The 15th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America, passed by Congress in 1869. The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. During Reconstruction, federal troops occupied Mississippi. Among the laws they enforced was the constitutional amendment guaranteeing a right of all men to vote.
And the newly freed slaves did vote. With blacks in the majority in Mississippi, this state sent two black senators and one black congressman to Washington. At least 200 other blacks held public office.
They were Republicans, the party of Lincoln. They were deeply engaged in the legislative process. We had individuals get elected to office across the state because they understood the value of impacting public policy and being actively engaged. They understood the value of coming from a position of slavery and servitude to being full citizens.
But many white Southerners did not support black equality. Even worse, they took the law into their own hands. It's murder and terror and violence preventing blacks from voting or doing this political work that they have been doing.
By the mid-1870s, Reconstruction was over and the federal troops were gone. They pulled out the support for the newly freed people. So, uh... Kluke Klan and the White Lioners took over.
There was mass killing and coup d'etats taking place all across the state of Mississippi, reversing a trend that had begun right after the Civil War of full participation of all of Mississippi's citizens. And in 1890, Mississippi adopted a new constitution. Literacy tests and poll taxes, which prevented a large number of blacks from voting, became law. Mississippi reverted back. It wasn't a system of slavery, but it was a system of segregation.
It made it illegal for blacks and whites to marry. It made it illegal for blacks and whites to attend school together. It made it illegal for blacks to vote without passing literacy tests and having grandfather clauses and poll taxes. For the next 75 years, it was slavery, but by another name, Jim Crow.
The 15th Amendment, guaranteeing the right to vote, went unenforced. African Americans in Mississippi were unequaled under the law. For most, life was little or no better than under slavery. People really did live as if it was the Middle Ages. They were thieves on the plantations.
If they got to go to school, they got to go to school for only a few months a year during the wintertime when there was nothing to do. Otherwise, they were just animals for labor on the plantation. They were living in virtual slavery then. They didn't have no rights. They had to get up and go to work when they say.
Couldn't leave the plantation. In order to change their status, blacks had to be able to vote. But the government and the Klan enforced the poll taxes and literacy laws enacted in 1890. Blacks attempting to register had to know the state constitution. Nehelo.
Old cigar box or something here, all this section of the Constitution, he'd shake it up and tell you to pick a number. Then you had to cite whatever number he'd pick out, the section of the Constitution, exactly word by word. Most of the time, it was just a farce, and that made it worse when they would pick an impossible...
question. White people didn't have to go through all of that. And for most blacks, the poll taxes were outrageously expensive.
That poll tax in some areas of the state could equate a month's pay for them. It could equate to two weeks'pay. It was a significant amount. Because African Americans were being exploited for cheap labor.
They were not paid much for their labor, so only those who had a little bit more means could even afford to pay a poll tax. Whites also threatened the livelihoods and lives of blacks who tried to register. Many times they talk about literally being shot and killed. They talk about how their houses were destroyed. people.
They talk about how they might lose the job that they had. How are they going to feed? But World War II veterans returning to Mississippi after risking their lives for their country discovered that they were not allowed even the basic right of voting.
As they began to demand their due, the modern civil rights movement began. Violence increased. Mississippi had more lynchings than any other state.
People were getting killed. You had a resistance built in, the poll taxes, the literacy test. We had less black people voting in 1960 than we had in 1950. White Mississippians were talking about and saying that black people didn't want to vote.
But not wanting to vote was far from the truth. such as Medgar Evers and Aaron Henry, crusaded for voting rights. They wanted to make sure that citizens of this country could cast their vote free of intimidation and vote suppression methods such as poll tax.
Those individuals formed the base of the NAACP across the state. They also became a support network for young students and others. One of them was Bob Moses, a teacher from New York. He came to Mississippi and they began to organize across the state.
So we actually start the project in the southwest corner of the state. Macomb, where less than 1% of eligible blacks were registered to vote. Statewide, the number was closer to 5%.
