Civil rights-minded students from across the country descended on Mississippi in 1964 for a landmark project that helped bring about a new political order in the South. The effort to raise the percentage of registered black voters from a mere 6.4 percent of all those potentially eligible was a hard climb in the face of vicious intimidation, including the murder of three civil rights workers. But through door-to-door canvassing and the opening of Freedom Schools to educate disenfranchised adults, the discriminatory political landscape began to change.
Here’s an excerpt from Freedom Summer:
“The most important goal of Freedom Summer was getting black people to go to the courthouse to register to vote. However, even after people were persuaded to register, they faced enormous obstacles. ‘I was working mostly with black women who had found the courage to go all the way down to the county seat in Indianola to try to register,’ said Linda Davis. ‘Many of them had made that trip of thirty miles more than twenty times. And each and every time they had been refused by the white registrar of voters.’
“ ‘From 1956 to 1963 only seven black people in Sunflower County had registered,’ said Mrs. Bernice White, a college-educated science teacher.”
(Holiday House, 120 pp.)
