Unit 19: The Civil Rights Movement

1945-1970

Freedom Summer

Voting Rights Protests Lesson Plan | Grades 7-12

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Mississippi was one of the most violent and segregated states in the nation. The state had the dubious honor of leading the nation in the number of lynchings. Even though they made up half the population only 6% of African-Americans could vote. This is why Mississippi was chosen as the target of the Mississippi Freedom Project in 1964. Since Reconstruction many states had gotten around the Fifteenth Amendment by passing literacy tests, poll taxes, and voucher systems that stole the vote away from black citizens.

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How Jim Crow Stole the Vote
Literacy tests were designed to be confusing and complicated, requiring applicants to answer all kinds of obscure questions about state law and history. Questions like: “Does enumeration affect the income tax levied on citizens in various states?” were so specific that they were almost impossible to answer. Other questions were intentionally confusing such as “Write right from the left to the right as you see it spelled here”. The final decision of whether or not you passed was up to the white registrar.

If you somehow managed to pass the literacy test, there were more barriers waiting. Poll taxes required a fee just to register. Since most Black Mississippians were trapped in low-paying sharecropping or domestic jobs, a few dollars was often more than they could afford to lose to take a test they probably weren’t going to pass. Some counties used voucher systems to keep blacks from voting by requiring that they find a registered voter to vouch for them before they could themselves apply. Since any sympathetic white voters lived in different parts of town and feared the Klan, it was nearly impossible to find a supporter. Furthermore, state officials frequently moved polling stations at the last minute or placed them miles away from Black neighborhoods.

But if by some miracle you became a registered voter there was always fear and terrorism to keep you away from the polls. The names of registered voters were often published in the local newspapers which made you an instant target of the Klan who would show up at your door in the dead of night and beat you into giving up your right to vote. The key to ending Jim Crow once and for all was through the vote.

Yardley, Richard Quincy. "Voting Tests." The Baltimore Sun, 17 Mar. 1960. Richard Q. Yardley Cartoons Collection, Syracuse University Libraries.

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Freedom Schools and Activism

Civil Rights organizations including the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Council on Racial Equality (CORE) began preparing for a massive get-out-the-vote campaign to register African-American voters in Mississippi. The Freedom Summer project brought thousands of black Mississippians together with out of state volunteers, mostly wealthy white college students eager to make a difference. Before heading down to Mississippi volunteers were warned to expect violence and even death. During orientation white volunteers were told that they would be living with black families and their lives depended on not rushing in and believing that they could save the place. Mississippi was such a violent place that many parents felt that their kids were going off to a war zone. And that is exactly where they were headed.

To build a community that could sustain itself, activists also set up Freedom Schools. While Mississippi’s regular schools for Black children were underfunded and focused on "sharecropper education" or manual labor, these schools taught over 3,000 students about their Constitutional Rights and Black history. The volunteers were also fighting a broken political system split by region. Northern Democrats and many Republicans supported civil rights, but Southern Democrats (the "Dixiecrats") used their seniority in Congress to block every law that attempted to dismantle segregation. Because the "official" party in Mississippi was "whites only," the activists created the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) to show the world they were being locked out of democracy.

Two Freedom Summer volunteers teaching children in Freedom School. Freedom Summer Text & Photo Archive, Queens College Special Collections and Archives; Western College.

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Fannie Lou Hamer

The undeniable voice of this fight was Fannie Lou Hamer. For decades, Hamer lived the backbreaking life of a sharecropper on a Mississippi plantation. She didn't even know she had a constitutional right to vote until she attended a civil rights meeting in 1962. When she went to register, her "boss" didn't just fire her—he forced her and her family off the land she had called home for 18 years.

Things only got worse from there. In June 1963. Hamer and a group of activists were traveling home from a voter registration workshop when they stopped at a "white only" lunch counter in Winona, Mississippi. The police hauled the whole group to jail, but they didn't just lock Hamer up. In a move designed to silence her, the police ordered two Black inmates to beat her with a blackjack while a state trooper held her down. The assault was so savage it left her with permanent kidney damage and a limp she carried for the rest of her life.

They tried to beat the fight out of her, but it backfired. Instead of going home and staying quiet, she took her story to the 1964 Democratic National Convention. When the cameras turned on for a live national broadcast, Hamer described the Winona jail cell beating in graphic detail. She told the nation about the screaming, the blood, and the moment a state trooper told her he was going to make her "wish she was dead."

As she began to ask the room, "Is this America?" President Lyndon B. Johnson panicked. Watching from the White House, he realized her story was too powerful to let the public hear. He hastily called a fake "emergency" press conference, forcing the TV networks to cut away from Hamer mid-sentence. He had no real news; he just stood in front of the cameras and rambled about the nine-month anniversary of JFK's death until he was sure Hamer was off the air.

But his plan failed. The networks were so struck by Hamer’s testimony that they played her speech in full on the late-night news. By the next morning, the country was finally listening to the truth LBJ had tried so hard to hide. Her story forced Congress to pass the Voting Rights Act of 1965 just one year later.

Fannie Lou Hamer singing during the 1966 “March Against Fear.” By Jim Peppler. Source: Alabama Dept. of Archives and History

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Things Turn Violent

The first busload of three hundred volunteers arrived on June 15, 1964. The very next day two white students, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, and James Cheney a local black student were sent to Neshoba County to investigate the recent burning of Mount Zion Methodist Church. On their return, they were arrested for “speeding”. The arrest had given the sheriff enough time to organize a lynch mob. The local deputy sheriff, Cecil Price, was actually a member of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. He detained the three men just long enough to coordinate with his fellow Klansmen.

