Freedom Summer of 2024? Election official hopes 60-year-old fight will inspire voters

WASHINGTON ‒ Shirley Weber plans to take a page from the history books this summer.

To promote the importance of voting in California, Weber, the secretary of state, plans to launch a get-out-the-vote campaign. The effort will commemorate the 60^th anniversary of Freedom Summer, a pivotal movement that spurred civil rights activism in Mississippi and across the country.

Weber and get-out-the-vote activists hope this new project will do the same.

“We want to get up and down California, as large as it is, and help people understand in different areas why people worked so hard to vote,’’ Weber said. "There just seems like there's a disconnect between folks who struggled so hard to get the right to vote and others who have no concept at all.’’

Daphne Chamberlain, a Mississippi civil rights historian, said she supports any effort to commemorate Freedom Summer and educate people about the importance of voting in local and national elections. During that summer of 1964, thousands of people, many of them college students, joined Mississippi locals to help register Blacks citizens to vote.

“Freedom Summer needs to happen every year,'' Chamberlain said. "This is a crucial election year.”

Events commemorating Freedom Summer also are planned across Mississippi this summer, hosted by universities and civic engagement groups. Many are aimed at high school and college students.

MacArthur Cotton, a civil rights veteran who lives in Kosciusko, Mississippi, welcomes the commemorations.

“I had no illusions that freedom was going to be something instant. I expected there would be work to do as long as I lived,’’ said Cotton, 81, a veteran of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. “I did hope that we would by now have resolved the voting question.”

Remembering the fight for voting rights

Much like civil rights activists did in Mississippi decades ago, Weber’s office plans to fan out across the state registering voters, hosting lectures and education series in churches and other venues. It will also turn to social media, which didn't exist back then, to reach younger people.

“It's much about civic engagement but (also) motivating them to understand how powerful this motivation is and the fact that it's not ‘Just oh, you should vote because you're a citizen,' ’’ said Weber, who called the initiative Freedom Summer 2. “It's your responsibility, and that doesn't somehow register to young people or anybody.”

In California, whose population is closing in on 40 million, nearly 22 million were registered to vote in 2022, and about half of those registered cast ballots that year, according to the Secretary of State's office.

Historically, California has had some of the largest gaps in voter turnout between white voters and voters of color, often ranking near the bottom among states, said Mindy Romero, director of the University of Southern California's Center for Inclusive Democracy.

In 2022, 31% of eligible Black Californians cast ballots, compared with 30% of Asian American and Pacific Islanders, 26% of Latinos and 58% of white voters, according to a recent report released by the center.

“There's still a legacy in the state, a historic legacy that shows up in our voter turnout,’’ said Romero, adding that for decades community groups have conducted get-out-the-vote campaigns. “We still have significant disparities, consistently entrenched disparities in turnout by race and ethnicity that have real impact on representation and outcomes.’’

Some factors for those disparities include lower registration rates and a disconnect from the political process, Romero said. Obstacles to voting may not be overt in California, she said, but some voters of color still face hurdles such as targeted misinformation and lack of access to language assistance.

“California often is overlooked when we think about our nation's terrible history of voter suppression efforts, particularly violent voter suppression efforts,’’ Romero said. “But there isn't a lot of recognition about what has happened historically out here in California for voters of color period, but particularly for the Latino community.’’

Over the years, the state has taken steps to improve access, including expanding early voting and increasing polling centers.

“Still, you’re begging people to come to vote,’’ Weber said.

As part of its Freedom Summer 2 project, the office plans to invite veterans of the Civil Rights Movement, many whom are in their 80s and 90s, to share their experiences.

“We want to make it a little bit more real for people to understand this power that they have, that they don't use,” she said. “Most of us don't know why we vote. We also don't know what happens when we don't vote. But the older folks, they knew what happens when you don't have a voice, when you can't participate in the political system.’’

'Clarion call' to continue the fight for voting rights

Black Mississippians had long been organizing around the fight for voting rights. In 1964 the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) formed the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party to counter the all-white state party. The MFDP held a convention, drawing thousands.

“It was wonderful to see all those people across the state coming to finally mobilize to the point that we got hundreds of people who were saying, ‘OK, we’re ready to move,’’ said Cotton, noting that a year earlier Medgar Evers, the state NAACP field secretary, had been assassinated.

Cotton said civil rights activists had launched summer projects in the past but knew that if more white middle class activists got involved it would garner more attention. It did. Until then, he said, their efforts went mostly unnoticed by national media.

Freedom Summer also drew national media after the murder of civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner in June that year. Goodman and Schwerner were white.

Later that summer, delegates from the MFDP went to the national Democratic Party convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey. At the convention, civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer gave her impassioned speech about the struggle for voting rights for Black Mississippians.

“Everything that happened after that changed the complexion of politics in this state,’’ Chamberlain said. “That's when you see this shift in having more African American elected officials sitting in these positions of local authority all the way up to state positions of power.’’

Americans stood up to racism in 1961 and changed history. This is their fight, in their words.

Mississippi, where the population is nearly 40% Black, is now among the states with the highest number of Black elected officials.

It was after attending the unveiling of a statute of Hamer in Atlantic City last fall that Weber started plans to launch the Freedom Summer project in California.

"You start realizing the tremendous amount of sacrifice that people made just to register to vote, whether it's women, whether it's African Americans,'' Weber said.

Chamberlain, the Mississippi historian, called the commemoration efforts a “clarion call’’ for others to teach younger people about that history and how they can contribute today.

“We do need to acknowledge it as important and also being the inspiration to why we continue to do the work that we do.’’

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Freedom Summer takes center stage in California voter drive for 2024