Mississippi Freedom Summer, 1964

The Mississippi Summer project of 1964, now known as Freedom Summer, was a in part a voter registration project that was met with an extremely violent and deadly backlash.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio, Hello, and Welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy B. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. Over the
last few months, the state of Georgia made a lot
of headlines when it's voters elected Joe Biden for president

(00:24):
and then in a runoff elected John Ossoff and Raphael
were Not as senators. This broke a decades long pattern
of Georgians electing Republicans rather than Democrats into these roles.
These elections followed just years of organizing an advocacy and
legal work and voter registration efforts in the state, and

(00:45):
the person who has become most widely known for all
this work is Stacy Abrams. Really though it involved multiple
civil rights and voting rights and labor organizations along with
individual people, and Abrams has made it entirely clear that
it was not work that she did by herself, So
I just wanted to call that part out too. As
I was watching all of this unfolded, though, my mind

(01:09):
kept returning to other earlier voter registration efforts in the
United States, and one of those is the Mississippi Summer
Project of ninety four, which is now better known as
Freedom Summer. This project was met with an extremely violent
and deadly backlash, and in some ways that backlash has
overshadowed the work that the projects set out to do,

(01:31):
and that work actually involved a lot more than registering
people to vote. So that is today's topic for the show.
And before we start, I just wanted to shout out
the podcast seen on radio, especially its fourth season, which
is called The Land That Has Never Been Yet. Uh.
That is a twelve part series exploring the history of

(01:51):
democracy in the United States and the many, many ways
that it has not actually been all that democratic. Episode
seven is on Freedom Summer, and it's what inspired me
to put it on the topic list when that episode
first came out in April, because it kind of contextualized
Freedom Summer a little differently than I had learned it before.

(02:13):
So for some context about what led up to Freedom Summer.
In the early nineteen sixties, Mississippi existed in a state
of deeply oppressive, violent racism. Most of its black residents
were still working in the same jobs that their ancestors
had done while enslaved things like tending and picking cotton,
doing manual labor or doing domestic work, and these were

(02:35):
overwhelmingly the only kind of jobs available for them. Most
of Mississippi's black population lived in poverty. The U. S.
Supreme Court had ruled that public school segregation was unconstitutional
and brown versus board in nineteen fifty four, but in
the early sixties, Mississippi was one of the places where
schools were still segregated in spite of that ruling. Some

(02:58):
of the school buildings for black students were actually relatively new,
but the schools themselves were deeply deliberately underfunded. A fewer
than one percent of Mississippi's black students graduated from high
school at the time, and many black people in Mississippi
could not read or write. This wasn't a case of
pettiness or the Mississippi government just not caring about the

(03:20):
quality of education for black students. It was an intentional
effort to keep Mississippi's black population in a state of ignorance.
It was the same logic that had led to laws
making it illegal to teach enslaved people to read a
century before. In many parts of Mississippi, white people were
in the minority, and like enslavers of the past, they

(03:42):
knew it would be harder for black people to organize
if they lacked literacy and a basic education. Throughout the South,
white Citizens Councils had formed in the wake of the
Supreme Court's decision in Brown versus. Board. These organizations were
made up of powerful, high profile white citizens, and they
were dedicated to maintaining a state of segregation and white

(04:04):
supremacy in the places where they operated. Although White Citizens
Councils and their members could be violent, these organizations tended
to be more focused on things like legal and economic
oppression than there were on physical violence. In Mississippi, the
white Citizens Councils were so effective at maintaining the racial

(04:24):
status quo that the Ku Klux Klan, which tended to
be more overtly violent, didn't have much of a presence
there until nineteen sixty three. And on top of all this,
as we said at the beginning, Mississippi was a place
of violent racist hostility. Black people were expected to maintain
a demeanor of total deference and subservience to white people.

