Who Were the White Folks of Freedom Summer?

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An NAACP flyer campaigning for the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill, which passed the U.S. House of Representatives in 1922, but was filibustered to defeat in the Senate. Dyer, the NAACP, and freedom fighters around the country, like Flossie Baily, struggled for years to get the Dyer and other anti-lynching bills passed, to no avail. Today there is still no U.S. law specifically against lynching. In 2005, eighty of the 100 U.S. Senators voted for a resolution to apologize to victims' families and the country for their failure to outlaw lynching. Courtesy of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

Some Exhibits to Come – One Hundred Years of Jim Crow

Bibliography – One Hundred Years Of Jim Crow

Claude, age 23, just months before his 1930 murder. Courtesy of Faith Deeter.

Freedom’s Heroes During Jim Crow: Flossie Bailey and the Deeters

Souvenir Portrait of the Lynching of Abram Smith and Thomas Shipp, August 7, 1930, by studio photographer Lawrence Beitler. Courtesy of the Indiana Hisorical Society.

An Iconic Lynching in the North

Claxton Dekle – Prosperous Farmer, Husband & Father of Two

Ancient manuscripts about mathematics and astronomy from Timbuktu, Mali

Some Exhibits to Come – African Peoples Before Captivity

Shackles for Adults & Children from the Henrietta Marie

Some Exhibits to Come – The Middle Passage

What I Saw Aboard a Slave Ship in 1829

Life After Hate: A Former White Power Leader Redeems Himself

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July 4, 2014

By Diamond Sharp, theRoot

From Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee leaders to Freedom School organizers, these are their stories.

Heather Booth, SNCC member and, later, founding director of the NAACP National Voter Fund. Considered one of the most notable alums of Freedom Summer, she is currently vice president of USAction.

Marshall Ganz, a SNCC field secretary, also helped organize the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. One of the most notable participants in the Freedom Summer movement, he would go on to do organizing work with Cesar Chavez. Ganz has been credited with creating the successful grassroots organizing model that the Obama campaign utilized during the 2008 election. Here he speaks to the Boston Occupy Movement. — Marshall Ganz, who created the grassroots organizing model that the Obama campaign utilized during the 2008 election speaks to the Boston Occupy Movement.

It’s well-known that 1964’s Freedom Summer, as it came to be called, was an interracial effort, with many white college students joining African Americans to register voters in Mississippi. It was the murder of three civil rights activists—two of them white—by members of the Ku Klux Klan that sparked national outrage and drew national attention to the struggle for access to the ballot. Ironically, thanks to a racially biased press, it was those murders and the presence of nonblack activists that many believe earned the work the headlines it deserved. From Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee leaders to Freedom School organizers, here are some of these activists’ stories.

[…]

1. Heather Booth

2. Dr. June Finer

3. Frank Cieciorka

4. Mary King

5. Miriam Cohen Glickman

6. Casey Hayden

7. Howard Zinn

8. Constance Curry

9. Marshall Ganz

10. Mario Savio

Click here to read short bios and see photos of these 10 white allies you should know:

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