On its face, Freedom Summer was a highly-coordinated voter registration drive, but there was much more to it. Veteran Civil Rights activist Charles McLaurin tells the story behind the strategy to expose the state to the world.
June 21, 1964 is the logical date for many to begin the story of Freedom Summer, otherwise known as the Mississippi Summer Project.
That is the day three Civil Rights volunteers, Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner and James Chaney went missing and were murdered in Neshoba County. It is also the week that hundreds of volunteers arrived in Oxford, Ohio, for training prior to being deployed to Mississippi to help with education and voter registration.
The story of Freedom Summer, however, began long before 1964.
Freedom Summer was the culmination of work that had been going on for years, said Charles McLaurin, one of the local organizers that summer.
“What we are doing now is we’re fixing to start to build some type of movement so that we can get the message out about what’s happening in Mississippi, because Mississippi, at that time, was a closed society,” McLaurin told The Enterprise-Tocsin in an interview.
McLaurin arrived in the Mississippi Delta, in the dead of night, in the late summer of 1962.
Famed Civil Rights leader Bob Moses was behind the wheel of a blue and white convertible Oldsmobile that left Greenwood just before midnight on August 8, 1962. McLaurin said the other passenger was a Massachusetts native named Charlie Cobb.
The destination was Amzie Moore’s home in Cleveland, with just a handful of communities in between like Doddsville and Ruleville.
“Just as we headed north to Ruleville, Bob started talking about there being a curfew in Ruleville, whereby midnight, Black people had to be off the streets and no lights on in their homes,” McLaurin said.
The car crept through the sleepy Delta town, just under the curfew, turned onto Highway 8 and headed toward the destination.
After meeting Moore and others at his house the next morning, McLaurin said that he and Cobb were told to get dressed for church.
They started to drive down Highway 8 back toward Sunflower County.
“We take Highway 8 to Ruleville, and I’m trying to determine why we’re going back to this terrible town,” McLaurin said. “I had already decided this was a terrible place. Black people can’t be on the streets at night after midnight.”
The men sat in the parsonage of Mt. Galilee Church and waited for the service to end.
When church ended, a group of Ruleville citizens came in to greet them.
“There is a conversation about us remaining in Ruleville, about organizers working with this local group of African American citizens,” McLaurin said.
It was determined later in that meeting that McLaurin and Cobb would stay at the home of Joe and Rebecca McDonald in Ruleville.
The men were tasked with helping locals spearhead a voter registration movement in the small town and eventually in Sunflower County as a whole.
The two men met immediate resistance.
That Monday, they were taking a tour of the town, and that is when they were stopped by then-Mayor Charles “Fisty” Dorrough, now deceased.
McLaurin said the mayor carried them to city hall.
“He said, ‘Y’all get out of town or something bad is going to happen.’ He tells us, ‘You can go,’” McLaurin said.
McLaurin said they did not leave town, and they began canvassing for the next eight to ten days, rallying as much interest as they could for voter registration.
During that time, McLaurin said they got enough people interested in registering that they were able to take a bus load of people to Indianola to the Sunflower County Courthouse, which at that time was the only place someone in the county could register to vote.
On that bus was a woman named Fannie Lou Hamer, a charismatic sharecropper.
During that trip, McLaurin said the bus driver was arrested for driving a bus “that was too yellow.”
Hamer would later be warned by the plantation owner where she, her husband and their two adopted daughters lived that she should go to Indianola and withdraw her application to be registered.
“Fannie Lou had refused, and she decided to leave,” McLaurin said. “They decided that Fannie Lou Hamer would leave that night, and her husband and two daughters would remain on the plantation and bring in the crop so that they wouldn’t owe any debt to the plantation owner. “
Hamer moved in with a woman named Mary Tucker, McLaurin said.
One night, about ten days into their canvassing efforts, shots were fired into several homes, including the McDonald home where McLaurin was living and Tucker’s home where Hamer had come to stay.
