Transcript 1964: The Freedom Summer

1964:
The Freedom Summer
By
Sharon D. Wells
Windsor Spring Elementary School
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1964: The Freedom Summer
• Freedom Summer 1964 was a campaign for black voter
registration in the Deep South organized by young
people from everywhere whose sacrifices have created
a more just society. It was during the Freedom Summer
1964 events that civil rights activists and Congress of
Racial Equality (CORE) members James Earl Chaney,
Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman were
murdered in Mississippi, while working to secure the
rights of the poor and black. In their memory, the
Chaney Goodman Schwerner Justice Coalition will ride
again for freedom and justice.
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1964: The Freedom Summer
• Freedom Rides were the acts of courageous
individuals who sought to end the segregation of
public transportation throughout the South. These
individuals boarded buses, planes, and trains headed
for the Deep South enduring harassment, beatings, and
arrests as they tried to promote equality through nonviolent strategies.
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American RadioWorks contributing photographer Steve
Schapiro covered the Mississippi Summer Project for Life
Magazine in 1964.
“Oh Freedom Over Me”
A slideshow by American RadioWorks.
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1964: The Freedom Summer
At the training sessions for
Summer Project volunteers in
Oxford, Ohio, in June, 1964, staff
members with the Student NonViolent Coordinating Committee
(SNCC) and the Congress of
Racial Equality (CORE)
demonstrate techniques of nonviolent resistance and selfpreservation.
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1964: The Freedom Summer
SNCC and CORE
staff members
lecture the
volunteers on
conditions in the
segregated South.
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1964: The Freedom Summer
•
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Bob Moses, leader of
SNCC's voter
registration efforts in
Mississippi from 1960
through 1964 and a key
architect of Freedom
Summer.
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1964: The Freedom Summer
Singing in Oxford.
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1964: The Freedom Summer
• Mississippi police
departments beefed up their
forces in preparation for the
Summer Project, which state
politicians called an invasion
by "outside agitators."
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1964: The Freedom Summer
• Fanny Lou Chaney,
mother of the missing
civil right worker
James Chaney.
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1964: The Freedom Summer
Rita Schwerner, wife of
missing civil rights
worker Michael
Schwerner, waits for
news of her husband
in Oxford, Ohio.
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1964: The Freedom Summer
• Some young
Mississippians kill
time while state and
federal authorities
search for the bodies
of Chaney, Goodman
and Schwerner.
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1964: The Freedom Summer
• The car driven by
Schwerner, Goodman,
and Chaney is found,
burned out, near
Philadelphia,
Mississippi.
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1964: The Freedom Summer
The Movement Soldiers On
• Civil rights workers
discuss strategy in a
"freedom house," a
Summer Project
office.
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1964: The Freedom Summer
Registering the Disfranchised
A civil rights
worker makes
a call
.
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1964: The Freedom Summer
• Summer Project
workers visit black
Mississippians to
discuss voter
registration.
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1964: The Freedom Summer
• Most black
Mississippians had
never met white
people who would
shake their hands or
address them as
equals.
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1964: The Freedom Summer
• Singing a freedom
song together.
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1964: The Freedom Summer
• Volunteers taught black
Mississippi children in
Freedom Schools,
special makeshift
schools set up for the
summer of 1964. Their
lessons emphasized
African-American
history, literature, art -and political struggle.
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1964: The Freedom Summer
• Summer Project
volunteers prepare
to leave Mississippi
at the end of the
summer.
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1964: The Freedom Summer
• Some of the
friendships formed
during the Freedom
Summer were
ephemeral, others
lasting for long
afterward.
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1964: The Freedom Summer
• At the 30th anniversary
reunion for Freedom
Summer participants in
1994, SNCC veteran Dorie
Ladner posed with three
girls from Minnesota at a
plaque commemorating
the murders of James
Chaney, Andrew Goodman
and Michael Schwerner.
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1964: The Freedom Summer
• Bullet holes in the
gravestone of James
Chaney, 1994.
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1964: The Freedom Summer
• Click the link for oral
interviews from
people that were
there.
Ronald
Crutcher
http://www.cas.muohio.edu/freedomsummer/audio/rc.mp3
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1964: The Freedom Summer
• Click the link for oral
interviews from
people that were
there.
Curtis
Ellison
http://www.cas.muohio.edu/freedomsummer/audio/ce.mp3
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1964: The Freedom Summer
Phyllis Hoyt
• Click the link for oral
interviews from
people that were
there.
http://www.cas.muohio.edu/freedomsummer/audio/ph.mp3
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1964: The Freedom Summer
Arthur Miller
• Click the link for oral
interviews from
people that were
there.
http://www.cas.muohio.edu/freedomsummer/audio/am.mp3
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1964: The Freedom Summer
Richard
Momeyer
• Click the link for oral
interviews from
people that were
there.
http://www.cas.muohio.edu/freedomsummer/audio/rm.mp3
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1964: The Freedom Summer
• Click the link for oral
interviews from
people that were
there.
http://www.cas.muohio.edu/freedomsummer/oral.html
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1964: The Freedom Summer
Forty-one years ago, the former Western College
for Women was the site for Freedom Summer
1964, where nearly 800 volunteers came to
prepare for upcoming civil rights efforts.
