Although the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) worked hard for civil rights in Mississippi during the early 1960s, they found that intense resistance by segregationists in rural parts of the Deep South made it too dangerous to pursue the non-violent campaigns, such as sit-ins, that were conducted elsewhere. Consequently, they were not able to generate the same level of publicity that Martin Luther King, Jr. had used so effectively in Montgomery and Birmingham. The 1964 Freedom Summer Project, which focused on voter registration and the education of black students, offered the possibility of a campaign that could bring about the kind of national publicity that was so desperately needed to bring about change in Mississippi.
When SNCC activist Robert Moses launched a voter registration drive in Mississippi in 1961, he confronted a system that regularly used segregation laws and fear tactics to disenfranchise black citizens. In 1962, he helped form the Council of Federated Organization (COFO) to coordinate the efforts of civil rights groups within the state; but by late 1963, violence and intimidation had stalled the coalition’s efforts. To focus attention on conditions in Mississippi, Moses proposed bringing hundreds of white students to the state for a summer campaign.
On 13 June 1964, the first group of summer volunteers began training at Western College for Women in Oxford, Ohio. About three-quarters of the approximately 1,000 Freedom Summer volunteers were white, northern college students from middle- and upper-class backgrounds. The training sessions in Oxford, Ohio, were intended to prepare the volunteers to register black voters, teach at "Freedom Schools," and assist in others ways in the on-going efforts of COFO. It was hoped that the presence of the volunteers would draw the nation's attention to the violent repression of voting rights for black residents and perhaps prod the federal government to intervene. The project also aimed to develop a grassroots freedom movement that could be sustained long after student activists left Mississippi.
The presence of the volunteers marked the greatest number of people to enter the southern struggle at one time, but many black civil rights workers, particularly the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee ( SNCC) members, were ambivalent about working with white volunteers. These tensions were intensified by the COFO staff's awareness that only violence perpetuated against the white students would prompt any meaningful federal intervention.
On 21 June, three civil rights workers were reported missing. African-American James Chaney and whites Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman disappeared while visiting Philadelphia, Mississippi, to investigate the burning of a black church. The abduction of the three civil rights workers intensified the activists' fears, but staff and volunteers moved ahead with the summer campaign.
Voter registration served as the cornerstone of the Summer Project, and approximately 17,000 black residents of Mississippi attempted to vote in 1964. While only 1,600 of the completed applications were accepted by the registrars, the gross inequities uncovered throughout the course of the summer helped to highlight the need for voting rights legislation.
In an effort to address the separate and unequal Mississippi school system, the Project established forty-one Freedom Schools. More than 3,000 young black students took classes that summer. In addition to math, reading, and other traditional courses, students were also taught black history, the philsophy of the civil rights movement, and leadership skills.
During the summer of 1964, SNCC leaders also set their sights on the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), an alternative to the Mississippi "Jim Crow" Democratic Party. The goal of the MFDP was to challenge the seating of the all-white Mississippi delegation at the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City. The MFDP planned to challenge the seats traditionally held by white Mississippians by arguing that the MFDP delegates be longed to the only freely chosen party in the state, as blacks had been systematically denied access to choosing delegates in the Mississippi Democratic Party. While the MFDP did not fully realize its goals, it did show African Americans that they could exert some measure of political power. It also helped to generate significant momentum for the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
The Summer Project marked one of the last major interracial civil rights efforts of the 1960s, as the movement entered a period of divisive conflict that would draw even sharper lines between the goals of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the younger, more militant faction of the black freedom struggle.