Holding on to the Past is Holding on to Hope

Editor’s note: For more resources on Freedom Summer, check out Teaching Tolerance’s web package Learning from the Summer of ’64.

All too often, I’m told to “let go of the past.” This admonishment comes from friends, family and professional colleagues alike. It doesn’t seem to matter whether I’m conducting a tour for students visiting the Civil Rights Memorial Center or relating, over coffee, the current news cycle to days gone by. Clearly, a lot of folk want me to simply “shut up about it.” Too late. I’m too old to change now. More important, the past won’t let me.

Serving as the guardian of the Civil Rights Memorial, a sacred monument to the past, is a responsibility I don’t take lightly. I have to talk about the past: It is my present, and its stories give me hope for the future.

Like many stories from the modern American civil rights movement, Freedom Summer was about answering the call to realize social justice. Voter registration campaigns began taking off across the South in 1961. Local activists were determined to challenge the systemic disenfranchisement of black voters in Mississippi. In the summer of 1964, thousands of volunteers went to Mississippi determined to make a difference. Not unlike the students who joined the Freedom Rides in 1961, they knew what they were up against and held on to the belief that their actions could bring about change.

The Freedom Summer campaign produced the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), and over 80,000 state residents joined that party. At the 1964 Democratic National Convention (DNC) in Atlantic City, N.J., MFDP delegates—claiming to be “the only democratically constituted body of Mississippi”—petitioned the credentials committee of the DNC to recognize and seat their delegation, not the all-white Mississippi Democratic Party delegation. The late, great Fannie Lou Hamer offered an impassioned plea to the committee. The MFDP was not seated, but the status quo was forever changed.

Not all Freedom Summer volunteers came from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) or the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). In fact, an overwhelming majority of the volunteers from outside Mississippi were white college students from the North, and many of them were Jewish. Some helped with voter registration, but most were assigned to help change the way black children were educated in the South.

Forty Freedom Schools were established. These free schools taught black history, the principles of nonviolent resistance and leadership skills to students from racially segregated and severely underfunded schools across Mississippi.

Freedom Summer, like other events of the movement, produced a backlash of violence against those who sought change through nonviolent means. In addition to the murders of civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, countless others were beaten and harassed. Black homes, businesses and churches were firebombed or burned to the ground. Yet, Mississippi was changing.

The stories about how everyday people—like you and me—stepped up and created change remind me that’s how change happens. You. Me. Us. We create it. Aren’t stories like that worth hearing over and over again?

Lecia J. Brooks is the director of outreach for the Southern Poverty Law Center.