(04:46):
Any perceived lapse was punishable by violence or even death.
More people were lynched in Mississippi than anywhere else in
the South, including the notorious lynching a fourteen year old
Emmett Till, which took place in Money, Mississippi in nine.
The n Double A CP started establishing field offices in
Mississippi in the early nineteen fifties. In late nineteen fifty four,

(05:09):
Medgar Evers was appointed in Double A CP Field Secretary
for Mississippi, and by nineteen fifty five, then Double A
CP was the most powerful civil rights organization in the state,
along with the Mississippi Progressive Voters League and the Regional
Council of Negro Leadership. Then Double A c P worked
primarily on issues related to voting in Mississippi, including offering

(05:32):
voter education and support, and registering to vote. Double A
CP Youth councils also offered Civics education for young people
to prepare them to register to vote once they were
old enough to do that. Most of this work was
done discreetly because the level of racist violence in Mississippi
was so extreme, but just the act of registering to

(05:54):
vote was incredibly risky. Under the fifteenth Amendment to the U.
S Constitution, quote, the right of citizens in the United
States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by
the United States or by any state on account of race, color,
or previous condition of servitude. But in Mississippi, anyone who
wanted to register to vote had to face a white registrar,

(06:16):
and those registrars routinely denied voter registration to black people.
This was not just a matter of the registrar saying no,
though a two dollar poll tax was financially out of
reach for Mississippi's poorest people, who were disproportionately black. There
was also an extremely unnecessarily complicated application form. There was

(06:41):
a test as well, and once again this test was
unnecessarily complicated, even to the point of being unpassable. It
involved interpreting a section of the state constitution. It was
up to the registrar what passage you were given, and
it was also up to the registrar whether you're interpretation
past the test. Black people also faced intimidation and threats

(07:04):
during the entire process, things like the sheriff standing in
the room with one hand on his gun and the
other on his baton while people tried to take those
impossible tests, especially in small towns and rural parts of
the state where everyone knew each other, the sheriff or
the registrar might pointedly mention that they knew your employer
or your landlord, who would not be happy if they

(07:25):
found out that you were trying to register to vote.
Beyond the convoluted process and the threats and intimidation, black
people who tried to register to vote in Mississippi often
faced actual retribution afterward, whether they were successful at registring
to vote or not. If you were black and you
tried to register to vote, you might be fired from

(07:48):
your job, or evicted from your home, or run out
of town entirely. Somebody might burn across in your yard
or firebomb your house, or you might be arrested, beaten,
or even killed as a consequence of all of this.
By nineteen sixty two, less than seven percent of eligible
black voters in Mississippi were actually registered. This was the

(08:10):
lowest percentage in any state, and that was after years
of work on the part of the ub A c P,
the Mississippi Progressive Voters League, the Regional Council of Negro Leadership,
and other organizations. One of those other organizations was the
Student Non Violent Coordinating Committee or SNICK. SNICK had been
formed during the lunch counter SIN ins that we talked

(08:32):
about on the show in January. Was formed after Ella
Baker convened a meeting of youth activists at Shaw University
in Raleigh, North Carolina. Members of SNICK started arriving in
Mississippi in nineteen sixty one. Snake activists quickly realized that
the kind of direct action they had been doing during
the lunch counter sit ins and other demonstrations was not

(08:55):
what the people of Mississippi were really looking for. The
threat of viole in response to such an outward protest
was just too great. But on top of that, many
of the direct action campaigns that had taken place earlier
in the Civil rights movement just weren't relevant to a
large portion of Mississippi's black population. If you were a
sharecropper living in a rural part of the state, there

(09:18):
probably was no lunch counter for you to patronize at all,
nor were there services like municipal buses to integrate as
had been done through the Montgomery bus boycott. So as
Snake activists established themselves in the state, they started looking
for a way to turn their attention to what was
relevant to the people of Mississippi and what Mississippi's black

(09:40):
residents wanted was to be able to vote so that
they could vote racist officials out of office. And we're
going to talk more about that after we pause for
a sponsor break. A series of events in Mississippi in
the early ninet in sixties led to the creation of

(10:01):
the Mississippi Summer Project. In nineteen sixty one, the Freedom Rides,
which were organized by the Congress of Racial Quality or CORE,
tested whether bus lines had integrated following the Supreme Court's
decision that interstate bus segregation was unconstitutional, and this included
integrated groups of Freedom Writers making their way into Mississippi,

(10:23):
many of whom were arrested and abused while in prison
once they got there. There's, of course, a whole lot
more to this. This is one of the many things
that has come up in the episode so far that
we have previous episodes on. We actually replayed previous hosts
episodes on the Freedom Rides as a Saturday classic back
in Also in nineteen sixty one, James Meredith applied for

