History
"This is Mississippi,
the middle of the iceberg."-- Bob Moses
In
the early 1960s, Mississippi was the poorest state
in the nation. 86% of all non-white families lived
below the national poverty line. [38] In addition,
the state had a terrible record of black voting rights
violations.
In the 1950s, Mississippi was 45% black,
but only 5% of voting age blacks were registered to
vote. [39] Some counties did not have a single registered
black voter. Whites insisted that blacks did not want
to vote, but this was not true. Many blacks wanted
to vote, but they worried, and rightfully so, that
they might lose their job.
In 1962, over 260 blacks
in Madison County overcame this fear and waited in
line to register. 50 more came the next day. Only seven
got in to take the test over the two days, walking
past a sticker on the registrar's office door that
bore a Confederate battle flag next to the message "Support
Your Citizens' Council." [40] Once they got in,
they had to take a test designed to prevent them from
becoming registered. In 1954, in response to increasing
literacy among blacks, the test, which originally asked
applicants to "read or interpret" a section
of the state constitution, was changed to ask applicants
to "read and interpret" that document. [41]
This allowed white registrars to decide whether or
not a person passed the test. Most blacks, even those
with doctoral degrees, "failed." In contrast,
most whites passed, no matter what their education
level. In George County, one white applicant's interpretation
of the section "There shall be no imprisonment
for debt" was "I thank that a Neorger should
have 2 years in collage before voting because he don't
under stand." (sic) [42] He passed.
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Fannie Lou Hamer was born on a plantation in the Mississippi
hill country in 1918, the last child in a family of
twenty children. Mrs. Hamer's parents, who were sharecroppers,
moved to Sunflower County, Mississippi, when she was
two years old. She recalled that "from two years
old up until now I've been in the Delta." Due
to the dire economic circumstances in which the family
lived, Mrs. Hamer received only about six years of
formal education. At the time of her youth the school
term was only four months a year. Also, education at
that time was considered secondary to work; nevertheless, "When
I was a child, I loved to read. In fact, I learned
to read real well when I was going to school.
"Mrs.
Hamer married and continued farming until the 1960s.
In 1962, Mrs. Hamer learned about voting, saying, "That
sounded interesting enough to me that I wanted to try
it." When the civil rights movement began in Mississippi,
Mrs. Hamer became first a participant and then a leader.
She joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
[SNCC] as a fieldworker in voter registration drives.
As a result of this work for civil rights, Mrs. Hamer
became a leading figure in the organization of the
Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. As a member of
the party, she attended the 1964 National Democratic
Convention to challenge the seating of Mississippi's
Regular Democratic Party. It was during a credentials
committee hearing at this convention that she made
her famous television appearance telling of the problems
she encountered trying to vote in Mississippi.
She
recalled that "The first vote I cast, I cast .
. . for myself, because I was running for Congress." She
opposed the incumbent from her congressional district,
Representative Jamie Whitten. Mrs. Hamer traveled widely
on behalf of the civil rights movement. She made addresses
in many major cities and colleges in the United States.
Mrs. Hamer was also instrumental in forming the farming
cooperative, Freedom Farms, in Sunflower County, Mississippi.
Among her many endeavors, Mrs. Hamer campaigned unsuccessfully
for a seat in the state senate in 1971. Mrs Hamer passed
away March 14, 1977, in the hospital at Mound Bayou,
Mississippi. Her funeral was conducted in Ruleville,
and she was laid to rest on March 21 at Freedom Farms
Cooperative, which she helped to found.
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In 1964 the Congress
on Racial Equality (CORE), Student
Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the the
National
Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP) organised its Freedom Summer campaign.
Directed by Robert
Moses, its main objective was to
try an end the political disenfranchisement of African
Americans in the Deep South. Volunteers from the three
organizations decided to concentrate its efforts in
Mississippi. In 1962 only 6.7 per cent of African Americans
in the state were registered to vote, the lowest percentage
in the country. This involved the formation of the
Mississippi Freedom Party (MFDP). Over 80,000 people
joined the party and 68 delegates, led by Fannie
Lou Hamer, attended the Democratic
Party Convention in
Atlantic City and challenged the attendance of the
all-white Mississippi representation.
CORE, SNCC and NAACP also established 30 Freedom
Schools in towns throughout Mississippi. Volunteers taught
in the schools and the curriculum now included black
history, the philosophy of the civil
rights movement.
During the summer of 1964 over 3,000 students attended
these schools and the experiment provided a model for
future educational programs such as Head
Start.
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As a result of marches, boycotts, student sit-ins
and the Freedom Rides, there was progress in the South
in desegregating public facilities as schools, restaurants,
parks, terminals and interstate buses and trains. But
without the power of the vote, blacks everywhere could
not politically direct and control their own lives
and communities. Nowhere in the country were African
Americans so completely removed from the seat of power
than in Mississippi, where the white population continually
devised means to keep them in a condition of bondage,
both in practice if not in name. Concerned groups worked
for many years to change the plight of voter registration.
In spite of unrelieved fear, inadequate funds, and
violence, they made the registration of African Americans
a major focus for over three years. The Freedom Summer
of 1964 developed out of these ongoing efforts.
This exhibit features a shopfront voter registration
headquarters and audio-visual media to tell the story
of the student volunteers, Freedom Schools, voter registration,
the Freedom Vote, the Mississippi Freedom Democrat
Party, and the 1964 national political conventions.
Take the Virtual Tour
Visit the Civil Right Museum Homepage
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Freedom Summer was a highly publicized campaign in
the Deep South to register blacks to vote during the
summer of 1964.
During
the summer of 1964, thousands of civil rights activists,
many of them white college students from the North,
descended on Mississippi and other Southern states
to try to end the long-time political disenfranchisement
of African Americans in the region. Although black
men had won the right to vote in 1870, thanks to the
Fifteenth Amendment, for the next 100 years many were
unable to exercise that right. White local and state
officials systematically kept blacks from voting through
formal methods, such as poll taxes and literacy tests,
and through cruder methods of fear and intimidation,
which included beatings and lynchings. The inability
to vote was only one of many problems blacks encountered
in the racist society around them, but the civil-rights
officials who decided to zero in on voter registration
understood its crucial significance as well the white
supremacists did. An African American voting bloc would
be able to effect social and political change.
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Freedom Summer was a 1964 voter registration project
in Mississippi, part of a larger effort by civil rights
groups such as the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE)
and the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee
(SNCC) to expand black voting in the South. The Mississippi
project was run by the local Council of Federated Organizations
(COFO), an association of civil rights groups in which
sncc was the most active member. About a hundred white
college students had helped COFO register voters in
November 1963, and several hundred more students were
invited in 1964 for Freedom Summer, a much-expanded
voter registration project.
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