Two female Jackson State students, who were visiting one of the homes, were injured but not killed, McLaurin said.
Despite the gunfire, McLaurin and others stayed the course, and interest in voter registration gained steam.
But there was only so much that could be done under the voting laws at the time.
In order to register, citizens had to pay a poll tax, and they had to take a test with about 20 questions, one of which asked them to interpret a section of the Mississippi state constitution.
“We definitely weren’t getting folks registered to vote,” McLaurin said.
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee leadership devised a new strategy, McLaurin said.
For 1963, they would set up their own registration and voting apparatus across the state and run candidates for statewide offices in a mock election.
This included candidates in three of the state’s five congressional districts, a U.S. Senate candidate and candidates for governor and lieutenant governor.
“We set up our own registration and reduced the 20 questions to about six,” McLaurin said, later adding, “That ballot brought us about 90,000 participants.”
Out of that initiative, McLaurin said they had the proof that more Blacks would register and vote if they were not subject to the rigorous test and intimidation.
Mass registration and voting would likely not be possible, McLaurin said, without some kind of national spotlight being on the state, and with the Democratic National Convention set to be held that summer in Atlantic City, New Jersey, the timing was right to escalate the strategy.
The Mississippi Summer Project, commonly known as Freedom Summer, was born.
“We’re going to try to bring a group of young college kids and other professionals into Mississippi for six weeks for this massive effort and continue our voter registration efforts, which we weren’t having very much success with,” McLaurin said.
This brought with it a certain amount of national press.
When volunteers Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney went missing on June 21, 1964, the state received more than just bad press.
“That really opened up Mississippi for a time,” McLaurin said. “We had the FBI, the Justice Department and news cameras here… That was a good thing and a bad thing. It was a bad thing that these young people were killed. This has now opened Mississippi up, and that’s what we wanted to do. We didn’t want to get nobody killed but we wanted to open Mississippi up.”
On August 4, 1964, the bodies of Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney were discovered. Later that month, the Democratic party held its national convention for the 1964 presidential election.
At the convention, the newly-formed and integrated Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party made its move, attempting to unseat the Mississippi delegates on the grounds that the state party had systematically excluded Blacks from participating.
“If we’re not able to deny them their credentials, then we would move on to a floor fight at the convention,” McLaurin said.
Hamer testified on national television about voter intimidation and violence in Mississippi.
President Lydon Johnson, who was seeking his first full term after being sworn in following the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy, could not ignore what was happening.
He sent then-vice presidential hopeful Hubert Humphrey and Walter Mondale to negotiate with the Freedom Democratic Party leaders.
“For the first time, we got the ear and the attention of the President of the United States of America, and at the same time, we’ve got Fannie Lou Hamer’s testimony before the credentials committee, the hearing itself, and now it’s national,” McLaurin said. “It’s on national TV. Johnson has to do something.”
The MFDP eventually refused the compromises offered, which McLaurin said would not have been impactful in terms of upholding Blacks’ constitutional rights to participate in the process.
Most of the Mississippi and Alabama delegates would refuse to support Johnson and eventually left the convention.
“We brought our best,” McLaurin said. “We had file cabinets of documentation of the murder and violence and economic reprisals where Blacks in Mississippi are being pressured…One good thing that came out of it, the national Democrat party said that it would never seat another delegation that was not representative of the state from which the state that they represented.”
This was also likely the beginning of the end for Democratic control in Mississippi. Many whites voted for Republican nominee then-U.S. Senator Barry Goldwater, and the solidification of the Republican party in the South began.
Later that year, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed.
The road to opening up voting rights across the state would still be a long one, but the Freedom Summer project had accomplished some of its goals, McLaurin said.
The nation was now aware of the voter intimidation and violence that had become common in the state for years, and the passage of federal laws in the wake of those stories would make it possible one day for all eligible Mississippians to be able to vote.
