Word: mississippi
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...summer project was needed, and even longer to agree that it would work. Some had felt that white northern students could not relate to the Southern Negro community and carry out the complex work of voter registration. Others had felt that a massive influx of civil-rights workers into Mississippi could only result in murderous reprisals from an inflamed white community. But on Easter Sunday, 1964, SNCC members began leaving for their projects in the Black Belt, carrying with them the preparatory plans for the Summer Project...
Voting was the central focus of the Project. Programs for freedom schools and community centers, while they had special purposes of their own, were all aimed at helping to win the vote for the Negro. Nearly half of the 800 volunteers who went into Mississippi in the summer of 1964 were "voter-registration workers." It was their duty to get thousands of Negroes to court houses all over the state to take the voter-registration test and to organize thousands more into a new political body, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party...
...immediate registration of Mississippi Negro voters was the sole purpose of the summer's work, then the Project was a miserable failure. Only about 1100 Negroe were added to the voting rolls during the summer; and over half of that number came from Panola County alone, where a federal court order had abolished the registration test. At this rate, it would take four centuries to register all of Mississippi's Negroes...
...Project is that it changed the attitudes of Negro and white Mississippians, of people across the nation, and of the federal government. Perhaps the most important change of all is the new feeling of courage, hope, and confidence that is now possessed by thousands of Negroes in Mississippi...
...formation of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party was a revolution in itself. For the first time since Reconstruction, Negroes participated in political discussions, political rallies, and political decisions. By the summer's end, 70,000 Negroes had joined the MFDP, even though the mere act of joining often brought danger and harassment. In MFDP precinct meetings, county conventions, and district caucuses, sharecroppers and city laborers stood up and said what they felt...