MISSISSIPPI

Two African American boys help out in the Hattiesburg, Mississippi, “Freedom Press” office during the Freedom Vote campaign of 1963. The campaign was an effort to increase black voter registration.

During the early 1960s, different groups and leaders experimented with a variety of tactics and strategies. SNCC and CORE organizers carved out a critical base as they fanned out across the South and established community-based projects to help support and sustain local organizing efforts around voting and mass protests against segregation.

In the summer of 1960, Robert P. Moses, a 26-year-old high school teacher from New York, traveled through Mississippi to recruit people for a SNCC conference to be held that fall. On the advice of Ella Baker, Moses sought out Amzie Moore, an NAACP leader in Cleveland, who told Moses about how white terrorism had crippled voter registration efforts in Mississippi. With Moore's encouragement, Moses and a team of SNCC workers returned the following summer prepared to live and organize in what was the poorest and the most violently racist state in the nation.

The SNCC organizers joined with other civil rights activists in the state, including members of CORE, SCLC, and the NAACP, and created the Congress of Federated Organizations (COFO) to unify the efforts of all civil rights groups operating in Mississippi. Late in 1961 COFO's efforts won financial support from the newly established Voter Education Project, a foundation-based organization that Attorney General Robert Kennedy helped to establish.

However, while the Kennedy administration, like the Eisenhower administration before it, was supportive of voter registration, it was not prepared to offer federal protection to those who sought to register—often in the face of violence, economic harassment, and, in some cases, death. The murder of Herbert Lee in 1961 and the beating and jailing of other voting rights activists had the desired effect. During 1962 and 1963, less than 4000 black voters were added to the rolls while 394,000 black adults in Mississippi remained unregistered.

The NAACP in Mississippi, under field director Medgar Evers, supported several desegregation efforts during this period. In 1962 NAACP lawyers secured a federal court order to gain the admission of the first African American to the University of Mississippi. Riots engulfed the campus on the eve of James Meredith's enrollment, claiming two lives and injuring hundreds of others. The Kennedy administration sent federal troops to restore order, and federal marshals remained on campus to protect Meredith.

The desegregation of Ole Miss encouraged Evers to revive the campaign against segregation in Jackson. SNCC workers offered training sessions for sit-ins. In the spring of 1963, students sat in at Woolworth's and attempted to gain admission to the public library and "whites-only" public parks, and organized protest marches in downtown Jackson. The demonstrators were beaten by police and arrested. On June 12, 1963, as he returned from a strategy meeting, Medgar Evers was gunned down in the driveway of his house.