Join the Living Legacy Project and the UU College of Social Justice 
in commemorating Freedom Summer!

July 5-12, 2014

Join this trip to learn from veterans of Freedom Summer, and experience the role that both faith and music play in sustaining people in the struggle for justice. Participants will deepen their understanding of and competence in a multi-cultural world, and study the links between Civil Rights history and today’s struggle against voter suppression, in additioing to learning how to be effective, inspired workers for justice wherever they live. 
The Mississippi Summer Project of 1964, popularly called Freedom Summer, was an ambitious effort to take a quantum leap forward in civil rights work in Mississippi.  Scores of civil rights workers and thousands of local citizens had been working for years to challenge Mississippi’s hardcore segregation, but with little effective protection from unjust arrests, arson, beatings, and even murder. COFO, the Council of Federated Organizations, was comprised of the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), and the NAACP.  It hoped that with the Summer Project bringing in hundreds of volunteers, mostly white college students, to work on Freedom Schools, voter registration, and other organizing projects that repression and violence would either decrease or at least be acknowledged. It was a community organizing effort that is still changing America.
From July 5-12, 2014, the Living Legacy Project and the Unitarian Universalist College of Social Justice will host a multigenerational journey into Mississippi fifty years after Freedom Summer. 
  • In Memphis, visit the National Civil Rights Museum at the Lorraine Motel, the site of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King's assassination
  • In Jackson, take a driving tour of COFO sites, visit COFO Headquarters, Medgar Evers's home, and the historic Tougaloo College 
  • Meet the family of Vernon Dahmer, a Hattiesburg voting rights leader killed by the Klan
  • Visit the cemetery outside Meridian where civil rights worker, James Chaney, is buried
  • Meet members of the historic Mt. Zion United Methodist Church in Neshoba County, where civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner were last seen after investigating a church fire set by the Ku Klux Klan
  • Travel through the Mississippi Delta where Emmett Till was killed nine years before Freedom Summer, and Fannie Lou Hamer, "sick and tired of being sick and tired," led a revolution for black representation at the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City
  • Visit the University of Mississippi in Oxford, where , in 1962, James Meredith desegregated the University, an event that became a flashpoint for the state's resistance to civil rights
And all along the way, talk with veterans of the Civil Rights Movement and, specifically, of the Mississippi Summer Project. 
This multigenerational trip is designed to give people of all ages (14 and older) an experience not to be forgotten as you explore together the genesis and the impact of the Mississippi Summer Project, referred to as Freedom Summer. 

We especially encourage grandparents to invite your grandchildren to learn along with you. What better way to explore the younger generation to the lessons and inspiration of the Civil Rights Movement!

Watch Freedom Summer from Eyes on the Prize:
Picture
Fannie Lou Hamer
The Living Legacy Project is in partnership with the Unitarian Universalist College of Social Justice to offer Civil Rights Journeys, specially tailored for young people ages 15-20.