Freedom Summer 1964 and the Mississippi Volunteers Who Changed the Rules

On the morning of June 21, 1964, a Sunday, three young men drove a blue Ford station wagon out of Meridian, Mississippi, toward the hamlet of Longdale in Neshoba County. James Chaney was twenty-one, a Black plasterer's apprentice from Meridian. Michael Schwerner was twenty-four, a white social worker from New York who had been running a community center in Meridian with his wife, Rita. Andrew Goodman was twenty, a college student from Manhattan who had arrived in Mississippi the day before. They were going to look at the ruins of the Mount Zion Methodist Church, a Black congregation that had agreed to host a school for the summer, and which a few days earlier had been burned to the ground by men who had beaten its members. That afternoon a sheriff's deputy named Cecil Price stopped the station wagon near the town of Philadelphia, arrested the three on a speeding charge and held them in the county jail. They were released after dark, told to leave the county, and followed. Nobody saw them alive again. The station wagon turned up burned in a swamp two days later. The bodies would not be found until August. The summer they had come to work in was barely a day old.

In short: Freedom Summer brought hundreds of mostly white college volunteers to Mississippi in 1964 to work beside Black organizers on voter registration and Freedom Schools. The murders of Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner made the country look at a state that had kept Black citizens from voting for generations. The summer did not register many voters, but it built a parallel party, trained a generation of organizers and helped make the Voting Rights Act possible a year later.

A state built to keep people from voting

The scale of what the volunteers faced is easy to forget. In 1964 Mississippi had the largest Black share of population of any state, and the smallest share of Black adults on its voter rolls. Fewer than one in ten Black adults in the state were registered. That was not an accident of apathy. It was the product of a system.

Mississippi's 1890 constitution had been written, openly, to disfranchise Black voters while staying inside the letter of the Fifteenth Amendment. It used a poll tax and, most effectively, a literacy and "understanding" test: an applicant could be asked to copy a section of the state constitution and then interpret it to the satisfaction of the county registrar. The registrar, who was white, decided whether the answer was good enough. A Black teacher with a college degree could fail. A white man who could barely sign his name could pass.

Then there was the part of the system that was not written down. Applicants' names could be published in the local paper. Employers and landlords read the paper. Sharecroppers who tried to register were thrown off the land they worked; workers were fired; churches that hosted meetings were burned. And beneath the economic pressure was violence, from night riders and sometimes from officials, that was rarely punished.

This is the mechanism to keep in view through the rest of the story. The barrier was not one law that a court could strike down. It was a stack of rules, customs and threats, each reinforcing the others, administered locally by people with no reason to change.

Why the organizers invited white students

The civil rights groups already working in Mississippi had been at it for years. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, known as SNCC, had sent organizers into the Delta and the southwest of the state starting in 1961. Bob Moses, a soft-spoken former math teacher from New York, had become the central figure in that work. The groups had joined forces under an umbrella called the Council of Federated Organizations, or COFO, which brought together SNCC, the Congress of Racial Equality, the NAACP and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

They had made slow progress at enormous cost. In 1961 a farmer named Herbert Lee, who had helped the registration effort in Amite County, was shot and killed by a state legislator, who was never charged. Medgar Evers, the NAACP's field secretary in the state, was assassinated in his driveway in Jackson in June 1963. Organizers were beaten in jails. The killings drew little national attention.

In the fall of 1963 COFO ran a "Freedom Vote," a mock election in which Black Mississippians who were barred from the real ballot cast votes for their own slate of candidates. Tens of thousands took part, which showed that the claim that Black citizens did not want to vote was false. White students from Yale and Stanford had come down to help with that effort, and the organizers noticed something uncomfortable: when white students were arrested or beaten, the national press paid attention.

That observation led to a hard debate inside SNCC. Some members, especially Black organizers who had been in Mississippi longest, worried that a flood of white, northern, college-educated volunteers would take over the local work, push local people aside and leave at the end of the summer. Others, including Moses, argued that the country would not protect Black Mississippians until it saw its own sons and daughters in danger, and that the movement needed that protection. Both sides were right about something. The plan went ahead.

A week in Ohio and a phone call

Before they went south, the volunteers trained at the Western College for Women in Oxford, Ohio, in June 1964. They were taught how to protect their heads when beaten, how to behave when arrested, how to talk with families who had good reason to fear them. Organizers told them frankly that some of them might be killed.

The first group left for Mississippi just as the second group arrived for training. Then, during that second week, word came that three workers were missing in Neshoba County. Moses addressed the volunteers and told them, in effect, that the three were almost certainly dead, and that anyone who wanted to go home should go. A few did. Most went south.

The disappearance became a national story overnight, for precisely the reason the organizers had predicted and dreaded. President Lyndon Johnson sent federal agents, and hundreds of sailors joined the search of the swamps and rivers around Philadelphia. In the course of that search the bodies of other Black men were pulled from Mississippi waters, among them two young men, Henry Dee and Charles Moore, who had been abducted and killed by Klansmen weeks earlier. Their deaths had attracted no search of their own.

On August 4, 1964, acting on a paid tip, the FBI dug the bodies of Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner out of an earthen dam on a farm outside Philadelphia. They had been shot. Chaney, the one Black man among them, had been beaten as well.

What the summer actually did

The volunteers spread out across the state in teams, living with Black families who took a real risk by housing them. They went door to door and field to field, urging people to go to the courthouse. The results at the courthouse were thin. Registrars turned most applicants away, as they always had. Measured only by names added to the rolls, Freedom Summer did little.

