Freedom Fighters: Stories from Freedom Summer 1964

McCollum, Anna (2016) Freedom Fighters: Stories from Freedom Summer 1964. Undergraduate thesis, under the direction of Kathleen Wickham from Journalism, The University of Mississippi.

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Abstract

Freedom Summer was a project conducted in Mississippi in 1964 as part of the civil rights movement. It involved hundreds of volunteers and members of the Council of Federated Organizations working to promote education and voter registration among the African American community across the state. The researcher found and interviewed veterans of Freedom Summer in order to write a series of profile stories centered around that subject. She visited them each in their hometowns (besides one phone interview with a woman from Iowa), photographed most of them and spoke to some of their peers for second and third sources. Through this process, the researcher discovered that there was and still is a divide between the Mississippi natives who worked for the civil rights movement and the out-of-state workers, many of whom were from northern universities. She also found that Freedom Summer significantly impacted each of her subjects. Her conclusion was that the stories from Freedom Summer — many of which still have not been told — remain critical to the history of Mississippi, the state that was so greatly marked by the summer of 1964.

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