The Volunteers and the Freedom Schools: Education for Social Change in Mississippi

Abstract

FROM THE BEGINNING of direct action work in South, student civil rights movement constantly evolved new programs and tactics. While goals of programs were always to work toward desegregation and voter registration, programs often stressed varied approaches to those goals and had different tactical components. Nowhere was this evolutionary process of multidimensional programs more clear than in civil rights work in Mississippi. From first Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) voter registration project which precipitated murder by whites of two local blacks, Mississippi represented strongest bastion of white racism and resistance in South. Direct action work in Mississippi was dominated by SNCC. However other three major civil rights groups, Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), National Association for Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), were also represented in state and, contrary to fragmentation and competition among groups at national level, they all tried to support each other. By 1962, four groups joined together to form an umbrella organization called Council of Federated Organizations (COFO). White violence against blacks increased almost daily and included jailings, beatings, shootings, bombings and murder. The Mississippi movement was nearly stymied. By November of 1963, despite Freedom Days, Freedom Votes, marches, sitins and boycotts, few Mississippi blacks were registered to vote, yet nation seemed unaware of situation. The Mississippi movement needed a new direction. COFO proposed a massive summer project aimed at recruiting college students as temporary civil rights workers. The Freedom Summer Project was a direct response to Mississippi experience. In 1964, more than 650 students from around country responded to COFO's call to give a summer to civil rights, and they were called the volunteers. Overwhelmingly urban and upper-middle class, most were in