Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee

==1964 Freedom Summer==
In the fall of 1963, with the assistance of 100 northern volunteers SNCC conducted the [[1963 Freedom Ballot|Freedom Ballot]], a mock gubernatorial election in which over 80,000 black Mississippians demonstrated their willingness to exercise the constitutional right to vote that state law and violent intimidation had denied them since [[Reconstruction era|Reconstruction]].<ref>[http://www.crmvet.org/tim/tim63b.htm#1963msballot Freedom Ballot in MS] ~ Civil Rights Movement Archive.</ref> (Only 6.7 per cent of the black voting age population of Mississippi was registered, compared to 70.2 per cent of the white voting age population).<ref>John Lewis, Archie E. Allen (1972) "Black Voter Registration Efforts in the South." ''Notre Dame Law Review''. Vol. 48:1. p. 112</ref> In coordination with CORE, the SNCC followed up on the ballot with the 1964 Mississippi Summer Project, also known as [[Freedom Summer]]. This brought over 700 white Northern students to the South, where they volunteered as teachers and organizers.<ref>{{Cite web |date=2021-04-16 |title=Freedom Summer - Definition, Murders & Results |url=https://www.history.com/topics/black-history/freedom-summer |access-date=2023-10-13 |website=HISTORY |language=en}}</ref>

According to [[Julian Bond]], their presence can be credited to freelance social activist [[Allard Lowenstein]]: white students, he had proposed, would not only "provide needed manpower", "their white skins might provoke interest from the news media that black skins could not produce."<ref name=":7">Julian Bond, [http://www.crmvet.org/comm/bond14.htm "Address to Freedom Summer 50th Commemoration"], Jackson, MS. June 28, 2014.</ref>  With the murder of two of their number, [[Andrew Goodman (activist)|Andrew Goodman]] and [[Michael Schwerner]], alongside local activist (Freedom Rider and voter educator) [[James Chaney]], this indeed was to be the effect. Freedom Summer attracted international attention.<ref>[http://www.crmvet.org/tim/tim64b.htm#1964fs Mississippi Summer Project] ~ Civil Rights Movement Archive.</ref>

For SNCC the focus of summer project became the organization, through the [[Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party]] (MFDP), of a parallel state Democratic Party [[primary election|primary]]. The MFDP would send an integrated slate of delegates to the [[1964 Democratic National Convention]] in Atlantic City and there contest the credentials of the all-white Mississippi regulars.

As part of this project SNCC's [[Charles E. Cobb Jr.|Charlie Cobb]] proposed summer field schools. Encouraging youth "to articulate their own desires, demands, and questions," the schools would help ensure a movement for social change in the state that would continue to be led by Mississippians. This was, he suggested, what organizing for voter registration was all about – "challenging people in various ways to take control of their own lives."<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://snccdigital.org/people/charlie-cobb/|title=Charlie Cobb|accessdate=Apr 2, 2023}}</ref> Over the course of Freedom Summer (and with assistance in developing the curriculum from, among others, [[Howard Zinn]]),<ref name="Martin Duberman 2012 99–100">{{cite book |author=Martin Duberman |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=VCqmA95DdNkC&pg=PA199 |title=Howard Zinn: A Life on the Left |publisher=New Press |year=2012 |isbn=9781595588401 |pages=99–100}}</ref> COFO set up more than 40 [[Freedom Schools]] in African-American communities across Mississippi. More than 3,000 students attended, many of whom participated in registration efforts.<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.crmvet.org/tim/tim64b.htm|title=Civil Rights Movement -- History & Timeline, 1964 (Freedom Summer)|website=www.crmvet.org|accessdate=Apr 2, 2023}}</ref>

With the encouragement of SNCC field secretary [[Frank Smith (D.C. Council)|Frank Smith]], a meeting of cotton pickers at a Freedom School in [[Shaw, Mississippi]], gave birth to the Mississippi Freedom Labor Union. At its peak, in the summer of 1965 the MFLU had 1,350 members and about 350 on strike.<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://snccdigital.org/events/mississippi-freedom-labor-union-founded/|title=June 1965: Mississippi Freedom Labor Union founded|website=snccdigital|language=en|access-date=2019-11-03|last3=Gateway|first3=SNCC Digital}}</ref>

