Date: 1964.

History:
Freedom Summer Project Civil Rights Workers

The 1964 civil rights campaign known as the Mississippi Freedom Summer Project focused on securing the vote for African Americans and was spearheaded by the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO). COFO consisted of the Mississippi chapters of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, the Congress of Racial Equality, and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. The Freedom Summer Project brought 1,000 volunteers to Mississippi, most of whom were white college students from the North. The Project was a direct result of the Freedom Vote campaign of summer 1963, during which 70,000 individuals were registered with the aid of thousands of volunteers from Stanford University in Stanford, California, and Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut.

On June 21, 1964, three workers with the Freedom Summer Project, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, were murdered on Highway 492 outside of Philadelphia, Neshoba County, Mississippi. Their bodies were discovered in an earthen dam on August 4. Since the state refused to bring murder charges in the case, a Federal Bureau of Investigation probe led to the U.S. government indicting nineteen men for violation of the workers’ civil rights. In the subsequent 1967 trial, United States v. Cecil Price, et al., seven of the men were convicted and received sentences ranging from three to ten years. In 2005, former Ku Klux Klansman Edgar Ray Killen, whose 1967 trial resulted in a hung jury, was convicted of three counts of manslaughter for the killings and sentenced to sixty years in prison.

Moon Lake Missionary Baptist Church

According to research material compiled by the Work Projects Administration, Moon Lake Missionary Baptist Church in Mayersville is the second oldest African American congregation in Issaquena County, Mississippi. In late June 1964, two Freedom Summer Project workers visited the congregation during a Sunday service and addressed its members in an attempt to organize a voting registration drive in the community. Among those present at this service was congregation member Unita Blackwell, who became a prominent civil rights leader. Blackwell was later elected mayor of Mayersville, where she was the first African American woman mayor in Mississippi. Moon Lake then hosted mass meetings of civil rights workers and local African Americans throughout the summer, and served as the meeting place for one of Issaquena County’s five precincts in the organization of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. The precinct caucus was held there on July 25. Two days later, when another precinct meeting was held, the owner of a plantation located across the street threatened the building with arson if the church continued to host civil rights activities. In January 1965, the church’s minister and three deacons, without input from the congregation, voted to disallow civil rights meetings there, a decision that upset many of the church’s members.

 

Scope and Content Note:

This collection consists of a typed, half-page flyer announcing a memorial service held on Sunday, August 16, 1964, at “Moonlake Baptist Church” (Moon Lake Missionary Baptist Church) in Mayersville, Mississippi. The service was held in memory of murdered civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner. In addition to providing information about the time, date, and place of the service, the flyer encourages attendance as a way to “show Mississippi and the world that we care” about the men and their cause.