Freedome summer10/24/2022 ![]() So, too, did two of the most distinguished liberal congressmen of the past half-century: John Lewis and Barney Frank. #Freedome summer freeSo did Mario Savio, who sparked the free speech movement at Berkeley. Susan Brownmiller, author of the landmark Against Our Will, participated in the Freedom Summer campaign. He recalls the creation of a community that featured not only courageous protesters who should be better-known-Robert Moses, Fannie Lou Hamer, Amzie Moore, James Forman-but also brave dissidents who, inspired by their experience down South, became leading figures in subsequent struggles on behalf of feminism, gay and lesbian liberation, the defense of the poor, and other progressive causes. He shows that the Freedom Summer campaign successfully publicized Mississippi’s grotesque pigmentocracy, thus helping to prepare the way for the epochal Voting Rights Act of 1965. He details grievous losses, the most notorious of which were the murders of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner. ![]() He describes beatings, shootings, bombings, arson, threats, and unjustified jailings. Watson vividly chronicles what SNCC and the volunteers faced and accomplished. This stirring episode in the civil rights revolution is often referred to as the Mississippi Freedom Summer campaign. Hundreds, the great majority of whom were white, journeyed to Mississippi to help. SNCC obtained personnel and publicity for these and related activities by issuing a nationwide call for volunteers. Third, it helped to create and sustain the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, an alternative to the state’s lily-white official Democratic Party, and contested the legitimacy of the official delegation at the Democratic National Convention, which nominated Lyndon Baines Johnson for the presidency. Second, it established Freedom Schools in which youngsters learned about black history and their rights as citizens. First, it attempted to register blacks to vote. Founded by the Negro students who had spearheaded the electrifying sit-ins of 1961, SNCC, with the courageous support of local dissidents, pursued three missions. It is, after all, the latest book-length exploration of the remarkable summer of 1964, when the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee mounted a dramatic challenge to the ideology and practice of white supremacy in Mississippi. ![]() Given my project, reading Bruce Watson’s Freedom Summer became obligatory. ![]()
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