Bob Moses

Freedom Summer Volunteers Inspired by More than Just Idealism

Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove 7-10-2014

Heather Booth plays guitar for Fannie Lou Hamer during the Freedom Summer, Mississippi, 1964. Creative Commons:Wallace Roberts.

On June 2, 1964, while hundreds of Freedom Summer volunteers were still finishing their training in Oxford, Ohio, three civil rights workers went missing in Neshoba County, Miss.

Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee field secretary Bob Moses was charged with leading the project that would organize poor, black Mississippians to challenge the power structure of the South and upset the Democratic National Convention.

Moses knew from his experience in Mississippi that James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman, who had left the day before to investigate a church burning in Philadelphia, Miss., would never be found alive. Moses’ responsibility that evening was to tell the young recruits who planned to spend their summer registering voters in Mississippi that they could meet the same end.

What happened next surprised some. In small circles, the young volunteers sat and talked. Soon, they started singing.