Freedom Summer Remembered at The Overby Center

To mark the 50^th anniversary of the dramatic events of “Freedom Summer” in Mississippi, The Overby Center for Southern Journalism and Politics at the University of Mississippi sponsored a discussion to further consider its breakthroughs and impact on American history.

The historical significance of the Freedom Summer in 1964 was that it was a campaign organized with the purpose of engaging college students to volunteer to fight for civil rights in the state of Mississippi by encouraging them to take part in voter registration and further education programs for blacks, which these ideals angered many Mississippi politicians. Also during this historical period, on June 21, 1964, three young volunteers disappeared in Neshoba County. The bodies of Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman and James Chaney were found 44 days later buried in Philadelphia, MS. This incident prompted involvement from the FBI and increased national media attention. 

To review and remember this dramatic period, the Overby Center panel featured three panelists, including: Roy DeBerry, who was a young activist in Holly Springs that summer who helped show the volunteers the dangerous “lay of the land” in his area, Susan Glisson, executive director of the William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation at Ole Miss, as well as the speaker, Charles K. Ross, director of African-American Studies and an associate professor of history at Ole Miss. The Freedom Summer panel was also moderated by Overby Fellow Curtis Wilkie, who covered Freedom Summer activities in the Delta when he was a young reporter for the Clarksdale Press Register.

The featured speaker, Roy DeBerry is now involved with the Hill Country Project, collecting interviews with people who helped integrate schools during the civil rights movement and evoked at the panel “with voting registration, you could be killed, beaten, lose your job, kicked out of your home for attempting registering to vote."

Another speaker, Susan Glisson who helped organize the “Philadelphia Coalition,” a group of Mississippians primarily based in Neshoba County who led a local effort to prosecute and convict those responsible for the murders, expressed at the panel that the community during 1964 held conversations, in which “through these conversations, they brought trust, relationships, and it became obvious to them that what they needed to do was call for justice.”

The well-spoken speaker, Charles K. Ross, who is the director of African-American Studies and an associate professor of history at Ole Miss, provided a historical perspective – a half-century after “Freedom Summer” at the panel evoked that during the summer of 1964 that “the ideology is that you have a right to vote as a citizen.”

So, these three speakers helped to further express to current college students at the University of Mississippi that important of the Freedom Summer’s 50^th anniversary as a project that was a catalyst for a traumatic season of both violence and hope that changed the history of the state of Mississippi, as well as the nation.