Later that night the men were released and before they had gone a few miles were ambushed, taken to a remote area, and murdered.

Controversy raged over the disappearance. Many white Mississippians insisted that it was a prank to make Mississippi look bad. Their bodies were found on a local farm 41 days later. The murders had brought in the FBI to investigate and made national headlines and it was probably for this reason alone that seven klansmen were found guilty of murder and sentenced to 3-7 years in prison. This was the first time since Reconstruction that white men had been convicted of violating civil rights in Mississippi.

Despite the danger, Freedom Summer volunteers pressed on, going door-to-door to convince African Americans to register to vote. Mississippi’s terrorist state was so powerful that most African Americans flat out refused to vote. Most who tried to register knew they would be fired from their jobs, beaten, harassed, or if they refused to back down could likely be murdered. That summer thousands were arrested and eighty volunteers were beaten, some critically. 37 churches were firebombed and Mississippi turned into a war zone that many people had predicted.

Flyer, Missing Call FBI, ca. 1964. Freedom Summer Text & Photo Archive, Miami University, Western College Memorial Archives, Oxford, Ohio

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The Bridge at Selma: A Final Stand

By 1965, the movement realized that even the national headlines from Freedom Summer weren't enough to force a new law through a stubborn Congress. They needed to find the most segregated, stubborn town in the South and make it the center of the world. They chose Selma, Alabama.

Selma was run by a hot-headed Sheriff named Jim Clark, who was known for his brutal temper. Activists knew that if they marched peacefully, Clark would likely react with violence—and they wanted the whole world to see it. The breaking point came after a young Black man named Jimmie Lee Jackson was shot and killed by a state trooper while trying to protect his mother during a protest. In response, activists planned a 54-mile march from Selma to the state capital in Montgomery.

On March 7, 1965, a day now known as Bloody Sunday, 600 marchers stepped onto the Edmund Pettus Bridge. As they reached the crest of the bridge, they saw a "blue wall" of Alabama State Troopers waiting for them. The marchers stopped and knelt to pray. Without warning, the troopers charged. They used tear gas, bullwhips, and Billy clubs to drive the protesters back. John Lewis, a young leader of SNCC, had his skull fractured in the chaos.

The images were broadcast that night, interrupting regular television programs. Americans in their living rooms saw peaceful people in their Sunday best, being trampled by horses and choked by gas. The outrage was instant. Thousands of people, including clergy of all faiths, rushed to Selma to join the next march. President Johnson realized the "middle ground" was gone. He went before Congress and used the movement's own words, declaring, "We shall overcome." This was the moment that finally forced Washington to stop talking about a voting rights bill and start writing one. That law became the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and was one of the single most important pieces of legislation in dismantling Jim Crow once and for all.

civil rights selma protest police beating a protester.webp

John Lewis (foreground) is beaten by a state trooper in Selma, Alabama, on March 7, 1965. The future congressman suffered a fractured skull. | AP Photo

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How the Voting Rights Act of 1965 Worked

In August 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act, which finally gave the federal government the "teeth" to stop the cheating we saw in Mississippi. This wasn't just a list of rules; it was a complete takeover of the voting process in the South.

First, the law suspended the use of literacy tests and other "devices" in states where less than 50% of the population was registered to vote. This meant that a local registrar could no longer hand a Black applicant a 500-word legal document to "interpret." If the tests were gone, the registrar lost their most powerful weapon.

Second, the law allowed the U.S. Attorney General to send Federal Examiners directly into the South. These examiners were federal employees who worked for the U.S. government, not the local sheriff. If a Black citizen was being blocked by a local registrar, they could go to a federal examiner who would put them on the rolls. This removed the "White Registrar" as the gatekeeper of democracy.

Third, the law created something called Section 5 Preclearance. This was a massive change. It stated that certain states (like Mississippi and Alabama) could not change any voting law—even something as small as moving a polling place or changing a district line—without first getting approval from the Department of Justice in Washington, D.C. This prevented states from coming up with new "tricks" to replace the ones the law had just banned.

Infographic showing the main provisions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. This is an AI generated image.

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Why It Matters

The Voting Rights Act was the moment the federal government finally stepped in to stop a century of local bullying. For a hundred years, the 15th Amendment was a promise that didn't exist in reality for Black citizens in the South. To even get to a ballot box, you had to survive a gauntlet of rigged literacy tests, "character" checks, and the very real threat of being fired or evicted.

This law changed the game by stripping local officials of their power to decide who was "worthy" of a vote. The federal government sent in its own examiners to oversee registration, and the results were massive. In Mississippi, Black voter registration jumped from 6% to nearly 60% in just three years. People didn't just suddenly become interested in politics; the barriers that were holding them back were finally removed.

This struggle proved that regular people—sharecroppers, students, and local organizers—could force the most powerful government in the world to protect its own citizens. By the time the law was signed, the question Fannie Lou Hamer asked in Atlantic City was finally getting an answer. The Act established a simple, hard truth: in a democracy, your voice should never depend on your zip code or the color of your skin.

Exit Ticket

Take a stand on one of these questions. Use 3-5 sentences to explain your thinking based on what you just read.

Exit Ticket 1: The Personal Cost of Democracy

If you were a student in 1964 and knew that attempting to register to vote meant your name would be published in the local newspaper—making you an immediate target for the Klan—would you have still gone to the courthouse?

Exit Ticket 2: The Catalyst for Change

For nearly a century, the federal government avoided interfering in Mississippi's voting laws. Then, following the 1964 murders in Neshoba County and the 1965 violence of 'Bloody Sunday,' they passed the Voting Rights Act. Why do you think it took these specific, tragedies to finally force a change in the law?