Freedom Summer activists sing before leaving training sessions at Western College for Women in Oxford, Ohio, for Mississippi in June 1964. (Ted Polumbaum Collection/Newseum)
    Why was the summer of 1964 pivotal in the fight for civil rights?
We didnât know whether civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner would be found alive down in Mississippi. We also didnât know whether the Civil Rights Act of 1964, without badly needed voting-rights protections, would begin to fulfill Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.âs dream of a new American racial order, following a hundred yearsâ war between advocates for full and equal Black citizenship and the architects of all the snares that had hampered Black progress since the collapse of Reconstruction in 1876.
What we did sense was that the movement had grown younger, more radical, more diverse and increasingly powered by what Robert âBobâ Parris Moses, the pivotal planner of Freedom Summer, has called âWe, the peopleâ force.â
Before Sly and the Family Stone released their hit song âEveryday People,â the volunteers of Freedom Summer lived the philosophy behind itâschool by school, vote by vote, blow by blow. Mosesâtruly one of the heroes in the history of the African American peopleâcompared âthe languageâ animating this noble effort to that âof the ocean, the everyday language of everyday people.â And when its wave crashed in Mississippi in June, July and Aug. of 1964, the reverberation was so loud and deep that we could hear it and feel it all the way up in the Allegheny Mountains surrounding my small home-town of Piedmont, W.Va.
One thing was for sure: None of us would ever be the same. Nor would America. To me, Freedom Summerâs greatest legacy is the counterintuitive philosophy behind it. After decades of a âtop downâ organizing strategy, Moses and Ella Baker flipped the script, galvanizing everyday people to learn and lead themselves. And it isâit always will beâa blueprint for change.