Macomb is where Hollis Watkins met Bob Moses. He was working on voter registration, trying to get... Black people registered to vote so that they could begin to run and occupy political positions.
So I told them I definitely would be willing to be a part of that. A native of the region, Watkins talked with friends, neighbors, and anyone who would listen. What is it that you have to lose? White people are killing black people anyway, for no reason at all.
We know that. So, if by chance you end up losing your life, you know, for doing something that need to be done that will benefit your people as a whole, then you ought to be willing to do that because you don't know whether they are coming to take your life later on today or tomorrow for no reason at all other than you just being black. Understandably, though, people were reluctant to register. They looked at that as being something that was against the status quo.
It was something that would bring about serious harm, possibly death, to them if they attempted to register to vote. Still, people understood the need for the ballot. People want work.
They want employment. They want to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, this kind of thing. And not be knocked down every time you try to make change. Education was the key to employment, to jobs, to security.
You had no access to education if you didn't have a vote. So the cycle continued. By the early 1960s, civil rights protests in Mississippi were gaining momentum and attention.
The Freedom Rides had ended in Jackson. James Murdett had entered the University of Mississippi and in 1963 NAACP field secretary Medgar Evers was murdered. Medgar's assassination really shifted the consciousness of some people in the country and began the path where the action in Mississippi began to take on.
Our national importance. Nonetheless, black voter registration was still quite low. By the fall of 1963, we had had a 90% failure rate.
And we had probably brought 90 to 100,000 black people to take the test, and only a few thousand ever passed it. Then it becomes clear to us, well, this road into... voter registration has sort of come to an end.
It's at that point that we think about running people. We had run people four of us, but now we're thinking... Let's do that on a bigger scale.
They designed mock elections to teach people how to vote, and they moved to Greenwood. Greenwood was chosen not because it would be any easier than McColl. If anything, the Delta was going to be much harder.
But we might as well send people into the most difficult place of all and use Greenwood as an anchor and build out from there. We set up our own parallel machinery so people could register to vote if they couldn't register at the courthouse. Aaron Henry ran for governor. Ed King was the candidate for lieutenant governor. Bob Moses came to me and said, we want to make this an interracial ticket.
And we need to show that black people are willing to vote for a white candidate who supports their same goals. So candidates of both colors talked about the issues pertinent to the disenfranchised. Better education, employment and job training for rural workers, black or whites, as the plantations were mechanized. We would set up ballot boxes in churches, in pool halls.
And Duke joins and let the people have a real ballot to mark. We knew we wouldn't be elected because we weren't on the real ballot, but the feel was that of a real election. Then, in November 1963, they held the Freedom Vote. When we had the Freedom Vote, you know, we had somewhere in the neighborhood of 84,000 people that participated in that, proved that. If this thing is open and fair, black people will definitely register and they will definitely participate on election day through the process of voting.
Outsiders came to help with this freedom vote. One of them was Al Lowenstein. People who run Mississippi today can only do so by force. They cannot allow a free election in Mississippi because if they did, they wouldn't run Mississippi. Al brings...
Students from Yale and Stanford down to participate in those elections. With the white students involved, the violence against blacks decreased drastically. An idea emerged.
Bring white students to Mississippi for a summer-long voter registration project. Not everyone thought this was a good idea. I was opposed to a large number of people coming down from the North. For the 1964 Summer Prize.
It was my feeling that to bring all of these young people from the North, they would take over and begin to do everything that needed to be done. Taking the initiative that we had worked so hard to bring about, taking that away from the local community people. But after a few months, they're going to be gone. And then there were others. who felt that this was very dangerous.
But what I thought was if we did not get American attention, those 30 or 40 local people are going to lose their jobs, one or two are going to be killed in each county, and we're not going to be able to even do the grassroots work. So that was the debate. The discussion continued until they received a critical phone call.
