Freedom Summer, Selma and the Voting Rights Act

Even after 1964, most Black citizens in the Deep South could not vote. In Mississippi in 1964, only about 7 percent of eligible Black residents were registered. During Freedom Summer that year, SNCC and allied groups brought hundreds of volunteers, many of them white college students, to register voters and run Freedom Schools; three workers, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, were murdered in June. Fannie Lou Hamer, a sharecropper evicted for trying to register, testified powerfully at the 1964 Democratic convention.

In 1965 activists marched from Selma toward Montgomery, Alabama; on 7 March, later called Bloody Sunday, state troopers attacked marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Televised violence led President Johnson to call for voting legislation, and on 6 August 1965 he signed the Voting Rights Act, banning literacy tests and allowing federal oversight. Black registration in Mississippi rose to about 60 percent within a few years.