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1964: The Freedom Summer
Edgar Ray Killen, a thirty-eight-yearold, ordained Baptist minister, was
the point man in the conspiracy to
murder three civil rights workers in
Neshoba County, Mississippi on June
21, 1964. It was Killen ("the
Preacher") who Deputy Sheriff Price
contacted that Sunday afternoon to
get the word out to local klansmen
that he was holding for their later
disposal three men, including Mickey
Schwerner, the much despised
"Goatee."
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1964: The Freedom Summer
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Killen, the owner of a local sawmill
and a former unsuccessful candidate
for sheriff, was a marginal character
until Sam Bowers appointed him
"kleagle," or klavern recruiter and
organizer, for the Neshoba and
Lauderdale County klan. He
zealously performed his duties, as
evidenced by the over seventy men
who met on June 16 in Meridian to
plan a trip to Mount Zion Church in
Longdale, where they hoped to find
and kill Schwerner. Instead of
encountering Schwerner, they found
only local blacks, who the klan badly
beat before burning down their
church.
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1964: The Freedom Summer
After Killen received word from Price
that Schwerner and the other two civil
rights workers were being held in jail,
he travelled to Meridian in Lauderdale
County to meet with other klan
bigwigs at the Longhorn Drive-In.
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1964: The Freedom Summer
Phone calls were made and recruits
signed up for a trip that evening to
Neshoba County. A larger group of
Klan met at Akin's Mobile Homes in
Meridian, where Killen informed them
of the plan he had worked out with
Price for the three men's release
shortly after dark. He told klan
members participating in the
murderous expedition to get rubber
gloves.
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1964: The Freedom Summer
A meeting was scheduled near the
courthouse in Philadelphia for
8:15. When the Meridian klan arrived
in Philadelphia, Killen took them on a
driveby tour of the jail that held their
quarry, then rushed off to establish
his alibi by attending a wake for an
uncle at the local funeral home.
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1964: The Freedom Summer
The FBI was informed of Killen's role
in the conspiracy by informant
Wallace Miller, Killen's first klan
recruit. Killen was one of nineteen
men arrested on December 4,
1964. At his trial in 1967, Killen
created a stir by passing to his
defense attorney a question for a
prosecution witness, Reverand
Charles Johnson.
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1964: The Freedom Summer
His attorney then asked the question
in cross-examination. Is it true, Killen
asked, that Johnson and Michael
Schwerner had tried to "get young
Negro males to sign statements that
they would rape one white woman a
week during the hot summer of 1964
here in Mississippi?" The judge was
not amused by the question, and
demanded to know where it came
from.
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1964: The Freedom Summer
The jury was unable to reach a verdict
on Killen's guilt. He was never
retried.
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1964: The Freedom Summer
Four decades later, justice has been served on the man
who facilitated the deaths of three of those volunteers.
Edgar Ray Killen, 80, a former Ku Klux Klan member,
was recently convicted of manslaughter in the deaths
of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael
Schwerner, whose civil rights efforts were cut short on
June 21, 1964, in Neshoba County, Miss.
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1964: The Freedom Summer
• The men were reported missing that night, and
Freedom Summer volunteers in Oxford were
notified of the disappearance.
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1964: The Freedom Summer
• Rick Momeyer, field secretary for the Student
Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, had just
arrived in Oxford for the second week of civil
rights training.
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1964: The Freedom Summer
• “From the first meeting, we knew they were
missing,” he said. “There weren’t many people
who didn’t suppose they were dead.”
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1964: The Freedom Summer
• Arthur Miller was a member of the Oxford
branch of the Mississippi Freedom Summer
Project at the time.
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1964: The Freedom Summer
• “I knew exactly what happened to them,” he
said regarding news of their disappearance.
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1964: The Freedom Summer
• Miller, former president of Oxford’s NAACP,
offered mixed reactions to Killen’s trial.
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1964: The Freedom Summer
• “They indicted him on three counts of
manslaughter. I thought murder would have
been a better count,” Miller said. “There’s a lot
of people still walking the streets of Mississippi
that were involved in it, and I hope they bring
some more of them to trial.”
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1964: The Freedom Summer
• The bodies of the civil rights workers were
found more than a month after the reported
disappearance in a remote earthen dam in
Mississippi. It was later determined that they
had been murdered as a result of a conspiracy
between members of the Neshoba County law
enforcement and the Ku Klux Klan.
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1964: The Freedom Summer
• At the June 21 trial in Philadelphia, Miss. exactly
41 years after the three men were killed, Killen
was sentenced to the maximum of 60 years in
prison.
• “It was a long time coming,” Miller said. “But it
was better late than never.”
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Bibliography
• http://americanradioworks.publicradio.org/features/oh_
freedom/story1.html
• http://jecf.org/freedomsummer/freedomsummer2004/Ab
outfreedomsummer.htm
• http://www.oxfordpress.com/hp/content/news/stories/2
005/07/15/OP0715freedomtrial.html
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Bibliography
• http://news.search.yahoo.com/news/search?prssweb=
Search&ei=UTF8&fl=0&p=freedom+summer&c=news_photos
• http://www.cas.muohio.edu/freedomsummer/oral.html
• http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/price&
bowers/Killen.htm
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Bibliography
• http://www.denison.edu/publicaffairs/pressrelea
ses/mlk_1-05.html
• http://www.cnn.com/2005/LAW/06/21/mississippi
.killings/
The End?
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