Black people in the state had been largely prevented from voting since the turn of the 20th century due to barriers to voter registration and other Jim Crow laws that had been enacted throughout the American South.

[1] Freedom Summer was built on the years of earlier work by thousands of African Americans, connected through their churches, who lived in Mississippi.

[3] Local civil rights workers and volunteers, along with students from northern and western universities, organized and implemented the mock election, in which tens of thousands voted.

By 1964, students and others had begun the process of integrating public accommodations, registering adults to vote, and above all strengthening a network of local leadership.

Speakers recruited for workers on college campuses across the country, drawing standing ovations for their dedication in braving the routine violence perpetrated by police, sheriffs, and others in Mississippi.

SNCC recruiters interviewed dozens of potential volunteers, weeding out those with a "John Brown complex"[4][5] and informing others that their job that summer would not be to "save the Mississippi Negro" but to work with local leadership to develop the grassroots movement.

[9] Organizers focused on Mississippi because it had the lowest percentage of any state in the country of African Americans registered to vote, and they constituted more than one-third of the population.

They maintained this exclusion of Black people from politics well into the 1960s, which extended to excluding them from juries and imposing Jim Crow segregation laws for public facilities.

[11] Most of these methods survived US Supreme Court challenges and, if overruled, states had quickly developed new ways to exclude Black people, such as use of grandfather clauses and white primaries.

The Commission on Religion and Race (CORR), an endeavor of the National Council of Churches (NCC), brought Christian and Jewish clergy and divinity students to Mississippi to support the work of the Summer Project.

The volunteers' presence in local black communities drew drive-by shootings, Molotov cocktails thrown at host homes, and constant harassment.

State and local governments, the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission (which was tax-supported and spied on citizens), police, White Citizens' Council, and Ku Klux Klan used arrests, arson, beatings, evictions, firing, murder, spying, and other forms of intimidation and harassment to oppose the project and prevent Black people from registering to vote or achieve social equality.

The parents of the missing children were able to put so much pressure on Washington that meetings with President Johnson and Attorney General Robert Kennedy were arranged.

FBI agents began swarming around Philadelphia, Mississippi, where Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner had been arrested after they had investigated the burning of a local black church that was a center for political organizing.

For the next seven weeks, FBI agents and sailors from a nearby naval airbase searched for the bodies, wading into swamps and hacking through underbrush.

Throughout the search, Mississippi newspapers and word-of-mouth perpetuated the common belief that the disappearance was "a hoax" designed to draw publicity.

After he returned home, he was abducted and killed by KKK members in Franklin County, Mississippi on May 2, 1964 with his friend Henry Hezekiah Dee.

When the forces of white supremacy continued to block black voter registration, the Summer Project switched to building the MFDP.

He did not allow the MFDP to replace the regulars, but the continuing issue of political oppression in Mississippi was covered widely by the national press.

The core curriculum focused on basic literacy and arithmetic, black history and current status, political processes, civil rights, and the freedom movement.

They drain me of everything that I have to offer so that I go home at night completely exhausted but very happy in spirit ...[20]Approximately fifty Freedom libraries were established throughout Mississippi.

It was real three-ring circus [24]Freedom Summer did not succeed in getting many voters registered, but it had a significant effect on the course of the Civil Rights Movement.

Leading up to the November 1964 election, repression persisted in Mississippi, with nuisance arrests, beatings, and church burnings continuing.

The discontent with the white students and the increasing need for armed defense against segregationists helped create demand for a Black Power direction in SNCC.

In October 1967, the men, including the Klan's Imperial Wizard Samuel Bowers, who had allegedly ordered the murders, went on trial in the federal courthouse in Meridian.

This marked the first time since Reconstruction era that white men had been convicted of civil rights violations against Black people in Mississippi.

As a result of investigative reporting by Jerry Mitchell (an award-winning reporter for the Jackson Clarion-Ledger), high school teacher Barry Bradford, and three of his students from Illinois (Brittany Saltiel, Sarah Siegel, and Allison Nichols), Edgar Ray Killen, one of the leaders of the killings and a former Ku Klux Klan klavern recruiter, was indicted for murder.

Killen's lawyers appealed the verdict, but his sentence of 3 times 20 years in prison was upheld on January 12, 2007, in a hearing by the Supreme Court of Mississippi.

In a 2009 article, Stanford historian James T. Campbell highlights Freedom Summer as an example where structured efforts to reconcile conflicting historical views—held by white and Black Mississippians—could have lessened the event's lasting effects.

Although Campbell doesn't directly call for a truth and reconciliation commission for the events of 1964, he suggests that the violent outcomes stemmed from two opposing interpretations of history.