Democracy in the Delta: Mississippi Freedom Summer and the Democratic Party Project

Freedom Summer

Staughton Lynd speaks with Freedom School teachers in Oxford, Ohio in 1964.

Click the poetry book to read poetry pieces from students of the Freedom Schools.

Civil Rights Movement Archive Inc

In 1964, SNCC started the project "Freedom Schools," a political and philosophical learning environment to supplement Black education in Mississippi. Staughton Lynd was the Freedom School's director. Ella Baker drew upon her experience working on President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal Worker's Education Project from the 1930s to make the first school, McComb's Nonviolent High School's blueprints and curriculum. Prior to the Freedom Schools, the Black children's public schools received four times less state government aid than the White schools.

SNCC and the Council of Federation Organizations increased the Mississippi Delta's low literacy and education rates. In addition, "Freedom Summer" focused national attention on Mississippi's racism when White college-aged allies from the North moved into Mississippi to teach in "Freedom Schools" and help register Black voters.

Two students peeking out a Freedom School window.

Courtesy of Ken Thompson, United Methodist Board of Global Ministries

Early in the Freedom Summer initiative, three participants, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, disappeared. Weeks later, their bodies were found, lynched by members of the Ku Klux Klan.

FBI photo of the burnt car from the lynching of the Freedom Summer participants near Philadelphia, MS.

FBI Missing Poster

FBI

Voter Registration Mission

Ella Baker, Bob Moses, and Amzie Moore, of a local Mississippi NAACP chapter, helped with Black voter registration in the Mississippi Delta. Many lived in impoverished conditions due to low-wage jobs or owned land their families tended to during slavery.

Left to right: Bob Moses, Julian Bond, Curtis Hayes, unidentified, Hollis Watkins, Amzie Moore, and E.W. Steptoe in Mississippi in 1963.

Civil Rights Movement Archive Inc.

Click on the pamphlet for Freedom Day in Hattiesburg to read, “Give Them a Future in Hattiesburg."

Civil Rights Movement Archive Inc.

Ella Baker taught the leaders of SNCC the meaning of self-determination. Through grassroots organizing in the belly of Southern racism, Freedom Summer participants have the tools to fight to end its oppression anywhere. Ella Baker focused on the marginalized groups within the Civil Rights Movement, the rural folk, that national Movement organizations seldomly recognize in their mission.

Click on Ella to hear her “Address at the Hattiesburg Freedom Day Rally” from January 21, 1964.

Voices of Democracy: The U.S. Oratory Project

The Creation of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party

The Freedom Summer initiatives garnered thousands of newly registered voters and paved the way for a more permanent political organization to form.

On August 28, 1963, over 200,000 people and civil rights organizations gathered at the Lincoln Memorial for the March on Washington. When SNCC’s chairman John Lewis turned to address the crowd, he had scrapped his original speech. Instead, he took to the podium and asked, “Where is our party?” “Where was a political party dedicated to civil and political rights of Black Southerners?” The passion-filled speech led to being one of the early catalysts for the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party.

MFDP State Convention in Jackson, August 1964

Civil Rights Movement Archive Inc

The March on Washington | John Lewis: Get in the Way | PBS LearningMediaA coalition of six African American organizations came together in 1963 to organize the historic March on Washington. Their goal was to press the congress to pass a civil rights bill introduced by President Kennedy’s administration. John Lewis chaired one of these organizations, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and was chosen to be the youngest speaker at the march. In the initial draft of his speech, he criticized the president’s bill as weak and too cautious. His elders, eager to preserve the success of the march, pressured Lewis to compromise and tone down his speech.

An Integrated Party | American Experience | PBSOn August 6, 1964 the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party held a statewide convention to elect 68 delegates to attend the Democratic National Convention later that month.

The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) was founded on April 26, 1964, at a state convention at the Masonic Temple in Jackson, MS. The purpose of this party is to encourage Black political participation while challenging the validity of the white bureaucracy that still believed in segregation being the law of the land, plaguing Mississippi’s politics.

Ella Baker gave the keynote speech to 2,500 attendees at the state convention stressing the importance of education within the Black Freedom Struggle. She expresses in her speech, “we have to deal with them on the basis of knowledge that we gain … through sending out children through certain kinds of courses, through sitting down and reading at night instead of spending our time at the television or radio just listening to what’s on.”

The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party's considerations underlying the development of this political party.

Wisconsin Historical Society

Freedom Vote Flyer, 1963.

Civil Rights Movement Archive Inc.

Civil Rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer benefitted from SNCC’s efforts to vote and used her haunting experience getting arrested during a registration mission to get more people to politically participate in her future campaign speeches.

Fannie Lou Hamer and Ella Baker worked together in 1962 and 1963 with SNCC’s first voter registration mission called Freedom Vote.

Left to Right: Fannie Lou Hamer and Ella Baker at the Democratic Party Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey on August 6th, 1964.

Civil Rights Movement Archive Inc

Ella Baker was the Coordinator alongside Fannie Lou Hamer at the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party's Washington, D.C. office.

This letter was sent from Miss Baker to the MFDP Delegates on July 20, 1964.

Civil Rights Movement Archive Inc

Above: African American and white Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party supporters demonstrating outside the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey

Right: Fannie Lou Hamer, Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party delegate, at the 1964 Democratic National Convention.

Library of Congress

The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party sought to be seated instead of the all-white delegation at the 1964 National Democratic Convention in Atlantic City. The MFDP, which included Hamer, denied the compromise of having only two seats out of twenty-four after an intense discussion over if the compromise should be accepted. Fannie Lou is noted for saying, “We didn’t come all this way for no two seats since all of us is tired.”

Though the 1964 Democratic National Convention was seen as a failure, in Baker’s mind, she saw it as an experiment of how far political self-determination has gone a long way in nearly breaking free from the mainstream Mississippi Democratic Party. The Atlantic City DNC also was a pivotal shift in the leadership of SNCC and the rise of the Black Power Movement. Ella soon phased herself out of her founding organization and moved back to Harlem, NY.

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