Video Segment

Eyes on the Prize, Volume 166, Chapters 1 and 2

Table of Contents

Summary
Questions for Discussion
Activities
Keywords
Profiles
Organizations
Maps
Graphs
Primary Documents

Summary

This story focuses on the right to vote. By the early 1960s, only 28,000 African Americans in the entire state of Mississippi were registered to vote. Medgar Evers, an NAACP organizer, led the NAACP in an economic boycott to end segregation in Jackson. President Kennedy made his strongest speech on civil rights in June 1963. That same night Evers was assassinated outside his Jackson home. Four months later, President Kennedy was killed in Dallas. Civil rights workers in Mississippi held a "Freedom Vote" (a mock election that provided practice for those who had never voted before and gave evidence of Black people's desire to vote to those who denied they had such interest).

In June 1964 more than a thousand volunteers poured into Mississippi to begin "Freedom Summer." Voter education and registration classes were held for adults; freedom schools were begun to teach reading, math, and African/African American arts and culture to Black children. Three young civil rights workers were murdered. Despite beatings and arrests, the movement continued. Civil rights workers canvassed house by house to register voters for a new political party, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP). Denied access to the regular Mississippi Democratic Party, members of the MFDP challenged the legitimacy of the all-white Mississippi delegation to the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City. This grass roots movement forced a showdown with President Lyndon B. Johnson and Democratic Party officials. The party's credentials committee offered a compromise but the MFDP maintained its demand for full voting rights at the convention. The MFDP challenge became the seed for political reform in the Democratic Party in Mississippi and across the nation.

Questions for Discussion

1. How were African Americans barred from voting in the South, and particularly in Mississippi?
2. Why were white Northern students brought in for the Freedom Summer campaign?
   
3. What personal sacrifices did the student volunteers make in order to go to Mississippi?
4. Why did they make these sacrifices? What do you think about these sacrifices? Whom did they benefit?

Activities

Have the students draw up a curriculum for a model freedom school in Mississippi. Students should bear in mind that the state-controlled system of education did not teach critical thinking, nor did it include any substantial history or culture of African Americans, Native Americans, Latinos, or Asian Americans.

Keywords

• Civil Rights Act of 1964
• job discrimination
• coalition

Online Profiles

• Unita Blackwell
• John Doar
• Medgar Evers
• James Forman
• Fannie Lou Hamer
• J. Edgar Hoover
• Lyndon B. Johnson
• Bob Moses

Organization Descriptions

• Ku Klux Klan
• Federal Bureau of Investigation
• Citizens' Council
• National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
• Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee

Maps

• United States. In 1950 the population of the United States was 134,941,622 White and 15,042,692 Black (approximately 9.5 percent of the population).
• Mississippi. Capital: Jackson. Population in 1950: 1,188,632 White, 986,494 Black. Principal Goods and Crops: apparel, food, lumber and wood products; cotton, corn, peanuts, oats and pecans.

Graphs

• Life Expectancy, Per-Pupil Expenditures
• Per-Pupil Expenditures
• Children in Poverty
• Black Elected Officials
• Self-Reported Voter Turnout

Primary Documents

• Brown decision
• Plessy decision
  
• FBI Poster of missing marchers

Bibliography

See Eyes on the Prize Bibliography

 

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