Lewis Allen was a black activist in Ahmed County who had witnessed... a racial murder and later talked to the FBI. Now, Lewis Allen had been murdered. I think that was really the turning point in this is that brought everybody more together around that you're going to have to do something else because we're dying. I put my weight behind the idea of the summer project and we moved forward from there.
We hope to to send into Mississippi this summer upwards of 1,000 teachers, ministers, lawyers, and students from all around the country. When we announced that we were going to have this summer project and Mississippi went bonkers and they started forming the League of White Racists, whatever they call themselves, right, you got editorials in the national paper, you know. Attacking us as wanting to start another civil war.
Because in one sense, as you can see, we were actually in a war. It was really strategic planning, except that one camp was unarmed, except in terms of ideas. commitment and there was another camp that was on. And the organizers began recruiting volunteers. The initial recruitment was done through the contacts that Al Lowenstein had at both Yale and Stanford.
And so that happened in the spring of 1964 across the college campuses. The recruitment, the screening. and getting the volunteers to come down. So we felt that you got what we call the children of the Constitution, which were the white kids to come in to bring more attention as people are going to be concerned about their children. I recruited students at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, this kind of thing, and I was in touch with some college chaplains.
So I always felt like... Like, do they really realize what we're asking them to do? But basically, we're asking them to come and die with us. Because we were going to have a showdown. We were going to bring everything to a head that we could in Freedom Summer.
These young people believed in democracy. And I think that they were volunteering because they were like true Americans. What they were saying is, I'm here to right a wrong that's being done to this country and democracy. They saw these people suffering.
Why are people suffering? I mean, just listen. It's the basic right, the right to vote.
I think a lot of people didn't, young people didn't understand this. And through the National Council of Churches, organizers set up training sessions at what was then Western College for Women in Oxford, Ohio. Very little of it was actually classroom. People sat out on the grass around, you know, in the shade of a tree and sat in a circle and talked. It was both to get to know the volunteers, to get a sense of who they were and what they were about.
and let them get a sense of us to talk about specific programs that were going on in different parts of the state. There was a good deal of role playing and discussion about what they might face in the state when they came to the state. A minister from Iowa and summer volunteer, Rams Barber, stayed with a local family in Canton. They were sticking their necks out, you know.
I mean the people who who housed us, the white folks knew who was doing it. The police drove by and knew where you stayed and who was keeping you and all that sort of thing. So it was dangerous for them. But the main message was just being in Mississippi.
part of the black community. If you just go and you actually figure out how you can just be a person who is living in this family. in this black community and getting to know the people that you are living with. Because with you comes the country, and the country will see through your eyes. And so all you have to do is be there and survive.
And they meant survive. In the Ohio training sessions, organizers emphasized the risks. We have to make sure we say to everyone and be very specific and clear. And that is, if you're coming to Mississippi, you must know that you should be prepared to be beaten, to go to jail, and to be killed.
And if you're not prepared for all three of those, we suggest that you go back home and do whatever you can to aid and assist the movement from there. President Johnson has ordered 200 Marines and eight helicopters to join in the search for three civil rights workers missing in Mississippi. In the first days of the Mississippi Summer Project, three volunteers went missing.
The whole state is poised around these people who are coming that they think of as invaders, and here comes a small party, right, an advance to guard, so to speak. One of the volunteers was Mickey Schwerner. He and his wife Rita had arrived at Meridian in January.
James Chaney was a native Mississippian, and Andrew Goodman had been in Mississippi just over 24 hours. The three headed to Neshoba County to investigate a church that had been burned and to support the parishioners. America learned much later that all three had been murdered by local law enforcement. law enforcement.
But first, they searched. We had checked every jail, every hospital for four or five counties and figured they hadn't been in a car wreck or the hospital would, you know, admit to having them. We didn't believe the jailers.
