Mississippi Freedom Summer Project Begins – Three Civil Rights Workers Murdered
The Mississippi Freedom Summer Project, organized largely by SNCC (April 15, 1960), officially began on this day.
The project brought about 1,000 volunteers, mostly white college students, to the state to register African-American voters and teach in Freedom Schools.
On this the night of the first day of the project three members of the project were murdered. James Chaney, an African-American and native of Mississippi, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, both white volunteers, were kidnapped by Ku Klux Klan members, tortured, and then murdered. Their bodies were not recovered until August 4, 1964. The murderers were tried and convicted on October 20, 1967.
One component of Freedom Summer was helping organize the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, which was founded on April 26, 1964. That August, the MFDP demanded that its racially integrated delegation be seated at the 1964 Democratic Party Convention in place of the all-white, segregationist “regular” delegation. See in particular Fannie Lou Hamer’s famous speech at the convention on August 22, 1964.
On June 21, 2005, Edgar Ray Killen, a Klan member who participated in the murders, was convicted on three counts of manslaughter and sentenced to 60 years in prison. The guilty verdict was delivered on the 41st anniversary of the murders. The prosecution, brought by the Mississippi attorney general, was one of several “atonement” prosecutions in the south which sought to atone for crimes against civil rights activists in earlier decades. Killen died in Parchman State Penitentiary while still serving his sentence in 2018.
In 2014, President Barack Obama awarded posthumously, the Presidential Medal of Freedom to James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner.
Read SNCC Report on Violence in Mississippi, 1961–Early 1964:
http://www.crmvet.org/docs/sncc_ms_violence.pdfRead original documents about Freedom Summer:
http://www.crmvet.org/info/msfshome.htmWatch the documentary: Freedom Summer (2014)
Learn more: Doug McAdam, Freedom Summer (1988)
Read: Gordon Martin, Count Them One by One: Black Mississippians Fighting for the Right to Vote (2010)
Learn more about Freedom Summer:
http://www.keepinghistoryalive.com/freedom-brochure.htmlSee the work of the Andrew Goodman Foundation web site: http://www.andrewgoodman.org/
Visit the National Museum of African American History and Culture here