National Civil Rights Museum To Host Symposium On 1964’s Freedom Summer

It is the 60th anniversary of Freedom Summer.

The National Civil Rights Museum at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis will host a symposium on the 60th Anniversary of Freedom Summer on July 27 from 10:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m..

Activists Judy Richardson, Charlie Cobb Jr, Courtland Cox, Dorothy Zellner, and Jerry Mitchell will be on hand to discuss their time as part of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. (SNCC)

According to the press release from the museum, the symposium will be moderated by Dr. Robert Luckett, director of the Margaret Walker Center and COFO Center at Jackson State University. Dory Lerner, the National Civil Rights Museum’s education manager, will co-moderate.

Richardson, an author and filmmaker, served on SNCC’s staff at its national office from 1963 to 1966 and participated in its Freedom Summer initiative, which took place in Mississippi. Cobb, a journalist and author, was a member of SNCC during which time he proposed the Freedom School project and organized voting rights in Mississippi from 1962 to 1967. Cox served as an executive committee member for SNCC and was an organizer for Freedom Summer as well as a member of the Sterling Committee for the 1963 March on Washington.

Zellner is an author and editor who worked for SNCC in Atlanta, Danville, Virginia, and Greenwood, Mississippi, from 1962 to 1967. She also ran the Northeast office of SNCC in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Mitchell is an investigative reporter and author whose research helped to convict four members of the Ku Klux Klan in civil rights cases that had gone cold.

In his 2022 book, Black Bodies in the River: Searching for Freedom Summer, Davis W. Houck revealed that the search for the bodies of civil rights activists James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner also led to the discovery of numerous other bodies in the rivers of Neshoba County, Mississippi.

According to the museum’s website, the upcoming event will also honor the memories of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner.

The symposium will conclude with a panel discussion of the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, a group described by the Mississippi Free Press in 2021 as a “state-funded spy agency charged with resisting integration and civil-rights activity.” Leo Carney, whose father participated in a 1960 effort to desegregate Mississippi’s Biloxi Beach, described the group’s tactics and relationship to the White Citizens Council of Mississippi.

“Freedom Summer of 1964 followed the Bloody Wade-Ins. Medgar Evers was one of the Sovereignty Commission’s primary targets, assassinated by White Citizens Council member Byron De La Beckwith.”

Panelists for the National Civil Rights Museum’s discussion of the commission will include Houck, Mitchell, and Luckett and will be moderated by Ryan Jones, the museum’s associate curator. General admission tickets for the event will cost $15 and includes lunch for in-person, registered attendees of the event. The event will be free of charge for all educators.