The MFDP efforts encouraged over seventeen thousand African Americans to vote for the sixty-eight delegates who attended the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City in the summer of 1964 and demanded to be seated in replacement of the regular Democratic organization. SNCC activists also directly challenged the segregated policies of the all-white Mississippi Democratic Party by supporting the efforts of local black leaders to run their own candidates under the party name Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP). Under the direction of SNCC veterans, these volunteers created community centers that provided basic services such as health care to the black community and initiated voter education activities and literacy classes aimed at encouraging black Mississippians to register to vote. Robert Moses of the SNCC was the guiding force behind the summer project, and the overwhelming majority of COFO staff workers were SNCC members who were veterans of the long fight for racial equality in Mississippi.Īpproximately a thousand northern white college students, committed to social change and imbued with liberal ideals, volunteered to participate in the Freedom Summer campaign. The SNCC played the largest role in the project and provided most of its funding. The considerable success of COFO activists in sparking the interest of black Mississippians in voter registration during the summer of 1963 prompted them to propose an entire summer of civil rights activities in 1964 to focus national attention on the disfranchisement of blacks in Mississippi, and to force the federal government to protect the civil rights of African Americans in the South. COFO had been formed in 1962 in response to the Kennedy administration's offer of tax-exempt status and funding from liberal philanthropies to civil rights organizations that focused their activities on increasing black voter registration. ![]() This campaign, which became known as Freedom Summer, was the culmination of COFO's efforts to attack black disfranchisement in Mississippi. In the summer of 1964 the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO), a Mississippi coalition of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), invited northern white college students to spearhead a massive black voter-registration and education campaign aimed at challenging white supremacy in the Deep South.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |