The Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) was a coalition of civil rights groups in Mississippi . Established in 1962 with the goal of maximizing the efforts of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the organization focused on voter registration and education. Under the leadership of SNCC activist Robert Moses, COFO launched the Mississippi Freedom Summer Project in 1964. In describing the difficulties faced by COFO and Summer Project workers, Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “Our nation had sent our Peace Corps volunteers throughout the underdeve lo ped nations of the world and none of them had experienced the kind of brutality and savagery that the voter registration workers suffered in Mississippi.”
One of COFO’s first efforts in Mississippi was the Freedom Vote, a mock election held in 1963 to protest the mass disenfranchisement of black citizens in the state. COFO sought to demonstrate that without discriminatory registration procedures and fear of white reprisals, blacks would vote in large numbers. The Freedom Vote introduced many blacks who had never voted to the political process, and over 80,000 ballots were cast.
Building upon this success, COFO organized the Mississippi Freedom Summer Project in 1964. The project brought hundreds of white college students to the state to assist COFO, which was staffed primarily by SNCC activists. Confronting violence and harassment, Freedom Summer volunteers canvassed neighborhoods, registered voters, developed public health programs, and taught literacy and civics in “Freedom Schools.”
Freedom Summer included formation of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), an interracial third party that challenged the all-white official state delegation at the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City. COFO hoped to generate national party pressure to change local election practices through the MFDP, but they garnered little support from the Democratic Party. President Lyndon Johnson offered the MFDP a compromise of two at-large seats, which MFDP delegates rejected.
Conflicts over the rejection of Johnson’s compromise increased existing tensions between COFO’s member organizations, and the NAACP withdrew from COFO in early 1965. Most of the summer’s volunteers returned to college in the fall, and COFO’s director, Robert Moses, resigned at the end of 1964. Weakened by substantial losses in its leadership, workforce, and funding, the council disbanded in 1965.