But the summer had other parts, and two of them mattered more than anyone expected.

The first was the Freedom Schools. Charles Cobb, a SNCC field secretary, had proposed them as a way to give Black children a kind of education the state's segregated schools denied them. Dozens of schools opened in churches, homes and back yards. Thousands of students came, more than the planners had expected, some of them adults. The curriculum mixed reading and math with Black history, which was all but absent from the public schools, and with discussion of citizenship, of how power worked in their own towns and of what they would change. At a Freedom School convention in August, students drafted their own platform. Several of the young people who sat in those classrooms went on to lead organizing in their own counties for decades.

The second was a political party. In April 1964 the organizers had founded the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, open to anyone regardless of race, because the regular state Democratic Party excluded Black citizens from its precinct meetings and conventions. Through the summer the volunteers signed up members on the party's own forms, which required no test and no fee. The new party held precinct, county and state conventions that followed the regular party's rules exactly, and elected a delegation of its own to the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City. Its argument was simple: we are the loyal Democrats in Mississippi, and the all-white delegation is not.

What happened in Atlantic City is a story of its own, and its central character was a sharecropper from Sunflower County named Fannie Lou Hamer, whom the summer's work had turned into one of the most powerful speakers in the country. The short version is that the convention offered a compromise that the Freedom Democrats rejected, and that the party promised to bar discriminatory delegations from future conventions. That promise was kept. The regular Mississippi party's delegation was not seated in 1968; an integrated delegation was.

The fair case against the strategy

It is worth stating the critics' case, because some of it came from inside the movement. The strategy deliberately used the value the country placed on white lives to win protection for Black lives, which is a hard thing to say out loud and a harder thing to live with. Many Black organizers felt that the volunteers, however brave, absorbed attention and credit that belonged to local people who had been risking everything for years and would still be there in September. Tensions over race and leadership inside the summer's projects were real, and they fed the debates that reshaped SNCC over the next two years.

There is also the fact that the federal government had to be shamed into acting. The FBI had long argued it had no authority to protect civil rights workers. It moved in force only after two of the missing men turned out to be white and from New York. The arithmetic of whose disappearance counts was the very thing the movement was fighting, and the summer proved it rather than escaped it.

Both criticisms are true. So is this: the summer worked as a lever because the organizers understood how attention flowed in American politics and refused to pretend otherwise. Mississippi's system depended on the rest of the country not looking. The summer made the country look.

Justice, slowly

Mississippi did not charge anyone with murder for the three killings. In 1967 the federal government tried eighteen men for conspiracy to violate the victims' civil rights, the only federal charge available, before a federal judge who had himself been hostile to the movement. An all-white jury convicted seven of them, including Deputy Price and a Klan leader named Samuel Bowers. The sentences were short by the measure of the crime.

The case did not end there. Journalists, among them Jerry Mitchell of the Jackson Clarion-Ledger, and the families of the victims kept pressing. In 2005 the state of Mississippi tried Edgar Ray Killen, a sawmill operator and part-time preacher who had helped organize the killings, and a jury convicted him of manslaughter on June 21, 2005, forty-one years to the day after the three men disappeared. He died in prison.

What changed, and what is being unwound

Within a year of the summer, after Selma, Congress passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965. It suspended literacy tests and other devices in states with low registration, sent federal examiners to register voters where local officials would not, and required certain jurisdictions, Mississippi among them, to get federal approval before changing their voting rules. Black registration in Mississippi rose dramatically within a few years. The state that had the fewest Black voters on its rolls came to elect more Black officials than almost any other.

That federal approval requirement, called preclearance, was the part of the law that most directly reflected the lesson of Mississippi: that local officials with a long record of discrimination will find a new device as fast as courts can strike down the old one. In 2013, in Shelby County v. Holder, the Supreme Court held that the formula deciding which places needed preclearance was outdated and could not be used. Congress has not passed a new one. States once covered can now change polling places, purge rolls and redraw maps without asking first.

Here is the argument, and it is an argument: the volunteers of 1964 understood that the right to vote is not protected by a single law but by a system of rules, enforcement and attention, and that dismantling any part of that system matters. Our page on voting rights and redistricting follows the fights over maps, purges and the remaining parts of the Act, and our racial justice page follows the wider record.

The fairest closing note belongs to the people who stayed. The volunteers mostly went home in August. The Black families who had housed them, the sharecroppers who had gone to the courthouse and the teenagers from the Freedom Schools did not. They kept organizing in a state that punished them for it, and within a decade they had changed who sat in its county offices and its legislature. They were not waiting for permission.

What you can do

• Make sure you can vote, and help one person who isn't sure. Our voting page lists registration deadlines, voter ID rules, and mail and early voting for every state, linked to each state's election office. Check your own status, then sit down with a neighbour or a relative and check theirs.
• Tell your members of Congress where you stand on restoring preclearance. Enter your address on our representatives page to find your U.S. representative, senators and state legislators, their phone numbers and contact forms, and their latest votes.
• Teach the history the Freedom Schools taught. Volunteer with a literacy, tutoring or civil rights group near you; the organizations directory lists nonprofits by cause in every state, including voting and civil rights groups.
• Watch your county. Polling place closures and voter-roll purges are usually decided at public meetings of county election boards. Attend one, ask questions on the record, and bring a friend.