During the height of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s, protest leaders liked to tell the joke about a Chicago seminary student who was suddenly awakened at 3 A.M. by a voice imploring him: Go to Mississippi! Go to Mississippi!! Go to Mississippi!!! The student said, “Lord, you said that you will be with me always, even until the end of the earth. If I go to Mississippi, will you go with me?” The heavenly voice replied, “I’ll go as far as Memphis.”

The idea, of course, was that if God was afraid to go to Mississippi, mortals had no chance of surviving.

Without a doubt, virulent Mississippi racists were the most brutal in the nation. Bob Moses and his comrades at the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) decided to launch a campaign against fear in violence by organizing Freedom Summer in 1964, a project designed to create a showdown between Mississippi authorities intent on maintaining segregation and a federal government obligated – at least on paper – to protect the rights of African-Americans, who were denied their right to vote and live as full citizens.

Moses favored what he called an “annealing process.” He explained, “Only when metal has been brought to white heat, can it be shaped and molded. This is what we intend to do in the South and the country, bring them to white heat and then remold them.”

Key to remolding the South was arranging for White college students from around the nation to descend on Mississippi.

Clayborne Carson, in his book, “In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s,” said that Moses and Allard Lowenstein, a White activist who had participated in Southern protests, came up with the idea of Freedom Summer.

“They assumed that Mississippi officials could not crush such a massive force of civil rights workers and that national sentiment would not tolerate assaults against white students, especially those from leading colleges and prominent families,” Carson wrote.

It became clear very early that there wouldn’t just be assaults on visiting activists – some would be killed.

On June 21, 1964, SNCC workers learned that three civil rights workers – James Chaney, a Black Mississippian, and two Whites, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman – did not return from a trip to Meridian, Miss. to investigate the burning of a Black church. The three had been arrested in Philadelphia, Miss. and released at night without being permitted to place a telephone call.

Responding to the mounting public outcry, President Lyndon Johnson authorized 200 Navy servicemen to help in the search for the missing workers and assigned 150 FBI agents to the case.

On August 4, the bodies of the three civil rights workers were found in an earthfill dam near Philadelphia, Miss. Seven White men were eventually convicted and sent to prison.

Freedom Summer played an important part in the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the 1965 Voting Rights Act and other groundbreaking federal legislation. Because of that early work, Mississippi now has more Black elected officials than any other state.

Last weekend, many of the veterans of Freedom Summer were brought together for a conference at the University of Tennessee organized by Professor Cynthia Griggs Fleming. They included Chuck McDew, who succeeded Marion Barry as chairman of SNCC; Rev. James Bevel, a key SNCC and SCLC organizer; Bob Zellner, the son of a White Alabama Methodist minister who became a SNCC field secretary and Freedom Rider; Timothy Jenkins who joined the movement as the National Student Association’s representative to SNCC; Avon Rollins, a former SNCC field secretary; Lawrence Guyot, a SNCC field secretary and later head of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party; Unita Blackwell, the first Black female mayor of a Mississippi town (Mayersville), Charles Jones, a SNCC veteran and leader of the Charlotte, N.C. sit-in movement as well as many others.

I was asked to serve as a dinner speaker at the event and was struck by the courage and commitment of those assembled in Knoxville. Many of the Whites in the room were Southerners who had joined the Civil Rights Movement because it was the right thing to do. One of them, Constance Curry, who served with Ella Baker as adult advisers to the young activists in SNCC, observed that Whites are not as active in the Civil Rights Movement today as they were in the 1960s.

“They think the movement is over,” she explained. “They think it ended with the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. Young Blacks think it’s over, too. It was hard to ignore when people weren’t served at lunch counters – that hit you in the face – but they don’t see the less subtle things like the prison pipeline. We must educate them.”

Any education about the Civil Rights Movement must include Freedom Summer. Without Freedom Summer, we might not have some of the freedoms we’re now enjoying.