In 1964, the Council of Federated Organizations pondered what action to take after a largely successful drive the previous year to register African American voters in Mississippi. It did not want the enthusiasm that had been stirred to fade and the fight for African American rights to lose momentum, and thus it launched Freedom Summer.

Planning Freedom Summer

The Council of Federated Organizations consisted of members of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Congress of Racial Equality, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). At a meeting in Greenville, Mississippi in 1964, David Dennis of the SNCC proposed to 45 delegates that a Freedom Summer campaign be aimed primarily at expanding the voter registration drive and taken into areas of the state where opposition and hostility ran high.

The delegates immediately debated whether they should recruit white college students from the North to help in the effort. Many in the SNCC believed that Freedom Summer should be all black; this, they insisted, would promote African American leadership. Further, these delegates did not like the superior attitude of whites who had previously come to the South to help. When civil rights leader Robert Moses arrived at the meeting, he helped persuade the delegates to recruit the white students. "Look, I'm not going to be part of anything all black," he insisted. "I always thought that the one thing we can do for the country that no one else can do is to be above the race issue." He realized, too, that the presence of white students would increase media coverage and assure federal protection for civil rights workers.

Violence Erupts

Such protection proved meager, however, and even before the campaign began in June, extensive violence had erupted as local whites assaulted African Americans. When the SNCC volunteers arrived—more than 800 who had met at the Western College for Women in Oxford, Ohio to plan their strategy—the violence continued unabated. Freedom Summer included a tragedy: three students (one African American and two whites) were brutally killed near Philadelphia, Mississippi by whites. One observer estimated that by summer's end, whites had killed three additional volunteers, beaten 80, shot at 35, burned more than 30 churches to the ground, and bombed about 30 buildings.

Aftermath

Freedom Summer greatly affected the SNCC and the civil rights movement: the violence radicalized African Americans, even to the point that some rejected nonviolence and armed themselves for protection. The white students returned home convinced that American society was not only undemocratic but also cruel and barbaric, and they felt betrayed by the federal government and its liberal supporters for having done little to protect the volunteers. These students constituted an activist minority that expressed disgust with the status quo and through the counterculture challenged the major political parties, the Vietnam War, poverty, and the entire economic structure.

Freedom Summer registered African American voters (although due to white resistance, only in small numbers) and led to an important confrontation at the Democratic National Convention when the recently organized Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party challenged the all-white delegation from that state. Perhaps more importantly, Freedom Summer had exposed injustice and thus left an indelible imprint on the emerging counterculture.