(10:45):
admission to the University of Mississippi, which was still not
admitting black students, and that launched a legal battle that
went all the way to the Supreme Court. In nineteen
sixty two, the Kennedy administration announced its Voter Education Project,
which would provide funding and tax exempt status for organizations
that were working to register black voters. Part of the

(11:07):
project's goal was to encourage the civil rights movement to
shift away from direct action demonstrations and to focus instead
on voting, which the administration saw as less confrontational and divisive.
Civil rights organizations knew that this was a strategic move
on the government's part to try to influence what they
were doing, but they also saw it as an opportunity,

(11:28):
and as a result, in nineteen sixty two, the Council
of Federated Organizations was formed to act as an umbrella organization.
It brought together SNIC CORE and then Double a CP
to focus all of their efforts on voting rights and
registration in Mississippi. In the fall of nineteen sixty two,
the Board of Supervisors of Lafleur County, Mississippi, voted to

(11:52):
end its participation in the federal Surplus Food commodity program
that was a critical food source for thousands of the
counties black residents. Snick Field organizers concluded that this decision
was in retaliation for their voter registration work in the county,
although the Board of Supervisors denied this allegation. Comedian and
activist Dick Gregory brought about fourteen thousand pounds of basic staples,

(12:17):
including baby food, to the area in a chartered plane.
Dick Gregory's donation got a lot of media attention, and
activists in Mississippi started trying to figure out a way
to keep that focus going to make the rest of
the country more aware of what conditions were like in Mississippi,
and an idea on how to do this was proposed

(12:39):
by snick Field secretary Robert Moses known as Bob, and
Alard Loewenstein, who had been a Freedom writer and had
worked with Snick to coordinate a mock gubernatorial election in
Mississippi in November of nineteen sixty three. That mock election
had brought in about a hundred volunteers, most of them white,
to try to demon straight how black voters could shift

(13:02):
elections if they could freely vote. Freedom Summer was more
ambitious than the nineteen sixties three mock election. They would
bring as many as one thousand volunteers, most of them white,
to Mississippi. The involvement of white students would mean that
the white media and the general population of the rest
of the country might actually pay attention to what was
happening there, and organizers also knew that white parents were

(13:26):
likely to start contacting their representatives in the federal government
and otherwise demanding action if they thought that their children
were at risk. This idea was deeply controversial, though the
groups that made up the Council of Federated Organizations were integrated,
and they had worked with groups of white activists before.
The civil rights movement as a whole had also involved

(13:48):
the ongoing work of Jewish and Christian activists and clergy,
and plenty of black activists who were already in Mississippi
had come there from somewhere else. As one example, Moses
himself had been born in Harlem. But this idea of
just so many young white students all coming from other

(14:08):
states into Mississippi was really troubling to a lot of people.
There were also concerns that these students, who would mainly
be recruited from prestigious universities in the North, would be
too idealistic or unwilling to work under the direction of
black people. This was compounded by the fact that many
of the most experienced activists in Mississippi were by this

(14:29):
point exhausted and burned out. Plus, this was inherently dangerous work,
and anyone who participated was putting their own lives at risk.
This idea had its supporters as well, though one of
them was Fannie Lou Hamer, who is definitely on the
list for her own episode in the future. At some point,
Hammer was a sharecropper and a timekeeper on the plantation

(14:52):
where she worked. She had become an organizer for SNICK
and had been forced to leave that plantation in August
of nineteen sixty two after she led a group of
black people to register to vote. In an interview with
Terry Gross, SNICK activist Charlie Cobb, who had been born
in Washington, d c. Described Hammer as backing him against

(15:12):
a wall and saying, Charlie, I'm glad you came down here.
What's the problem with other people coming down here. The
controversy went on until the summer of nineteen sixty three.
On June twelfth of that year, thirty seven year old
and double a CP field secretary Medgar Evers was murdered
in his own driveway. Evers had been born in Mississippi,

(15:33):
and he had been involved in boycotts of service stations
that refused restroom access to black people, along with other
boycotts and protest activities, and he had also helped investigate
the murder of him at till he had faced a
series of death threats before being murdered. After two different
juries failed to reach a verdict. His murderer, white supremacist

(15:54):
and Ku Klux Klan member by Randela Beckwith, was finally
convicted in nineteen four. Ever's murder was what led many
of the people who had opposed the project to put
those reservations aside. The Mississippi Summer Project, as this idea
came to be known, was announced in February of nineteen
sixty four by James Farmer of CORE, James Foreman of SNICK,

