Freedom Summer’s lasting impact: ‘They never forgot their mission’

“So many of those volunteers went back to school with a new mission,” said Davis Houck, Florida State University’s Fannie Lou Hamer professor of rhetorical studies. “They never forgot that mission.”

The seeds of the summer of 1964 changed voting in America. Changed political parties. Changed the nation.

That metamorphosis came not through some dramatic event captured on television, but through person-to-person relationships, said Dave Tell, the University of Kansas professor and author of “Remembering Emmett Till.” “It was a slower paced change, but in the end, it was a more powerful change.”

In 1964, civil rights leaders made public their plans to let student volunteers join them in working in the civil rights movement in Mississippi.

Upon hearing the news, Sam Bowers, imperial wizard for the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, told his fellow Klansmen to prepare for this “communist invasion.” “When the first waves of blacks hit our streets this summer,” they must avoid fighting them on the streets and attack them and their white collaborators at night, he said.

After darkness fell June 16, 1964, Klansmen heard that civil rights activists had gathered at Mount Zion Methodist Church in Neshoba County. They sped in their cars to the historically Black church and grabbed members, demanding to know where the activists were.

When members said they didn’t know, Klansmen began to beat and pistol-whip members. Before Klansmen left, they torched the church.

“My mother had blood on her,” recalled member Jewel McDonald. “My brother had blood on him.”

Five days later, three young activists — James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner — came to investigate the Klan attack. Chaney and Schwerner had long been involved in the movement. Goodman had come as a Freedom Summer volunteer.

After spotting the trio, a deputy jailed them and released them that night into the hands of his fellow Klansmen, who killed the trio and buried their bodies 15 feet down in an earthen dam.

That’s because he was on his way to Ohio to help train volunteers for Freedom Summer.

In the years that followed his killing, she didn’t share the identity of her father, whose mother and family had been terrorized afterward.

During Black History Week in junior high, she followed other students into the library, where there were pictures on the wall of Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights activists. Then she saw it. A picture of her father.

“I never said a word,” she recalled. “I never told anyone.”

But each birthday carried a solemn reminder of the death of the father she never knew.

On the 40th anniversary of his death, she finally shared with others that her father was the civil rights icon, James Chaney.

“I love my dad and am so appreciative that he knew his purpose and assignment in life was to help others,” she said. “I am just like my dad.”

A year later in 2005, she wept as she watched a jury convict the Klan leader who helped orchestrate his killing, Edgar Ray Killen.

Young people need to be educated so that they can display the same passion and courage as her father’s generation, she said. “Even with my dad, Andy and Mickey being killed, those students still got on the bus [for Freedom Summer in Mississippi].”

They learned how to respond nonviolently to attacks from mobs and police. They learned how to run Freedom Schools to help educate children. They learned how to go door to door to encourage Black Mississippians to register to vote.

These white volunteers stayed with Black families, went to church with them and followed their house rules, Houck said. “It was a deeply immersive experience.”

Through that summer, volunteers came to understand what life was like for these Black families in Mississippi, he said. In turn, these families, who had never had white people under their roofs, now felt the burden of protecting them, he said.

Freedom Summer altered the trajectories of all of their lives, he said. “The movement changed them.”

In that summer of 1964, the civil rights movement shone a light on Mississippi, which had done its best to keep Black voters from the polls after the Civil War ended, first with violence and then with laws and a new state constitution.

“There is no use to equivocate or lie about the matter,” future Gov. James K. Vardaman declared, “Mississippi’s constitutional convention of 1890 was held for no other purpose than to eliminate the n—– from politics.” 

Two years later, lawmakers purged all names from the voting rolls and barred Black voters from re-registering through poll taxes and constitutional quizzes.

The changes worked. Within a decade, the number of Black registered voters fell from more than 130,000 to less than 1,300.

Even after the passage of more than 70 years, that number remained miniscule. By 1964, less than 7% of Black Mississippians could vote.

That began to change with the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which Congress adopted in part because of the trio’s murders and similar violence.

“Today, the hard-fought right to vote is under sustained attack,” Bender said. “Tragically, the gains of the past are not being utilized by many.”

Since 2023, at least 20 states, including Mississippi, have passed laws that make voting more difficult, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.

Under current Mississippi law, if voters fail to respond to a “confirmation notice” of their address, they are purged from the voting rolls.

In 2023, U.S. District Judge Henry T. Wingate blocked a law that he concluded might criminalize assistance to disabled Mississippians that might need help with absentee voting. This year, the state Legislature passed a measure to correct the law.

Mississippi also has the nation’s strictest felony disenfranchisement law, barring more than 10% of the state’s population from ever voting again because they’ve been convicted of certain felonies outlined in the constitution.

While some states, including Florida, have enabled those convicted of felonies to regain the right to vote, Mississippi has balked at such reform. That means more than 130,000 Black Mississippians, or 16% of the Black adult population, can’t cast a ballot.

The Hill concluded that the second most difficult state in the nation to vote in was Mississippi.

Those in power “don’t want ‘certain people’ to vote,” said state Sen. John Horhn, a Democrat from Jackson. “It’s a part of a bigger plan to maintain control, even as the white majority loses its numbers.”

Bender said a new movement — of the people, by the people and for the people — is needed to ensure that voting and other constitutional rights are protected.

As the nation diversifies, “there needs to be coalition building around extremely important common interests,” she said. “There is increasing resistance among some to this new reality as they feel threatened by these inevitable demographic changes.”

Those enslaved had to accept such authority or face possible death, he said. Afterward, they faced the horrors of Jim Crow, he said.

“My brother was murdered by people who viewed the imperial wizard as an authoritarian who should be listened to,” he said. “None of them were convicted of murder.”

Now, 60 years since Freedom Summer, “we’re going back to the future,” he said. “We’re dignifying the notion that an authoritarian can do no wrong.”

Throughout history, he said some of those in power have tried to deny or impede equal access to the ballot. For instance, student volunteers for the Andrew Goodman Foundation discovered a statewide ban on early in-person voting on Florida campuses.

“This ban of denying polling sites where young people lived, worked and studied had a negative impact on turnout,” Goodman said.

The foundation and the Florida League of Women Voters sued the state, and this in-person voting was restored.

The Rev. Eddie Hinton, who serves as pastor for the church, said he sees people of different races coming together now.

“We have come a long way, but we still have a long way to go,” he said. “Black and white can work together.”

Mount Zion also honored McDonald and her family for their courage.

She told Mississippi Today that she has forgiven the Klansmen who attacked her family.

“Why should I hate someone?” she asked. “I don’t believe in holding grudges. Why should I carry that when I can just forgive them and go on and live my life?”

Some people may think she’s crazy for saying that, she said, “but I do believe in order for us to go to heaven, we need to love each other and, if we see someone who needs help, then help them out.”

She called on Mississippians to start healthy conversations across racial lines. “There’s too much hatred,” she said. “We need to get rid of that hatred and love each other.”