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Conferences

Freedom Summer 50th Anniversary

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SNCC workers Lawrence Guyot and Sam Walker at COFO (Council of Federated Organizations) office in Gulfport, Mississippi. Courtesy of www.crmvet.org.
SNCC workers Lawrence Guyot and Sam Walker at COFO (Council of Federated Organizations) office in Gulfport, Mississippi. Courtesy of www.crmvet.org.

Fifty years ago, hundreds of student volunteers headed south to join the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s (SNCC) field staff and local people in their fight against white supremacy in Mississippi. This week, veterans of Freedom Summer are gathering at Tougaloo College, just north of Jackson, Mississippi, to commemorate their efforts to remake American democracy.

The 50th anniversary events, however, aren’t only for movement veterans. Students, young organizers, educators, historians, archivists, and local Mississippians make up the nearly one thousand people flocking to Tougaloo’s campus this Wednesday through Saturday. We here at Duke Libraries, as well as members of the SNCC Legacy Project Editorial Board, are in the mix, making connections with both activists and archivists about our forthcoming website, One Person, One Vote: The Legacy of SNCC and the Fight for Voting Rights.

Mississippi Freedom Summer 50th Anniversary. Courtesy of Freedom50.org.
Mississippi Freedom Summer 50th Anniversary. Courtesy of Freedom50.org.

This site will bring together material created in and around SNCC’s struggle for voting rights in the 1960s and pair it with new interpretations of that history by the movement veterans themselves. To pull this off, we’ll be drawing on Duke’s own collection of SNCC-related material, as well as incorporating the wealth of material already digitized by institutions like the University of Southern Mississippi, the Wisconsin Historical Society’s Freedom Summer Collection, the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, as well as others.

What becomes clear while circling through the panels, films, and hallway conversations at Freedom Summer 50th events is how the fight for voting rights is really a story of thousands of local people. The One Person, One Vote site will feature these everyday people – Mississippians like Peggy Jean Connor, Fannie Lou Hamer, Vernon Dahmer, and SNCC workers like Hollis Watkins, Bob Moses, and Charlie Cobb. And the list goes on. It’s not everyday that so many of these people come together under one roof, and we’re doing our share of listening to and connecting with the people whose stories will make up the One Person, One Vote site.

One thought on “Freedom Summer 50th Anniversary”

  1. I find the Duke University sites to be very well organized as well as contain information not otherwise found on the internet.Or at least not easily.
    You have often had articles on influential writers, human rights issues, as well photographers who have made a difference in the world. well done.
    Sarah Leeder
    ~Canadian

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