Freedom Summer

Freedom Summer (also known as the Mississippi Summer Project) was a campaign in the United States launched in June 1964 to attempt to register as many African-American voters as possible in Mississippi, which had historically excluded most blacks from voting. The project also set up dozens of Freedom Schools, Freedom Houses, and community centers in small towns throughout Mississippi to aid the local black population.

The project was organized by the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO), a coalition of the Mississippi branches of the four major civil rights organizations (SNCC, CORE, NAACP and SCLC). Most of the impetus, leadership, and financing for the Summer Project came from the SNCC. Robert Parris Moses (Bob Moses), SNCC field secretary and co-director of COFO, directed the summer project.

1963 Freedom Vote

Freedom Summer was built on the years of earlier work by thousands of African Americans, connected through their churches, who lived in Mississippi. In 1963, SNCC organized a mock "Freedom Vote" designed to demonstrate the will of Black Mississippians to vote, if not impeded by terror and intimidation. The Mississippi voting procedure at the time required Blacks to fill out a 21-question registration form and to answer, to the satisfaction of the white registrar, a question on interpretation of any one of 285 sections of the state constitution. This gave freedom to the registrars to rank the applicant as unqualified, which they mostly did.

Freedom Summer (film)

Freedom Summer is a 2014 American documentary film, written, produced and directed by Stanley Nelson Jr.. The film had its world premiere at 2014 Sundance Film Festival on January 17, 2014.

It won the Best Documentary award at 2014 Pan African Film Festival. The film had its U.S. television premiere at PBS on June 24, 2014.

Synopsis

The film narrates the events of the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer, when more than 700 student activists took segregated Mississippi by storm because of underscored by the systematic exclusion of African Americans from the political process. Robert Parris Moses of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee developed a campaign to bring a thousand volunteers to canvassed for voter registration, creating freedom schools and establishing the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party.

Reception

Freedom Summer received positive reviews from critics. Rob Nelson of Variety, said in his review that "A well-shaped and powerful reminder of a time in recent American history when white supremacy was decisively and courageously undercut." Duane Byrge in his review for The Hollywood Reporter praised the film by saying that "veteran filmmaker Stanley Nelson has crafted a searing portrait of those violent, racist times. Intelligently composed and powerfully driven, Freedom Summer is a stirring historical document. It would seem an essential addition for any university library." Dawn Baumgartner Vaughan of Herald Sun, about the film said that "“Freedom Summer,” for those who were born after 1964, brings home a time when wanting to vote meant threats of death on one extreme end, and losing your job on the other. It’s a reminder why any new restrictions on voting, in particular those that impact African-American voters, are worth close scrutiny."

Freedom Summer (book)

Freedom Summer book written by Deborah Wiles and illustrated by Jerome Lagarrigue. Originally published as a hardcover edition in 2001, the book is now available as a paperback from Simon & Schuster. There is also a 2010 book by Bruce Watson by the same name, but the Watson book is written for adults; the Wiles book is for all ages.

Summary

The set is in Mississippi during the summer of 1964, a summer of desegregation in the South, the book is about two best friends. John Henry is black and Joe is white. They do everything together, such as swimming in a creek. They cannot swim in the town pool together because blacks are not allowed to use the public swimming pool.

Joe is then told that a law has been passed that blacks can do everything that whites can do. He is really excited because this means that he can go to the town pool tomorrow with John Henry. The boys are more excited than ever before but when they arrive at the town pool the following day, they are in shock because the town pool has been closed. The entire pool has been filled with black sticky disgusting tar as white people would rather close down the entire pool instead of sharing it with black people. They did not want these people to have their own lives so they turned them down. No voting for them.