Honoring Freedom Summer

(Children’s Defense Fund) – As summer draws to a close, we are also nearing the end of an extraordinary milestone – the 60th anniversary of the Civil Rights Movement’s Freedom Summer. As a brand-new Yale Law School graduate in 1963, I was fortunate enough to receive one of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund’s first two fellowships to help young attorneys seeking to practice in the South.After a year of intensive preparation at LDF’s New York City headquarters under the tutelage of an extraordinarily gifted and committed band of attorneys, I opened a law office in Jackson, Mississippi. God was headed south to Mississippi and Alabama and Georgia, and I went along for the scariest, most exhilarating, most rewarding, and most challenging years any human being could hope for. I moved to Mississippi at an extraordinary moment – just in time to witness firsthand and assist the unfolding of the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer Project.Related Stories The Mississippi Freedom Summer Project engaged college students from around the country to work together with local Black community members to open up Mississippi’s closed society and demand basic human and civil rights for all Mississippians. Hundreds of White middle-class students brought visibility to the...