Freedom Summer repeating itself as we near its 60th anniversary of violence, hope and change

As we approach the 60th anniversary of Freedom Summer, the similarities between that era and today are striking.

Voting rights, the cause that drew about 1,000 white, affluent students from across the country to volunteer in rural Mississippi, remains under assault in state legislatures, including ours. Anti-war protests continue to boil across American college campuses and battalions of police have been sent in to quash those protests. At least a third of Americans have decided that they’d rather destroy our democracy than share the country.

Given the stakes of the fall presidential election, we are in for another summer of struggle and protest.

The Freedom Summer Project began in June of 1964. It chose Mississippi, because the Magnolia State had the nation’s lowest percentage of registered African Americans voters.

Black Mississippians made up more than a third of the population in 1962 but accounted for only 6.7% of the eligible voters. The volunteers, most of them white and about half of them Jewish, worked with Black Mississippians to register people to vote.

As the project launched, however, three volunteers were kidnapped, killed and buried in the Mississippi clay. The search of the murky swamp land unearthed the bodies of eight other missing Black people.

Volunteers made the trek anyway, determined to join the fight for voting rights.

During the 10-week project, more than 1,000 people were arrested, 80 Freedom Summer volunteers endured beatings, 37 churches were bombed or burned, 30 homes or businesses were bombed or burned, and four civil rights workers were killed.

Voting rights remain under attack today.

About a year ago, the Eighth Circuit Court of appeals prohibited private citizens and civil rights groups from filing lawsuits aimed at enforcing the Voting Rights Act. Now, only the Justice Department can bring those claims. Such cases typically are brought by individual voters, said Ari Berman, a national voting rights correspondent for Mother Jones, in an NPR interview. Groups like the ACLU and the NAACP and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund represent them, he said.

Of the 182 successful lawsuits brought in the past 40 years, only 15 were brought by the Department of Justice, Berman said.

The department “brings very few voting rights cases,” he said. “Ninety percent of successful lawsuits under the Voting Rights Act are brought by private groups and private plaintiffs.”

Meanwhile, college campuses have erupted over the war in Gaza and over efforts to address America’s legacy of discrimination.

Riot police have descended on campuses from California to New York, where pro-Palestinian students have demanded an end to the war in Israel that has killed more than 34,000 Palestinians, more than 12,000 of which were children. This spasm of protest follows horrific Oct. 7th Hamas-led attacks on Israeli civilians that killed 1,200 people and saw roughly 240 people taken hostage. About 130 people remain captive in Gaza.

Also on college campuses, extremists in several states have taken aim at dismantling programs designed to make college campuses more welcoming for minority students.

Program advocates have said these programs help recruit and retain students of color who for generations were denied entry because of their race. Program detractors describe the programs as conspiratorial efforts to produce armies of social or political progressives and complain that gender and racial identities may soon become more important than being white.

Here in Kansas, extremist legislators have attacked DEI while struggling to even define it. Worse, the extremists are holding $36 million of funding hostage until the state’s six universities report to Gov. Laura Kelly that they’ve eliminated DEI policies.

“Universities have chosen to embrace ideologies that discriminate against people who do not hew to their orthodoxy,” state Rep. Steve Howe was quoted as saying.

That’s not what the schools are doing, but that’s exactly what he’s doing.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Back in the 1960s, the anti-democratic crowd pushed poll taxes and literacy tests to keep Black people from voting and to keep them off juries.

Today, extremists purge voter rolls, close polling stations and erect other hurdles to voting.

Back in the 1960s, state and local governments, where segregationists predominated, used arrests, firings, spying and other forms of intimidation to keep people disenfranchised.

Today, voting rights opponents still dominate most state governments and annually churn out new and discriminatory voting restrictions.

And as in the 1960s, today’s young adults have raced into these conflicts, raising their voices and putting themselves on the line. They’ve risked arrest defending democratic tenets that increasing numbers of Americans see as inconvenient or even expendable.

Freedom needs a refreshing summer renewal.

Maybe this one will last longer than 60 years.

Mark McCormick is the former executive director of The Kansas African American Museum, a member of the Kansas African American Affairs Commission and former deputy executive director at the ACLU of Kansas. Through its opinion section, Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.