Freedom Summer - Aftermath

Aftermath

Though Freedom Summer failed to register many voters, it had a significant effect on the course of the Civil Rights Movement. It helped break down the decades of isolation and repression that were the foundation of the Jim Crow system. Before Freedom Summer, the national news media had paid little attention to the persecution of black voters in the Deep South and the dangers endured by black civil rights workers, but when the lives of affluent northern white students were threatened the full attention of the media spotlight was turned on the state. This evident disparity between the value that the media placed on the lives of whites and blacks embittered many black activists. Perhaps the most significant effect of Freedom Summer was on the volunteers themselves, almost all of whom – black and white – still consider it one of the defining moments of their lives.

The structure of the civil rights movement remained after Freedom Summer. In September and October, leading up to the November election, a series of repressive events occurred. Nuisance arrests, beatings, and church burnings continued. Long-term volunteers continued to staff the COFO and SNCC offices throughout Mississippi. After the flood of summer workers in 1964, it was decided that projects should continue in the following summer, but under the direction of local leadership. In the following summer, and thereafter, the priorities for action were set by locals.

Among many notable veterans of Freedom Summer were Heather Booth, Marshall Ganz, and Mario Savio. After the summer, Heather Booth returned to Illinois, where she became a founder of the Chicago Women's Liberation Union and later the Midwest Academy. Marshall Ganz returned to California and worked for many years on the staff of the United Farm Workers, later taught organizing strategies, and in 2008 played a crucial role in organizing Barack Obama's field staff for the campaign. Mario Savio returned to the University of California, Berkeley, where he became a leader of the Free Speech Movement.

Back in Mississippi, controversy raged over the three murders. Mississippi refused to indict anyone but the FBI continued to investigate. Agents infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan and paid informers to reveal secrets of their "klaverns". In the fall of 1964, informants told the FBI all about the murders of Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney, and on December 4, 19 men were arrested. All were freed on a technicality, starting a three-year battle to bring them to justice. Finally, in October 1967, the men, including the Klan's Imperial Wizard Samuel Bowers, who had ordered the murders, went on trial in a federal courthouse in Meridian. Seven were ultimately convicted for federal crimes related to the murders. All were sentenced to 3–10 years but none served more than six years. Still, it marked the first time since Reconstruction that white men had been convicted of civil rights violations in Mississippi.

The nationwide shame created by Freedom Summer continued to haunt Mississippi, even as the state made halting racial progress. Blacks were given the vote in 1965 with the federal Voting Rights Act but made little progress as Mississippi's legislature passed several laws to dilute the power of their votes. Only with Supreme Court rulings and more than a decade of cooling did black voting become a reality in Mississippi. The seeds planted during Freedom Summer bore fruit in the 1980s and 1990s when Mississippi elected more black officials than any other state. Today, thanks to Freedom Summer and the MFDP, nearly every major city in Mississippi has a black mayor, black city councilmen, black policemen, judges, and other officials.

Further investigation of the Mississippi civil rights workers murders during Freedom Summer finally led to another trial in 2005. As a result of investigative reporting by Jerry Mitchell (an award-winning reporter for the Jackson Clarion-Ledger), high school teacher Barry Bradford, and three students from Illinois (Brittany Saltiel, Sarah Siegel, and Allison Nichols), Edgar Ray Killen, one of the leaders of the killings and a former Ku Klux Klan klavern recruiter, was finally indicted for murder and later found guilty of three counts of manslaughter. The Killen verdict came on June 21, 2005, the forty-first anniversary of the crime. Killen's lawyers appealed the verdict, but his sentence of 3 times 20 years in prison was upheld on January 12, 2007, in a hearing by the Supreme Court of Mississippi.