Although the three were classified as missing, Moses was certain they were dead. At the Ohio training session, he spoke to the volunteers about to leave for Mississippi. My concern is that they really understand on a deeper level what they have gotten themselves into. That you live in a country where law enforcement officers will murder students because they are doing something that they think is contrary to their beliefs about how this country should run itself. My whole point was to make clear to them that those young people were dead and they should not go down unless they were willing to face that.
When the word was announced, to me, I saw a certain degree of disbelief. I saw expressions of sadness. I saw expressions of indecisiveness. And after After a song or so was sang, then I saw a collectiveness process begin to take place where people kind of collected themselves and began to say, I'm going on to Mississippi.
The federal government offered a $25,000 reward for information. But FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover was saying... They've been seen in Brazil and all this stuff here. They're not really missing.
This is a ploy on the part of the civil rights workers to get attention, you know. And all the time, they knew where the bodies were. At Tougaloo College, Ed King was receiving information from two women near the scene of the murders.
They disappeared on Sunday. I was told by Thursday that the bodies were in a new dam. under construction.
The search for the missing volunteers continued for 44 days. They were finding bodies from the time of June when the kids were missing, Cheney and them were missing. To that period of time as they were finding bodies. It also opened up the reality this was not an anomaly, this was not an exception, this was the step, the way in which Mississippi operated.
And that those black bodies did not have the same value as those two individuals who happened to be from New York. I will never forget the night of August the 2nd. We were at Mount Olive Baptist Church.
Folk singer Pete Seeger was in the middle of a concert. I remember someone whispered to him, and before he sung this next song, he said, I have something to announce to you. They have found the bodies.
Then all of a sudden we stood up and we joined hands and we started singing We Shall Overcome. We were determined then they shall not have died in vain. So instead of intimidating us, it had the opposite effect on us. And I think the deaths of Cheney, Goodman, and Schwerner only accelerated the realities of the terror that Mississippians were living in. My fellow Americans, I am about to sign into law the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Although Mississippi Senators fought against the bill, the state watched as President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act on July 2nd.
We believe that all men are entitled to the blessings of liberty. Yet millions are being deprived of those blessings. Not because of their own failures, but because of the color of their skin.
When the Civil Rights Act had been passed, In the past, you know, to me it says finally at least the federal government seems as if it is listening and looking at the atrocities and things that we as black people have had to go through and are still going through and is going to at least... Get one of the feet that's on us and our necks, we're going to get it off where we can breathe, catch some fresh air, and do something that we've had a right to do all of our lives. But in spite of all his promise, the Civil Rights Act did not contain any voting provisions.
We wanted to keep the focus on voting rights and did not want people celebrating a victory over a lunch counter and a cup of coffee as if we had reached, you know, the greatest achievement that could happen. The Mississippi Summer Project volunteers dug in. They canvassed from door to door. Sit around the kitchen table and talk about What they wanted in life and how they'd like to see their community changed for the better.
We used school boards as examples in the voter registration drives. And people would say, well, what difference does it make? Why should I risk my job or risk my life or risk my home being burned just to try to register to vote? And then we could talk about not who you might elect for governor or senator. but what about the local school board?
And then we'd move on to what if there was a difference in the local sheriff? But an example, that plane, I think shows how little opportunity people had at the grassroots level to work for their own change and their own survival. The Canton police would follow us and park their car out in the street. When we went out to a door, people would peep out the window and say, Go away, come back some other time.
I can't talk to you when the cops are out there. So they were effective at intimidating some people so they wouldn't talk to us. We had other people who were still afraid to try to register to vote, that they'd lose their job, but who said, I will feed people.
I'll bring food down to the church three nights a week. Volunteers faced even bigger challenges in the Delta. We had to sleep on the plantations and work just to talk to people because you couldn't, you couldn't, you know, just drive up there. They wore overalls.
It was made into a fad, but it really wasn't that, that was our way of not being identified. So we could, we could walk among the people. You know, we couldn't, they couldn't readily identify us unless they had other ways.