(16:16):
and Bob Moses of both SNICK and the Council of
Federated Organizations. They would train young white volunteers and activism
and non violence. Then these volunteers would come to Mississippi
where they would live in the homes of black Mississippi
residents and work on three interconnecting projects. One was talking
to black residents about registering to vote. Another was to

(16:38):
recruit these same people into a new political party that
was the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, And the third was
to teach at Freedom Schools, which were independent schools that
were meant to fill the gaps that had been left
by Mississippi's intentionally bad public education system for black students.
The voter registration effort was an uphill battle. Volunteers went

(17:01):
door to door in pairs, one black and one white
to encourage people to register to vote and to offer
support with the registration process, but most people they talked
to were understandably afraid to register. Although about seventeen thousand
people tried to register to vote during Freedom Summer, only
about sixteen hundred were successful, but many more people were

(17:24):
willing to join the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. By late
summer of nineteen sixty four, that group had eighty thousand members.
The Freedom Schools were also a success, and they grew
in number over the course of this project. In the end,
there were more than forty schools that served more than
two thousand students. They met in church basements, homes, and parks,

(17:46):
and in places where children were working as farm labor.
They held their classes at night, Some of the schools
had night classes for adults as well. The day often
began with freedom songs like Ain't Gonna let Nobody Turn
Me Round, and there volunteers taught reading and math, black history,
black literature and art, civics, dance, drama, music, storytelling, and

(18:08):
other subjects. Some schools had their own newspapers, or they
staged their own plays. Although the volunteers teaching in these
schools were nearly all white, the curriculum was developed by
black people from Mississippi according to their own needs. As
we noted up at the top of the show, the
white response to the Mississippi Summer Project in Mississippi was

(18:29):
incredibly violent, and we will talk about that after responsive break.
Organizers of the Mississippi Summer Project were selective about which
volunteers they accepted. For this, they needed people who were
responsible and level headed, and who would carry out the

(18:52):
instructions of their black hosts and organizers without hesitation. They
had to be willing and able to follow the product
ex principles of non violence, and that meant not resisting
or fighting back even if they were physically attacked, and
they had to understand the risks involved, including the risk
of being seriously hurt or killed because of this work,

(19:14):
Many of the volunteers went through a two week training
in orientation at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, which included
everything from how to behave to how to non violently
protect themselves while being beaten. Volunteers were also trained on
how to keep themselves and others as safe as possible.
They would be staying with black families and working with

(19:35):
black organizers, and they needed to know how not to
put those people at risks through their actions. And this
training really highlighted the fact that a lot of the
volunteers had good intentions, but they didn't really comprehend what
they were about to face. And one session, a group
watched a video of the registrar from Forest County, Mississippi,

(19:56):
whose appearance and demeanor and speech seemed almost like an
a exaggerated caricature. It was not an exaggeration at all.
He was a real person. When volunteers started laughing, snick
Field staff who were conducting this training were understandably outraged.
This level of caution and effort to train and prepare

(20:16):
the white volunteers was absolutely justified. During the Mississippi summers, project,
the homes of at least thirty black families and more
than thirty black churches were firebombed or otherwise destroyed. In
just one night, the ku Klux Klan conducted a coordinated
cross burning, simultaneously burning crosses in almost eight percent of
the counties in Mississippi. There were thirty five documented shootings

(20:40):
and at least eighty volunteers were beaten, with four of
them being critically wounded. There were also six known murders.
Volunteers for this project started arriving in Mississippi on June
twenty one of nineteen sixty four, and the very next day,
while others were still training in Ohio, three civil rights
workers hered. They were James Cheney of Mississippi, as well

(21:03):
as Michael Schwerner, who was known as Mickey, and Andrew Goodman.
Schwerner and Goodman were both from New York. Schwerner and
Cheney were both field workers for the Congress of Racial Equality,
and Goodman was there for Freedom summer and had just
finished his training at Miami University. It was Goodman's first

(21:23):
day in Mississippi. The three men had volunteered to investigate
the bombing of a church where Schwerner had been working
for Core. Cheney was driving them back to Maurdi in
Mississippi when Nashoba County Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price pulled him
over for allegedly speeding and arrested all three men. After
Cheney was allowed to pay a fine at about ten

