Freedom Summer, or the Mississippi Summer Project, was a volunteer campaign launched in June 1964 to attempt to register as many African-American voters as possible in Mississippi, which had historically excluded most blacks from voting. The project also set up dozens of Freedom Schools throughout Mississippi to aid the local black population. The projects leadership and funding came from the SNCC and COFO, along with hundreds of white college students in the north. In 1963, the SNCC organized a mock vote for blacks, which gave them a chance to prove they were capable of understanding politics. The civil rights activists from both organizations and the white volunteers from the north faced many challenges during the campaign. The white supremacists, which was almost …show more content…
Newspapers called them "unshaven and unwashed trash". The volunteers' presence in local black communities drew drive-by shootings, Molotov cocktails thrown at host homes, and constant harassment. State and local governments, the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, police, White Citizens' Council, and Ku Klux Klan used arrests, arson, beatings, evictions, firing, murder, spying, and other forms of intimidation and harassment to oppose the project and prevent blacks from registering to vote or achieving social equality. On June 21, 1964, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner were arrested by a sheriff. The three were held in jail until after nightfall, then released. They drove away into an ambush on the road by Klansmen, who abducted and killed them. Goodman and Schwerner were shot at point-blank range. Chaney was shot by Jim Jordan, another klansmen who was in the car when the other two men were shot. After six weeks of searching in which federal law enforcement participated, their bodies were found to have been buried deep under the mud. The men's disappearance the night of their release from jail was reported in the news, shocking the