Although the focus was on voter registration, Freedom Summer organizers realized other areas needed attention. So we brought in issues of focus around health care, a medical group that came in, education, went to development of the Freedom Schools and others. So we tried to touch on all of those particular issues that were confronting to people in the state and right now. the countries.
Medical was the medical committee for human rights. The few physicians here and when I say the few physicians here, Dr. Britton and Anderson and myself found that The summer project was coming that was supposed to bring thousands of volunteers to the state of Mississippi. We said, well, my God, who's going to take care of all these people?
At least the southern branch of the Medical Committee for Human Rights began in my office that week before the summer project began. Education became freedom schools. Now the freedom schools were... were different.
The citizenship education piece was basically about preparing people to be able to read and write. To be able to pass that literacy test that was given. But the Freedom School was about academics.
It was about getting people to understand their duties and their rights. It was about getting them to... Overcome fear as a part of that. It was more so as I look at it about leadership development. Freedom schools were a huge success.
Thousands of students, both young and old, attended. But the focus remained on voting rights. We had to be people that any time the state intervened and arrested us or did something to us.
Then prima facie, the reason is because they are doing voter registration work. And through the long, hot Mississippi summer, voter registration continued. I'm here to mobilize support for the Freedom Democratic Party. And to support the tremendous quest for the right to vote on the part of the people of the state of Mississippi in the midst of bombings, of murders, and many of the other difficult experiences that the Negro people are facing here along with their allies in the white community. Just as the violence against blacks had its roots in Reconstruction, so did the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party.
After the federal troops pulled out and blacks who were Republican were prevented from voting, the Mississippi State Legislature became solidly Democratic. In 1964, every state senator or representative was a white Democrat, a Dixiecrat. Whites ran under the Democratic banner because it was the Republican president that they fell, took their way of life.
And so you fast forward some hundred plus years, you have... A state political party that decided that the political platform of the state party for individuals to participate would be a segregated platform. We had attempted to go to precinct caucus meetings of the regular Democratic Party and they close the door on our face, I mean in our faces. In some cases they see us coming when it was only two or three of them. them, they get in a vehicle and drive off.
We wanted to exchange a corrupt system, a system, or a party that was discriminatory to one that was open and free for all people to come and be a part of. So we tried to talk about how you get in the back door and that's to replicate the Democratic Party process with the exception of the fact that you didn't have to go through all the testing that they had. You didn't have to count the number of peas in the jar where they had to estimate it. Vote.
Voter registration during Freedom Summer took a two-fold approach. There was the legal registration with the state, and there were freedom registrations with the new Democratic Party. They demonstrated that people wanted to participate, to vote. We were attempting to prove that people were able to be involved and could run their own county conventions and that sort of thing.
So we had lots of people, thousands of people registered with the Freedom Democratic Party. Organizers wanted a political system that was free and open to all. To open up this state, the new Mississippi Freedom Democrats soon realized that they needed to work nationally. The initial idea came from a volunteer. Lowenstein suggested that we go to the Democratic Convention and not just do things within the state.
And we decided, well, that's crazy, but that's a good idea. And we begin the process of thinking about challenging the Mississippi State Democratic Party at the National Convention. Every delegate representing Mississippi at that time that national convention would be white. And these Democrats openly and defiantly supported the Republican Party's nominee, Barry Goldwater. In order to effectively challenge the Mississippi delegation and be seated at the convention, everyone in the Freedom Democratic Party had to follow exactly the established procedures and procedures.
and bylaws of the National Democratic Party. We were developing the MFDP, Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. And so the local people learned, and we followed the rules of the state on how to organize a party and a delegation to a national convention. We had hundreds of these local precinct meetings around the state, then had to move to a county meeting, then to a congressional district. The last step.
up was the state convention. It convened on August 6th at the Masonic Temple in Jackson. They elected 68 delegates to the Democratic National Convention.
