A gripping look at Freedom Summer in Mississippi in 1964 has early chapters offering a tense, almost moment-by-moment chronicle of the final hours of civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Mickey Schwerner’s lives — and their murders. The three young men disappeared the first week of Freedom Summer, while most young volunteers were still being trained in Ohio. Their disappearance exemplified the brutal racism under which African Americans lived in Mississippi. Author Susan Goldman Rubin describes the Freedom Summer voter registration drive, including efforts to sign up people under the alternate Mississippi Democratic Freedom Party, as well as classes and activities taking place at the Freedom Schools, giving a sense of events from the perspective of both Black residents of the communities and Freedom Summer volunteers. All the while, the FBI’s search for the three missing men went on. The eventual discovery of their bodies, and the impact as word spread among Freedom Summer communities, is one of many affecting dimensions of Rubin’s account, which also emphasizes that Freedom Summer was an effort designed by African American activists and propelled by African Americans working in collaboration with volunteers, Black and white, from within and beyond the state’s borders. Rubin drew on a multitude of primary source materials and interviews to create this volume that includes occasional black-and-white photos, and wonderful sketches rendered that summer by Freedom Summer participant and artist Tracy Sugarman. (Age 13 and older)

In 1964, Mississippi civil rights groups banded together to fight Jim Crow laws in a state where only 6.4 percent of eligible black voters were registered. 

Testing a bold new strategy, they recruited students from across the United States. That summer these young volunteers defied segregation by living with local black hosts, opening Freedom Schools to educate disenfranchised adults and their children, and canvassing door-to-door to register voters.

Everyone involved knew there would be risks but were nonetheless shocked when three civil rights workers disappeared and were soon presumed murdered. The organizers' worst fears were realized as volunteers, local activists, and hosts faced terror on a daily basis. Yet by the middle of August, incredible strides had been made in spite of the vicious intimidation. The summer unleashed an unstoppable wave of determination from black Mississippians to demand their rights and helped bring about a new political order in the American South. 

Fifty years after this landmark civil rights project in Mississippi, an award-winning author offers a riveting account of events that stunned the nation. Includes over 75 photographs, drawings, original documents, a timeline, source notes, bibliography, maps, and an index.