The Freedom Summer project, which began as a voter registration campaign in Mississippi in 1964, impacted the broader movement for civil rights in a number of important ways.
First, the campaign helped build popular support for federal legislation to protect voting rights for African Americans. It illustrated the will of black Mississippians to vote—thousands participated in a mock vote held prior to Freedom Summer—and it also illustrated the violence with which white Mississippian leaders resisted black aspirations to political agency. The deaths of Michael Schwarmer, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney outraged the nation.
These efforts helped build the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, a wing of the party from Mississippi that tried to gain seats at the 1964 Democratic National Convention. They were denied these seats, an action that illustrated a split in the Democratic Party over the issue of civil rights. Over time, many southern Democrats would bolt from the party.
The violence of Freedom Summer contributed to the growing militancy of the civil rights movement and of American youth as a whole. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC, was made up of many young men and women who became disillusioned with the conventional tactics that characterized the mainstream movement. Some of their leaders began to feel that these tactics were too slow and that they did not lead to the radical change they thought was necessary. SNCC would ultimately expel its white members, but many of the young college students, white and black, who came to the state for Freedom Summer returned to their campuses deeply disillusioned with the state of American democracy. Some—Mario Savio of the University of California at Berkeley, for example—formed the vanguard of the campus free speech movement of the late 1960s.
https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/freedom-summer
No comments:
Post a Comment