The delegates who came through were going to be people who could stand up, would not be afraid in the kind of intense scrutiny and, you know, the political atmosphere of a convention, that they were going to be people who could look you straight in the eye. and say what they thought. So we were excited because they had violated all of the rules and we had followed all of the rules and we were going into Atlantic City.
Parallel to the lead up and state convention, organizers were also working outside of Mississippi. We had pledges of support from Michigan to New England to California, where the people. had said we want to support the Mississippi fight.
When we got to the convention, some people thought our cause was so pure that we would win totally. And it was almost like a guarantee that we were going to be seated. But other forces were at work.
Lyndon Johnson, who had become president after John Kennedy was assassinated, wanted to receive his official nomination at a non-contentions convention. Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota was the frontrunner for vice president. To get the vice presidency, he would have to bring a resolution to the Freedom Democratic Party's challenge, right?
He would have to figure out how to resolve that so it didn't split the party apart. Some in the traditional Democratic Party worked to erode the support their challengers had gathered. The Freedom Democrats'first step was to present their case to the Credentials Committee. We expected to lose at the Credentials Committee, but that what we would then force was a vote, an open vote at the convention itself and get a minority report. And we had the votes to do that.
And that would have meant a discussion on national television of racism at the heart of American political institutions. In 1964, all aspects of the convention were televised. Fannie Lou Hamer was one of the Freedom Democrats who was scheduled to speak in front of the Credentials Committee.
When she got ready to testify, Johnson went on national TV to... Obliterate her testimony, but they replayed it that night and flooded the convention with telegrams. Her testimony really moved people.
And if the Freedom Democratic Party is not seated now, I question America. Is this America? The land of the free and the home of the brave? Well, we have to sleep with our telephones off of the hook because our lives be threatened daily because we want to live as decent human beings in America. And you got the world seeing this on TV.
You got to do something now. So President Johnson's people offered a compromise. The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party could attend the convention, but not vote.
The delegation rejected this. What we wanted was a traditional political settlement that you would split the votes and the seats between two rival parties. You didn't want to send any of them home.
But if they all... had half a vote, then you could add 50 new people from a rival delegation and let them be part of it. Although this compromise was precedented, the White House rejected this offer, and Johnson didn't want the challenge to reach the floor of the convention. Humphrey knew the consequences of continuing discord. Humphrey outlined that the president has said he understands the South.
If we hold through the election, The white South is going to become solidly Republican because of what you people in the MFDP are doing. Moreover, if he became vice president, Humphrey would bring the disenfranchised people better medical care. And if we elect Johnson, we'll get socialized medicine and we will get better welfare.
We will get better education in the schools. We'll work. To support labor unions, which the South needs.
We will do better things for senior citizens. Social security will be improved. And if you understand all of that, you may not understand what a terrible war we're having in Vietnam.
And the peace of the world is at stake. But the Freedom delegates still thought they should be seated. When Humphrey refused, Mrs. Hamer spoke directly to him.
She said, Senator Humphrey, if you take this job this way, with this kind of compromise, you will never be able to do anything for world peace, for education, for old Americans. You'll never be able. Senator Humphrey, I'm going to have to pray to Jesus for you. He would not meet with her after that.
Finally, on Wednesday. Five full days after arriving in Atlantic City, some of the Freedom Democrats were called to a meeting at Humphreys Hotel. They were told to accept a compromise. The regular Democratic delegates would be required to pledge support for President Johnson. There would be new rules guaranteeing blacks'participation for future conventions.
Aaron Henry and Ed King would be seated as at-large delegates. The rest of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party could attend but not vote. Ed King offered to give up his seat so Mrs. Hamer could be seated instead.
And then we were told absolutely no because Mrs. Hamer cannot be in this. That's really not, as we saw it, a compromise. And then on top of that, they wanted to name the two people that was to be seated.