(21:44):
pm that night, the three men were allowed to leave
the jail and told to get out of the county,
but they never reported back in with their friends or
other activists. At the time, the FBI did not have
a field office in Mississippi, so FBI agents from New
Orleans started a kidnapping investigation. On June twenty three, authorities

(22:05):
found the station wagon that the men had been traveling
in that had been set on fire and was still
smoldering when they found it. This led the FBI to
call this the Mississippi Burning Case. Most of the activists
from Mississippi had concluded that the men were dead as
soon as they did not check in as scheduled, but
for the white volunteers, this really brought home how much

(22:27):
danger they were really in. Worried white parents started calling
the capital to try to ensure that their kids would
be safe, and Scharner's wife, Rita made a series of
media appearances in which she consistently put the focus back
on the project and on conditions in Mississippi. Yeah, she
was one of the people that made a lot of
demands for increased like federal attention on what was happening

(22:50):
in Mississippi and on this investigation. J Edgar Hoover called
her and her husband communists, and there's a like a
phone recording between Uver and President Lyndon Johnson where Lyndon
Johnson says that two was worse than a communist, that
she was ugly and mean to him like that their
treatment of her was not good at all. The FBI

(23:12):
established a Mississippi field office steering all of this, and
although they didn't really investigate that other crimes that were
going on, they did search for Cheney, Schwerner, and Goodman.
They found the bodies of eight other people during this search.
After receiving a tip, law enforcement finally found the bodies
of Cheney, Schwerner, and Goodman buried in an earth damn

(23:33):
on August five, nineteen sixty four. All three had been shot,
and Cheney had also been severely beaten. Although more than
twenty men most of whom were members of the Ku
Klux Klan, were arrested in connection with this crime. A
Mississippi judge dismissed the charges against them. The only way
for the federal government to have jurisdiction was to file

(23:55):
civil rights charges rather than murder charges. In nine s
eighteen men were tried for having violated federal civil rights
law in relation to these murders. An all white jury
found seven of the men guilty, including Deputy Sheriff Price.
The jury deadlocked in their verdicts for three of the accused,

(24:16):
and they acquitted the rest. None of the convicted men
served more than six years in prison, and the only
person to actually be tried for murder in connection of
all of this was Edgar Ray Killen, who had orchestrated
the attack. He was convicted of manslaughter in two thousand
five and ultimately died in prison. President Barack Obama awarded Cheney, Schwerner,

(24:40):
and Goodman the Medal of Freedom posthumously. Inten and their
bodies were discovered just a day before the Mississippi Freedom
Democratic Party held its state convention and Jackson, Mississippi, to
elect a delegation that would travel to the Democratic National
Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey later that month. Through
at the national Convention, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party also

(25:03):
maintained a twenty four hour vigil for the three men
and a protest which included signs bearing slogans like one Man,
One Vote. As we noted earlier, by this point the
Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party had about eighty thousand members, and
the party's goal was to represent Mississippi at the Democratic
National Convention rather than the Democratic Party's all light delegation.

(25:27):
And their case for this was really clear cut. The
Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party had followed all of the Democratic
Party's rules and procedures about its own convention and its
own delegate selection. Meanwhile, Mississippi's Democratic Party had systematically excluded
black participants, and many of its members had orchestrated a

(25:49):
campaign of racist terror against the state's black population. Multiple
people testified on behalf of the m f DP before
the Democratic National Convention Credentials Committee, including Rita Schwerner, Martin
Luther King Jr. And Fannie lou Hamer. Hamer's testimony was
particularly damning and compelling. She talked about her own experience

(26:11):
trying to register to vote after which the owner of
the plantation where she worked and lived had told her
to withdraw her registration or leave. She also talked about
being in a house that someone fired sixteen bullets into,
and she talked about her arrest while returning from a
voter registration workshop on June nineteenth, nineteen sixty three. While

(26:33):
in jail after that arrest, she could hear officers beating
and shouting racist slurs at other people who had been
arrested with her. Then officers forced two black prisoners to
come into her cell and to beat her so badly
that she had permanent kidney damage. Hamer ended by saying, quote,

