Recruiting Volunteers for the Project
Volunteers were needed to assist in accomplishing the goals of the freedom project. After substantial debate, the decision for a racially integrated project was made, and the recruitment of white volunteers began. It was anticipated that by recruiting Northern whites, many of whom were college students, it would capture the attention of the media. In June 1964, 700 student volunteers began training in Oxford, Ohio.
The Murder of Three Volunteers
On June 20, twenty-year-old Andrew Goodman, a white student at Queens College in New York City, James Chaney, a black twenty-one year old from Meridian, Mississippi, and Michael Schwerner, a white twenty-four year old from Brooklyn, New York, finished training and headed for Mississippi. Their first assignment was to investigate the burning of a church located in a town near Philadelphia, Mississippi. Before they could even begin working on their assignment, the three men vanished.The FBI and the Justice Department discovered that the men were last seen after being arrested for a traffic violation in Neshoba County. The FBI opened an office in Jackson to investigate their disappearance. On August 4, the bodies of Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner were found buried on a farm in Philadelphia. They had been shot, and Chaney had also been beaten.
In December 1964, deputy sheriff Lawrence Rainey and eighteen other white men were arrested for conspiracy. The charges were dropped, but in 1967, seven of the men were convicted in federal court for the violation of civil rights laws. Their sentences ranged from three to ten years.
The Freedom Summer Project Continues
In the midst of the FBI investigation into the murder of the three men, volunteers continued to register voters. They went door-to-door telling black residents about the MFDP, providing education on how to register to vote, and they offered to accompany those who wanted to register to the courthouse. While it had been planned that the voter registration drive would terminate at the end of the summer, it was continued through the fall.
The MFDP Attends the Democratic Convention
On August 22, the Democratic National Convention took place in Atlantic City. MFDP members were optimist and enthusiastic at the prospect of their delegation being seated. A Credentials Committee chaired by Walter Mondale was formed to resolve the issue. Martin Luther King Jr. and Fannie Lou Hamer, cofounder of the MFDP, spoke to the committee about seating the black delegates. Hamer gave a powerful speech about her experience in the South registering black voters and the brutality that civil rights activists often faced.A compromise offer was made to allow for two delegates from the MFDP, one white and one black, to cast votes as delegates. MFDP members decided to reject the compromise deal; the proposal only allowed the remaining MFDP members to attend the convention as guests and the Credentials Committee had already handpicked the two voting delegates. It was not until 1968, at the next Democratic convention, that the MFDP was victorious.
The Success of Freedom Summer
Despite the disappointment at the convention, Freedom Summer had been a moderate success. Forty-one freedom schools were established, 1,600 were successfully registered, and national attention was brought to black disenfranchisement in the South. Most importantly, Freedom Summer helped influence the enactment of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the law that put an end to the methods Southern whites used to prevent blacks from voting.