So that's kind of like saying, turn over to us all of that which you have, and we will examine it and tell you which of it is legitimate. And to me, that was a huge slap in the face. The president was naming for black Mississippians who their leaders would be and even Aaron said that's too much like the plantation. Everybody know just like we know the Democratic Party did not follow.
its own rules and processes to get people to this point and we went exactly according to the process and we still were being shoved as we say pushed to the curb. Others thought two seats would show progress. The Freedom Democrats meeting with Humphrey said that the entire delegation had to decide on this latest offer. About that time one of Humphrey's aides came in and said The television has just announced that the MFDP has accepted this.
All the TV cameras are outside because, unbeknownst to us, the Credentials Committee has also agreed to this. So they had worked out this deal. The Credentials Committee was going to announce it, and then we were going to announce it. So that didn't happen.
What we did instead was protest. After the fact, the entire delegation met at Union Baptist Church. The delegation said no, and they said it with pride, and it was a powerful decision.
They would not play by the ordinary rules if the ordinary rules meant something as conniving and twisted as that. That Wednesday evening, the Mississippi Freedom Democrats were on the floor of the convention. The white regular Democrats had already gone home, and their seats had been removed.
The Freedom Democrats watched as Lyndon Johnson was nominated by acclamation. Their voices were never heard. The next day, they went home.
Seeing some of the accomplishments that was made, you felt good about that. But at the same time, we knew that the things that we stood for... Things that we were fighting for, that fight still had to continue. We still hadn't resolved the problem of humanity being considered human.
It forced the nation to face the fact that African Americans in Mississippi were not being treated with equal protection under the law that is to be afforded to all citizens. It changed the course of history, not only for Mississippi, not only for the South, but for the nation. It's a lead-fied sense that I'm not going to vote for Lyndon Johnson.
With even the Democratic governor voting Republican, Mississippi party politics shifted away from its solidly Democratic base. The very notion that African Americans are equal. to whites in this state is something that many whites could not, they could not take. And so we've seen from that point a mass exodus of whites in Mississippi leaving the party going to the Republican Party.
But the Freedom Democrats, who had been rebuffed by President Johnson, actually campaigned for him in his run against Republican Barry Goldwater. From that moment on he Here and in other southern states, there was an effort to get a new black leadership from an upper middle class group who could play by traditional rules. Humphrey came in with the war on poverty and openly saying that that would be a way to build a new interracial democratic party. But it still wasn't egalitarian. Whoever the black leaders were that emerged would have to be acceptable.
In the months following Freedom Summer, black voter registration remained low. 6.7% of the eligible, under the 15th Amendment, eligible African American population in Mississippi was registered to vote, which was, even compared to other southern states, was remarkably low. Then, on August 6, 1965, President Lyndon Johnson signed another piece of landmark legislation, the Voting Rights Act. We then began to see a tremendous increase in participation of African Americans in the electoral process. They wanted to have a voice that in the democracy, public policy is developed and determined at the polling place.
Robert Chin saw the impact in Canton. He had flown registrars to come in and set up office down on Peace Street. And man, we got folks registered.
We got thousands of folks registered in Madison County that year. By 1968, the next presidential election, close to 60% of Mississippi African Americans were registered, which was the highest in the region. But what was not accounted for was this thing called redistricting. The largely black Mississippi Delta had long been the second congressional district.
When the Voting Rights Act became law, Mississippi redrew the boundary lines so that the black population fell into four separate congressional districts. In essence, they nullify that which the Voting Rights Act. was supposed to have given us. Dividing the Delta area up between four different congressional districts made sure that black people in Mississippi would not be able to elect a representative of their choosing.
Or, if voters did elect a black official, his authority would be mitigated by the majority whites. So it's like you celebrate this victory and you're wondering what is happening to you. Later you find out that you've been tricked, sidestepped again.
It took State Senator Henry Kirksey 14 years and 9 trips to the United States Supreme Court to get more equitable district lines drawn. Well, I feel this is a great step. This will open the door up for other people of my race.
And I think this is going to change the thinking of some of our people who have been reluctant about using the ballot. 1967 marked another voting milestone in Mississippi. Robert G. Clark was elected to the Statehouse.
