In the Mississippi summer of 1964, known as Freedom Summer, civil rights activists intended to register black voters where taxes and tests stymied their rights. After the bodies of student activists were found murdered by the KKK, public outcry eventually led to the passage of civil and voting rights acts.

The Daily Dose provides microlearning history documentaries like this one delivered to your inbox daily: [ Ссылка ]

Learn more: [ Ссылка ]
Subscribe for daily emails: [ Ссылка ]
Become a Patron: [ Ссылка ]

Follow us on social media:
Twitter: [ Ссылка ]
Facebook: [ Ссылка ]
Click to subscribe on YouTube: [ Ссылка ]

#FreedomSummer #CivilRights #VotingRights

Today's Daily Dose short history film covers Freedom Summer, when three civil rights activists were murdered by the KKK when the activists descended on Mississippi intent of registering black voters. The filmmaker has included the original voice over script to further assist your understanding:

Today on The Daily Dose, Freedom Summer.

After Martin Luther King, Jr.’s 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial, the Jim Crow South remained staunchly segregated—especially at the voting booth—where segregationist lawmakers instituted poll taxes and literacy tests intended to stymy Black American’s constitutional rights. Most glaring was Mississippi, where only 7 percent of the state’s eligible Blacks had successfully registered to vote.

Calling for civil rights activists to descend on Mississippi with the intent registering Black voters, Mississippi Project Director Bob Moses insisted on “nonviolence in all situations,” however when the first 300 volunteers arrived on June the 15th, 1964, two white students from New York, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, and local Black activist James Chaney quickly disappeared during a visit to Philadelphia, Mississippi, where they had gone to investigate the burning of a Black church. Despite this quite troubling development, the volunteers pushed ahead with their registration efforts, receiving pushback and violence at almost every turn.

Six weeks later, the badly beaten and bullet-riddled remains of the missing volunteers were recovered, killed by a Ku Klux Klan lynch mob that had the full protection and support by local police. National and international outrage would follow, citing zero federal protection and a slow investigation by local and authorities, the FBI and 400 Navy sailors.

While Freedom Summer did little to increase Black voter participation—a mere 1,200 successful registrants out of 17,000 attempted tries—public outcry combined with the 1964 Democratic National Convention, where delegates from the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party were refused entry. The two events helped to persuade President Lyndon Baines Johnson and congress to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed segregation in public places, while banning employment discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin. Next would come the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which outlawed racial discrimination voting laws in the segregated South. Of the eighteen white men suspected of being involved in the brutal murders, only eight were charged. Seven would eventually be convicted, receiving relatively minor puppet sentences for their crimes.

And there you have it, Freedom Summer, today on The Daily Dose.

свернуть