Freedom Summer voting rights pioneers reflect on project's legacy 60 years later

As advocates across the country rally to register voters ahead of November's 2024 presidential election, Leslie McLemore, the Rev. Rims Barber and Euvester Simpson – three of the remaining foot soldiers who championed the fight for voting rights in 1964 Mississippi – recall a time when registering Black voters cost some Americans their lives.

“I mean, just the idea of the act of going from your house to the county courthouse to register to vote, you know, you were putting your life on the line,” McLemore, who was a 20-year-old student at the Mississippi HBCU Rust College in 1964, told GMA3 Co-Anchor DeMarco Morgan.

In interviews with Morgan, the three voting rights advocates reflected on their involvement 60 years ago in the historic Freedom Summer Project – a groundbreaking movement in Mississippi that, according to the Martin Luther King Research and Education Institute at Stanford University, highlighted the need for federal voting rights legislation and fueled political momentum that would bring the Voting Rights Act of 1965 into fruition.

“If you tried to register to vote, part of the process was they would publish your name for two weeks in a local newspaper,” McLemore said, reflecting on the intimidation that Black voters were subjected to at the height of Jim Crow, when laws enforced racial segregation and discrimination against Black Americans and federal voting rights protections did not exist.

From violence and poll taxes to literacy tests, Black voters faced a wide range of tactics to intimidate them as they registered to vote, according to Stanford’s MLK Research and Education Institute.

“You would have a better life for the future?” Morgan asked.

“Yeah, I would have. My family would have a better life,” McLemore responded.

McLemore, Simpson and Barber joined the Mississippi Freedom Summer project – an unprecedented voter registration drive that was the brainchild of the iconic civil rights advocate Bob Moses, a co-founder of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, and one that was a collaboration between four major civil rights organizations of the time, including the NAACP.

“I can’t describe to you how I felt as a participant in the civil rights movement. And I knew we were doing something important, that we were helping to change Mississippi,” McLemore said.

According to Stanford's MLK institute, the first group of approximately 1,000 volunteers – the majority of which were white college students from the North – began training on June 14, 1964, at Western College for Women in Oxford, Ohio, before heading to Mississippi to help register Black voters.

“The thought behind that of Freedom Summer was that if well-to-do white people’s children came to Mississippi to help in this effort to get Black people registered to vote, then surely the higher-ups at the White House would take notice and offer some type of protection,” Simpson told Morgan.

But only one week after that first group of volunteers arrived in Oxford, three civil rights workers who were part of the Mississippi Freedom Summer project – James Chaney, a Black man from Mississippi and two white men from the North – Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman -- who were investigating the burning of a church in Philadelphia, Mississippi – were reported missing in Mississippi.

“Word came that they were missing,” said Simpson, who was friends with two of the three men who he would later learn were abducted and then murdered. “And of course that put a damper on everything.”

According to Stanford’s MLK Institute, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was invited in 1964 by Moses to Greenwood, Mississippi, where he showed his support for the voter-registration project and encouraged Black Mississippians to vote.

But less than three weeks after King’s visit, the bodies of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner were found buried in a dam in Neshoba County, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. Their story is depicted in the 1988 film, “Mississippi Burning.”

While the abduction and murder of Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner intensified fears, it did not deter the advocates of the Mississippi Summer Project, some of whom had their homes or church bombed, were beaten or killed.

“I mean, it was dangerous, of course, and people were still continually getting harassed and murdered,” Simpson said.

She was 17 years old at the time and said that she was once jailed for her advocacy with civil rights legend Fannie Lou Hamer, who was the co-chair of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. The party was formed by Black residents of Mississippi, as part of the Freedom Summer project, who were not permitted to participate in meetings of the state Democratic Party.

“I know you talked about being shot at. The Klan coming after you,” Morgan told Barber, a Freedom Summer volunteer in 1964 who moved to Mississippi from Iowa to join the movement.

“I’ve been shot at several times. I’ve been jailed several times,” Barber said.

According to Stanford’s MLK Institute, the Freedom Summer project focused on voter registration because in the summer of 1964 there were 17,000 Black residents of Mississippi who attempted to register to vote, but only about 1,600 of the applications submitted were accepted by the local registrars.

“I was just so impressed with the people that I was trying to help out and what they were doing and the courage they had,” Barber said.

Reflecting on Vice President Kamala Harris’ historic run, McLemore said that the night Harris became the first woman and woman of color to accept the nomination for president, she reflected on 1964 and those who joined her in the movement, including Hamer, who represented the Freedom Democratic Party during the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey.

“I reflected back on the fact that in 1964, so many of us – 68 of us – went to Atlantic City as a part of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party,” McLemore said. “And I was thinking and reflecting on the testimony of Mrs. Hamer before the credentials committee in Atlantic City and what her testimony meant and what the efforts of the Freedom Democratic Party meant. That party provided the platform that the vice president was standing on because we had made a mark.”