More than 900 brave, determined and resilient volunteers flooded Mississippi in 1964 for the Freedom Summer Project, and Mississippi State University is celebrating that effort’s impact on equality and human rights.
The Freedom Summer Project called volunteers, mostly northern white college students, to launch the drive to register blacks to vote in Mississippi, the state with the lowest percentage of black voters at that time. After Freedom Summer activists James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwermer were murdered in June by the Ku Klux Klan for registering Neshoba County blacks to vote, national outcry led to the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
“Remembering Freedom Summer: Building a Better Future” will be held at MSU Oct. 19-21 in Colvard Student Union. While the conference is free and open to the public, participants should register aas.msstate.edu/fsc/reg.
Numerous Freedom Summer volunteers, students, activists and photographers will speak, as well as recognized scholars from MSU and other universities all over the country.
Plenary sessions:
Other distinguished speakers will be authors Susan Follett, Francoise Hamlin, Michael Williams and Flonzie Brown Wright, along with additional Freedom Summer students and volunteers Roy DeBerry, Roscoe Jones, Larry Rubin and Gloria Clark. Academic speakers will represent University of Florida, University of Texas, College of Charleston, University of North Carolina, Alcorn State University and Miami University.
MSU’s African-American Studies program is sponsoring the two-day conference; more information is available at aas.msstate.edu.
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