African American History 8

Medgar Evers

🗓 1925–1963
📍Jackson, Mississippi
📌 WWII veteran, first field secretary of the NAACP in Mississippi.
🎓 Applied to the University of Mississippi Law School (rejected in 1954).
⚖ Launched major anti-segregation campaigns in Jackson, using marches, sit-ins, and lawsuits.
💥 Assassinated June 12, 1963 by Byron de la Beckwith, a member of the Citizens’ Council.

Robert Parris Moses (Bob Moses)

🧠 Leader of SNCC operations in Mississippi.
🎓 Went to Stanford University in 1964 to recruit students for the Freedom Summer.

Freedom Summer (1964)

🗓 June–August 1964
📌 SNCC, CORE, and COFO launched a full-scale campaign to register Black voters in Mississippi.
👥 800 volunteers trained in Ohio (Western College for Women), then sent to Mississippi.
📋 Goals:

• Voter registration

• Launch the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP)

• Create Freedom Schools

COFO (Council of Federated Organizations)

🗓 Founded 1962
📌 Coalition of SNCC, CORE, NAACP, and SCLC in Mississippi
🎯 Focused on voting rights as the central strategy.

Freedom Schools

🧠 Concept by Charlie Cobb in Dec. 1963
📚 Taught African American youth about:

• Voting rights (Citizenship Curriculum)

• Black history (Guide to Negro History)
  📣 Instilled ethnic pride, literacy, and activism.
  📰 Printed their own newspapers; 41 schools by 1964.

Fannie Lou Hamer

📍Sunflower County, MS
👩🏾 Sharecropper turned SNCC activist
🗓 First attempted to register to vote in 1962 after a meeting with Bob Moses.
📋 Took the literacy test multiple times and finally passed in January 1963.
🏠 Evicted, beaten, and threatened for her activism.
📣 Delivered powerful testimony at the 1964 DNC:

"Is this America, the land of the free and the home of the brave...?"

Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP)

🗓 Founded April 1964 by SNCC
📌 Created to challenge the all-white Mississippi Democratic Party.
👥 80,000 Black members by August 1964
🎯 Sent delegates to the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City.
🏛 The White House offered a “compromise” of 2 token seats — MFDP rejected it.

Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, Michael Schwerner

🗓 Murdered June 21, 1964
📍Philadelphia, Mississippi
👤 Chaney: local Black CORE activist
👤 Goodman & Schwerner: white Northerners working with CORE
💥 Arrested, released at night, then murdered by Klansmen and buried in an earthen dam.
🔍 Bodies found August 4; 21 men indicted in December.
⚖ Only 6 convicted, none for murder.

Dixiecrats

📌 Southern Democrats who fiercely opposed civil rights and integration.
👎 Blocked MFDP at the 1964 Convention.

President Lyndon B. Johnson (LBJ)

🗓 1963–1969
📌 Supported civil rights reforms after JFK’s assassination.
📜 Signed:

• Civil Rights Act (1964)

• Voting Rights Act (1965)

• Civil Rights Act (1968)