Sunday, September 3, 2017

How did the Freedom Summer Project help to build the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party? Use three points to support your argument.

Freedom Summer, also known as the Mississippi Summer Project, was a voter registration drive in Mississippi in 1964. Black and white youths bused themselves to Mississippi and went into mostly rural areas to register Black people to vote and to expand literacy. A voter registration drive was first launched in 1961 by Robert Moses, who was at that time the leader of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).
The project, unfortunately, didn't succeed in registering as many new voters as the volunteers had hoped. Intimidation and even murder, culminating with the abductions of Michael "Mickey" Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman—three Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) field workers in Philadelphia, Mississippi—discouraged people from challenging the status quo in Mississippi. Thus, the Freedom workers' goal shifted toward drawing national attention to the problem of the disenfranchisement of Black voters in Mississippi—a violation of the Fifteenth Amendment.
The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) was founded in April 1964 and set out to delegitimize the Mississippi Democratic Party at the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey, that year. For decades, segregationist Democrats, or "Dixiecrats," sent the same incumbent representatives to Congress. Their power went unchallenged as long as they upheld segregation and the motto of "states' rights": a euphemism for disregarding federal mandates related to integration and the extension of civil rights to Black citizens.
So, to answer your question more directly, Freedom Summer helped to build the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) in the following three ways:
1. It exposed the unconstitutional violation of Black citizens' rights to vote at the national level.
2. It exposed the violent intimidation that was directed at Black voters and those who tried to help Black people register to vote.
3. It cultivated a group of homegrown activists, including Fannie Lou Hamer, who were present at the Democratic National Convention in 1964.
http://content.wisconsinhistory.org/cdm/ref/collection/p15932coll2/id/18091

http://content.wisconsinhistory.org/cdm/ref/collection/p15932coll2/id/44770

https://snccdigital.org/inside-sncc/alliances-relationships/mfdp/

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