(26:53):
all of this is on account of we want to
register to become first class citizens. And if the Freedom
Democratic Party is not seated, now I question America. Is
this America, the land of the free and the home
of the brave, where we have to sleep with our
telephones off the hooks because our lives be threatened daily,

(27:14):
because we want to live as a decent human beings
in America. During all of this, President Lyndon Johnson was
worried that he was going to lose the support of
white Southern Democrats if he showed too much sympathy towards
Mississippi's black population. He was also generally fearful that something
was going to go wrong at the convention and he'd

(27:34):
wind up losing the nomination, so he held an impromptu
press conference while Hammer was speaking, one that people thought
was going to include the announcement of his running mate,
but which instead announced that it had been nine months
to the day since his predecessor, John F. Kennedy had
been assassinated. This strategy on Johnson's part did not work out, though,
the fact that he had preempted Hammer's testimony became its

(27:57):
own story, and many news programs played in its entirety
during their next evening broadcasts. So Johnson instructed Hubert Humphrey
to negotiate with the MFDP, suggesting that he would be
selected as his running mate if Humphrey was successful. Humphrey
tasked Walter Mondale with working out a plan, and that plan,

(28:19):
which Mondale was the one to announce, was for two
members of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, one black and
one white, to be seated as delegates at large, while
the all white Democratic delegation would be seated as normal
if they would support Johnson for president. The National Democratic
leadership also promised not to seat any segregated delegations in

(28:43):
the future. Although this was framed like it was a compromise,
the m f DP did not see it that way
at all and refused to accept it, a decision that
divided the movement as a whole. Many of the all
white Democratic delegation from Mississippi also so withdrew from the
convention rather than promising to support the Democratic candidates. Afterward,

(29:06):
many of the MDFPS delegates were able to get badges
from delegates from other states who were sympathetic to what
they were doing, so they could enter the convention hall,
but the chairs for the Mississippi delegation were removed. There
were people, mostly people from outside Mississippi who were involved
in the civil rights movement, who were like, you got something,

(29:26):
you should take it. But the delegation from Mississippi was like,
it is not enough and it is unacceptable. So this
attempt to appease racist white people did not really work
out for Johnson. Although he did win the presidential election,
most of the southern states he was trying to hang
on to, including Mississippi, went for Republican candidate Barry Goldwater,

(29:51):
and after another tumultuous Democratic National Convention in nineteen sixty eight,
which came up in our two parter on Cohen's hel
pro in, the Democratic National Committee established the McGovern Frasier
Commission to try to reform their entire nomination process. So,
as we said earlier, although seventeen thousand black people tried

(30:12):
to register to vote during Freedom Summer, only about sixteen
hundred were approved by county registrars, and the Mississippi Freedom
Democratic Party was not seated at the Democratic National Convention
as they had hoped and overall had thought that they
would be. So. In terms of the three initial projects
of Freedom Summer, the Freedom Schools were the most outwardly successful. However,

(30:35):
for a bigger picture look at things, Aaron Henry, who
was president of the Mississippi State Conference of the n
double a CP during the nineteen sixties, described one of
the biggest positive outcomes of Freedom Summer as quote the
human relations aspect, or in the words of Finny lou
Hamer quote before the N four Summer project, there were

(30:58):
people that want had changed, but they hadn't dared to
come out. After nineteen sixty four people began moving to me.
It's one of the greatest things that ever happened in Mississippi.
In addition, the Freedom School served as a model for
the federal head Start program, which provides early childhood education
and health and nutrition support for low income families, as

(31:21):
well as various programs that were part of the War
on Poverty and on a national level, Johnson signed the
Civil Rights Act of nineteen sixty four on July two
of that year during Freedom Summer, and on August six
of nineteen sixty five he signed the Voting Rights Act,
which outlawed things like poll taxes and literacy tests, as

(31:43):
well as harassment and intimidation when people tried to register
to vote. It also specified that jurisdictions that had a
history of this kind of discrimination had to have preclearance
from the District Court for the District of Columbia or
from the U. S. Attorney General any time they tried
to change their voting laws and policies. Freedom Summer's work

(32:05):
raising awareness about conditions in Mississippi contributed to the passage
of both of these laws, particularly the Voting Rights Act
and the Voting Rights Act, in turn dramatically affected voting
access in Mississippi. By nineteen sixty nine, more than sixty
six percent of eligible black voters in Mississippi were registered,
which was more than five percent above the national average. However,