He was the first black legislator since Reconstruction. Perhaps more significant than his election to the legislature was that on the municipal level, you had a number of African Americans who were elected in that time. But it was in majority black counties and cities that you really saw the exercise of African American voting power.
By the summer of 1968, four years had passed. since the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party had challenged at the National Democratic Convention. We had won a ruling that at the next Democratic Convention, 1968, and forever after, you could not exclude any group. And by the time of 68, that meant women, and it meant college students.
And over the next 30 years, it meant Hispanics and American Indians or any kind of a subgroup which could prove that they were denied their rights as Americans. The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party was once again headed to the National Convention, and they were seated, at least some. The delegates included members from the NAACP, the Freedom Democrats, as well as Young Democrats.
It was a loyalist delegation, people that identified with the National Democratic Party. The 70s. Most Mississippi schools desegregated.
William Waller and later William Winter were elected governor. They were men who were progressive on race and the increased black vote helped put them in office. And while there was still a dearth on the statewide level, by the middle of the 1970s... Mississippi had more black elected officials than any other southern state.
In our election 2014 coverage, Mississippi voters will have to follow new voter ID laws when they go to the polls for the primaries tomorrow. We're still fighting 1960 fights. Voter ID is the one that we're facing with right now.
Every study that's been done shows that it will have a disparate impact on African-Americans, on the poor, on the elderly. All you gotta do is... This amount of discouraged 10 or 15 percent in the whole complexion of any election changes. Why shouldn't we have early voting? Why shouldn't we have same-day registration?
We have the systems in place. You show up, you present your information, you can register and you can vote on the spot. That's a free, open democracy.
And today, activists are also concerned about the recent Supreme Court changes in the Voting Rights Act. They removed the pre-clearance provision for the old segregationist states, essentially. The state of Mississippi, or any other state, really is unfettered. and the way in which they change election laws. And if we don't do something about those, then it's gonna be some more sad days in Mississippi and this country.
as a whole. But evolving demographics also hold potential for change. Mississippi in 20 years is not going to look like Mississippi of today, and it's certainly not going to look like Mississippi of 20 years ago.
Older voters, people who went to segregated schools, tend to vote along racial lines. Once they leave the electorate, they're going to be replaced by voters that are not nearly as conservative as they are. The stasis that has persisted through Mississippi politics for a long time may well reach a pretty radical level.
breaking point in the next 10 to 20 years. So today is, we could figure out, how do you get the students to make that same stand? I think the young people have to be at the forefront of... combating the things that discriminate against people that live in this country, and they also have to be at the forefront of providing solutions that open this country up to everybody that's here.
And then what can we do to change the things that have deprived a lot of Mississippians of the quality of life and the respect, the rights that they deserve? And look around where you live, and if you do that, you will find a lot of things that need to be done away with, a lot of things that need to be changed for the better. If there are organizations that are already working on those, see about joining those. If there are not organizations, then look at starting one. But the civil rights veterans aren't resting either.
The struggle continues and you know there's no stop in place. You can retreat for a minute but the struggle goes on. ...rush off their hands and say it's done. It's not done. It's almost just begun.
With all of what is going on, with all of the things that need to be done, as long as I have some strength and energy to do something to make that better, I want to be found doing that. You can find out more information about the many aspects of Freedom Summer and take a sample literacy test at our website at mpbonline.org slash 1964. The real heroes of the movement, in my opinion, were the local people still. The people who lived in the backwoods and stuff like that, we still don't know what happened to a lot of them.
You know, and they had to face this by themselves on a daily basis. So their willingness to stand up and go to the polls and to go to Atlantic City, I mean, took much, much more courage than a lot of us who were not from Mississippi. Many people that we know nothing about, we don't talk about, that did so much to make it possible that, you know, I could do the little I did.
You know, so I'm always humbled by the thought of what they went through.