On August 4, 1964, before the state MFDP convention, the bodies of [[Murders of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner|Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner]] were discovered buried in an earthen dam. Missing for weeks since disappearing after investigating a church burning in June 1964, they were subjects of a massive manhunt that involved the FBI and United States sailors from a nearby base. In the course of the search the corpses of several black Mississippians were uncovered whose disappearances had not previously attracted attention outside the Delta.<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.fbi.gov/history/famous-cases/mississippi-burning|title=Mississippi Burning|website=Federal Bureau of Investigation|language=en-us|access-date=2019-05-01}}</ref><ref>{{Cite web|url=https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/freedom-summer|title=Freedom Summer|last1=University|first1=© Stanford|last2=Stanford|date=2017-06-29|website=The Martin Luther King Jr., Research and Education Institute|language=en|access-date=2019-05-01|last3=California 94305}}</ref>
[[File:Fannie Lou Hamer 1964-08-22.jpg|alt=Fannie, an African American woman in a floral dress, sits at a table and is mid-speech. The photo is in Black and White|thumb|left|Fannie Lou Hamer (1964) speaks at a Democratic Convention regarding the plight of sharecroppers. She founded the Freedom Farm Cooperative, an independent food project to provide aid for sharecroppers. ]]
Notwithstanding the national outrage generated by the murders, the [[Presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson|Johnson Administration]] was determined to deflect the MDFP effort. With the presidential election approaching the priority was to protect the Democrats' "Solid South" against inroads being made by Republican [[Barry Goldwater]]'s campaign and to minimise support for [[George Wallace]]'s third-party challenge.<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/mississippi-freedom-democratic-party-mfdp|title=Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP)|last1=University|first1=© Stanford|last2=Stanford|date=2017-06-02|website=The Martin Luther King Jr., Research and Education Institute|language=en|access-date=2019-05-01|last3=California 94305}}</ref> The MFDP nonetheless got to the National Democratic Convention in [[Atlantic City]] at the end of August.

The proceedings of the convention's credentials committee were televised, giving a national and international audience to the testimony of SNCC field secretary [[Fannie Lou Hamer]]: to her portrayal of the brutalities of a sharecropper's life, and of the obstruction and violence encountered by an African American in the exercise her constitutional rights. (Hamer still bore the marks of beatings meted to her, her father and other SNCC workers by police in [[Winona, Mississippi]], just a year before).<ref>{{Cite book|title=A Voice that Could Stir an Army: Fannie Lou Hamer and the Rhetoric of the Black Freedom Movement|last=Parker Brooks|first=Maegan|publisher=University Press of Mississippi|year=2014|isbn=9781628460056|location=Jackson|pages=102, 272}}</ref> But with the all-white delegations of other southern states threatening to walk out, Johnson engineered a "compromise" in which the national Democratic Party offered the 68 MFDP delegates two at-large seats from where they could watch the floor proceedings but not take part. Fannie Lou Hamer led her delegates out of the convention:<ref>[http://www.crmvet.org/tim//tim64b.htm#1964atlantic MFDP Challenge to the Democratic Convention] ~ Civil Rights Movement Archive.</ref> "We didn't come all this way for no two seats when all of us is tired."{{sfn|Dittmer|1993|p=20}}<ref name="atlantic">{{cite news | url=http://www.pressofatlanticcity.com/communities/atlantic-city_pleasantville_brigantine/black-mississippians-create-legacy/article_9811ec34-2bdd-11e4-92f4-0019bb2963f4.html | title=Black Mississippians create legacy | work=Press of Atlantic City | date=August 24, 2014 | access-date=March 4, 2015 | author=Lemongello, Steven | url-status=live | archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160304043502/http://www.pressofatlanticcity.com/communities/atlantic-city_pleasantville_brigantine/black-mississippians-create-legacy/article_9811ec34-2bdd-11e4-92f4-0019bb2963f4.html | archive-date=March 4, 2016 | df=mdy-all }}</ref>

Activists, Hayden suggests, were staggered to find the Democratic Party "in the role of racist lunch counter owner": "the core of SNCC's work, voter registration, was [now] open to question."<ref>[https://womhist.alexanderstreet.com/SNCC/doc45.htm Casey Hayden (2014) (to Elaine DeLott Baker, 11 September 2014). Introduction. Document 45. Casey Hayden (aka Sandra Cason)], "Memorandum on Structure," Waveland, Mississippi, [6-12 November 1964], Elaine DeLott Baker Papers, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University]</ref> In the wake of Atlantic City, Elaine DeLott Baker recalls the desolation of project offices "that had only recently been hives of activity and energy" and the shutting down of Freedom Schools and community centers.<ref name=":5">{{Cite book|last=Baker|first=Elaine DeLott|url=https://documents.alexanderstreet.com/d/1006932395|title=The "Freedom High" and "Harliner" Factions of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee: a Reexamination. Preliminary Draft|year=1994|pages=4}}</ref>

In September 1964, at a COFO conference in New York, Bob Moses had to see off two challenges to SNCC's future role in Mississippi. First, he had to defend the SNCC's anti-"[[Red-baiting]]" insistence on "free association": the NAACP had threatened to pull out of COFO if SNCC continued to engage the services of the [[Communist Party USA|Communist Party]] associated [[National Lawyers Guild]]. Second, he had deflect a proposal from Lowenstein and Democratic Party operative [[Barney Frank]] that in a future summer program decision-making be removed from organizers in the field to a new office in New York City responsible directly to liberal-foundation and church funders. [[Dorothy Zellner]] (a white radical SNCC staffer) remarked that, "What they [Lowenstein and Frank] want is to let the Negro into the existing society, not to change it."<ref name=":7" />