(32:28):
in the U. S Supreme Court issued its ruling in
Shelby County versus Holder, which invalidated that preclearance requirement and
the Voting Rights Act, and this has led to an
increase in voter suppression efforts. They're often not as obvious
as they were in Mississippi in the nineteen sixties, so

(32:48):
today they are things like disproportionately purging black, indigenous, and
people of color from the voting roles, or shutting down
the polling places in the those communities while keeping them
open in predominantly white communities, or passing voter ide laws
that disproportionately target people of color, cutting polling hours to

(33:11):
make it harder for people who don't have flexible work
schedules to vote. And then signature matching requirements, which are
often really subjective and they disproportionately affect older voters and
voters of color, whose signatures and thus votes are thrown
out if they don't exactly match. Yeah, that's signature match

(33:31):
thing who among us can replicate their signature, particularly if
one of them is on like a digital screen versus
yen and paper. It's so hard. And then also, like
my mother physically cannot sign anything, my my father's uh
signature has looked like an an indistinguishable scrawl. The first

(33:57):
letter of his first and last name is like is
as a discreet thing, but the rest of it is
just kind of a wavy line. Somebody's comparing those two
things by subjective criteria, and you know, they were both
seventy five years old. There in the categories of people
who are likely to be thrown out under those kinds
of requirements. Once again, before we wrap up this episode,

(34:20):
the Whole The Land That Has Never Been Yet series
from CNN Radio is highly recommended. The Freedom Summer episode
includes interviews that host John Bewen conducted with people who
were part of Freedom Summer, So that is another great
way to get additional context on this whole topic. Yeah,
I um, part of me doesn't want to describe it
because that, like having the experience of listening to it

(34:42):
myself was so marvelous. But a lot of the people
that he has interviewed are are people who uh, I
love to hear speaking. Many of them are no longer
with us, and they're they're from a documentary he had
done some years before, so more of the people that
he was interviewing were still i've then than are now. Um.
But that whole series I listened to as it came out,

(35:05):
and it is is extremely worth listening to you, as
are there other they've done other they did Seeing White,
which is about the history of the idea of race
and racism, and there's one called Men that's the history
of patriarchy. They're all very very good. Do you have
very very good listener mail? This is from April an
April and says a good evening, Tracy and Holly. Before

(35:25):
I begin, I just wanted to say thank you for
continuing your work throughout the current madness that we have
found ourselves in. Your podcast is a much welcomed and
informative distraction. I recently listened to your Unearthed You're in
episode at least on I think January one. I can't
remember if it was part one or two, but you
both mentioned the recent discovery of a thermopolium and Pompeii.

(35:49):
You describe the beautiful imagery on it some that possibly
describe the menu items like the rooster and fish, and
others that were more decorative, like the water nymph. You
also described the somewhat odd inclusion of a dog, Holly,
I believe you said your husband was particularly concerned about
the fate of the dog. Well, he might not need
to fear. I'm not sure if the two of you
are aware, but there is a precedent of canine imagery

(36:11):
and Pompeii and artwork. Below you should find the link
to a BBC article which shows a picture of a
mosaic depiction of a guard dog. It's literally a centuries
old version of a beware of the dog sign based
upon the Fresco. It may have served the same purpose
as the mosaic, although I'm not quite sure why a
guard dog would need to be at a food cart.
But hey, ancient Rome was a lively place. Obviously, this

(36:35):
is merely a conjecture. Although I have studied art history,
I do not claim to be an art historian or
an archaeologist. Thanks again for your work. I really love
your podcast. It is a nice balance of instruction and laughter,
which as a teacher I can appreciate. Sincerely, April and
thank you April Land for this email about the dogs,
and both because of the like providing possible context for

(36:56):
why the picture of the dog is there, but also
it just made me imagine a food stall whose clients
hell are so unruly that they just got to have
a dog on hand. I presume it's so people don't
sieve directly from the things. Um. The good news is
my husband, because he was very worried about this ancient dog,

(37:18):
found that same bbcr uh. So yeah, but I super
appreciate it and it's um. It is one of those
funny things, you know, you get fixated on something and
here you are looking up ancient dog imagery and POMPEII.
So thank you again for emailing us, April Land. If

(37:41):
you would like to email us about this or any
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(38:08):
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