For ten weeks in 1964, student volunteers joined local organizers in Mississippi in a historic effort to shatter the foundations of white supremacy in what was one of the nation’s most segregated and racist states.
Civil rights work in Mississippi in 1964 was dangerous. Those who had been on the ground in the state for decades knew that well, but some were less aware of what they'd face.Â
Former sharecropper Fannie Lou Hamer's Congressional testimony is so powerful that President Johnson calls an impromptu press conference to get her off the air.
When Dave Dennis gave the eulogy at the funeral of James Chaney—who was killed along with two other civil rights workers in the summer of 1964—he offered an emotional plea.
It would be the "Biggest Thing on Earth," the salvation of the common man, a dam and irrigation project that would provide a source of cheap power—boosting an entire region of the country.
The state of Mississippi's plan to bankrupt CORE backfired when, on August 14, 1961, all but nine of the Freedom Riders returned to Jackson for their arraignment.
