| Popis: |
FROM THE BEGINNING of direct action work in the South, the student civil rights movement constantly evolved new programs and tactics. While the goals of the programs were always to work toward desegregation and voter registration, the programs often stressed varied approaches to those goals and had different tactical components. Nowhere was this evolutionary process of multidimensional programs more clear than in civil rights work in Mississippi. From the first Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) voter registration project which precipitated the murder by whites of two local blacks, Mississippi represented the strongest bastion of white racism and resistance in the South. Direct action work in Mississippi was dominated by SNCC. However the other three major civil rights groups, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), were also represented in the state and, contrary to the fragmentation and competition among the groups at the national level, they all tried to support each other. By 1962, the four groups joined together to form an umbrella organization called the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO). White violence against blacks increased almost daily and included jailings, beatings, shootings, bombings and murder. The Mississippi movement was nearly stymied. By November of 1963, despite Freedom Days, Freedom Votes, marches, sitins and boycotts, few Mississippi blacks were registered to vote, yet the nation seemed unaware of the situation. The Mississippi movement needed a new direction. COFO proposed a massive summer project aimed at recruiting college students as temporary civil rights workers. The Freedom Summer Project was a direct response to the Mississippi experience. In 1964, more than 650 students from around the country responded to COFO's call to "give a summer to civil rights," and they were called "the volunteers." Overwhelmingly urban and upper-middle class, most were in |
