Freedom Summer 1964: Mississippi Under Siege

In the summer of nineteen sixty-four, an organization called the Council of Federated Organizations launched Freedom Summer: a statewide voter registration campaign in Mississippi that recruited approximately one thousand volunteers, most of them white college students from Northern universities. The decision to recruit white volunteers was deliberate and strategic. Robert Moses of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee argued that violence against Black organizers in Mississippi had gone unreported and unpunished for years because the national press and the federal government did not consider it significant. Violence against white Northerners would be harder to ignore.

The prediction proved correct within the first week.

On June twenty-first, nineteen sixty-four, three Freedom Summer workers disappeared in Neshoba County after being released from the Philadelphia, Mississippi jail. Andrew Goodman was twenty years old, from Queens, New York, a Queens College student who had arrived in Mississippi one day before. James Chaney was twenty-one, a Black Mississippian and CORE organizer from Meridian. Michael Schwerner was twenty-four, a white social worker from New York who had been organizing in Meridian since January.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation opened a search. Their bodies were found forty-four days later, on August fourth, buried in an earthen dam on a farm seven miles outside Philadelphia. All three had been shot. Chaney had also been beaten.

Eighteen men were eventually tried on federal civil rights violation charges because Mississippi declined to prosecute murder. Klansman Edgar Ray Killen organized the killings. He was acquitted in nineteen sixty-seven, retried in two thousand five on manslaughter charges, and convicted at age eighty. Mississippi had waited forty-one years to call it a crime at all.

The student volunteers who remained in Mississippi that summer registered voters, taught in Freedom Schools, and built the organizational networks that sustained the civil rights movement in the Delta through the end of the decade.