved.In order to force a national response  and focus attention on the brutal racism of Mississippi,a coalition of national and community groups,including the Student Nonviolent Coronation Committee (SNCC),NAACP ,and the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE),along local community groups,organized the 1964 Summer Project."Freedom Summer,"as it was known,brought over a thousand middle-class,mostly white college students from the North to work with Black community groups and movement activists in Mississippi.The foucus of the project was twofold:First an ambitious voter registration drive, and second,community organizing.The Summer brought to national attention the lengths to which white supremacists would go to uphold segregation:before the project even started,three volunteers,one black (James Chaney) and two whites (Michael H. Schwerner and Andrew Goodman),were murdered by a group of white police officers and vigilantes.Thousands more would be arrested and there would be scores of bombings,shootings,and beatings before the summer was over.The voter registration drive was the main focus of the project.When efforts to register Black people were largely unsuccessful,volunteers formed the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), a racially nonexclusive grassroots  that aimed to challenge the official,all white,segregationist Democratic Party delegation at the 1964 Democratic Party Convention.When the MFDP was refused a seat at the convention,a debate began within the movement about the limits and possibilities of trying to reform the political establishment.The second focus of Freedom Summer,and one of the most successful in community organizing and developing Black-led institutions,was the establishment of over thirty "freedom schools,"which used  alternative and collaborative teaching techniques to provide classes on African American history,politics,and literacy free of charge to adults and children in Mississippi.Freedom Summer succeeded in bringing attention to racial oppression in Mississippi,and strengthened the resolve of movement activists to continue their struggle.Many of the volunteers,influenced by their work in Mississippi,went on to become leaders in the Black Power,New Left, and women's movements of the 1960s.Most importantantly,Freedom Summer marked a turning point for the developing civil rights movement,as the experiences of the MFDP,state repression,and the inability to fundamentally alter the situation for poor blacks raised questions about the orientation strategies,and tactics of the radicalizing movement.