Mississippi to Atlantic City: Freedom Summer’s Mark on America

2024 marks the 60th anniversary of Freedom Summer, a landmark campaign to register as many African American voters as possible in Mississippi. While most of the movement’s work took place in the Magnolia State, a key portion of the path to voting rights ran through the Garden State.

On August 20, to remember this vital historical moment, NJCH and the Mississippi Humanities Council will host an event highlighting the iconic events that transpired in New Jersey. Join us for a panel discussion and commemoration on Tuesday, August 20, at 7:00 p.m. in the Fannie Lou Hamer Event Room at Stockton University’s Atlantic City Campus (located in the John F. Scarpa Academic Center, 3711 Atlantic Avenue, Atlantic City, NJ 08401).

RSVP Now

Panelists

The panel will feature four veterans of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party: Euvester Simpson, Dr. Roy DeBerry, Dr. Leslie McLemore, and David Dennis, Sr. Welcoming remarks will be given by Kaleem Shabazz, Atlantic City Councilman, President of NAACP: Atlantic City, and 1964 DNC veteran.

Euvester Simpson

A lifelong voting and civil rights activist, Euvester Simpson joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in 1963 at age 17. In June 1963, she was falsely imprisoned and abused by police in Winona, Mississippi, alongside fellow activists Fannie Lou Hamer, Annell Ponder, James West, and June Johnson. That incident of racist brutality was later recounted by Hamer in her powerful testimony at the Democratic National Convention in 1964, helping to draw national attention to the horrors of the Jim Crow South. Simpson continued to work with SNCC as a field secretary and has remained active in civil rights causes ever since. Learn more at the SNCC Digital Gateway

Dr. Roy DeBerry

Roy DeBerry was one of the first students to enroll in Mississippi’s Freedom Schools and began challenging segregation as a teenager. He worked as a canvasser seeking to register Black people to vote and as an organizer in the civil rights movement. He later earned bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees from Brandeis University. He served many years in research, teaching, and administrative roles in higher education, retiring in 2008 as vice president for economic development and local governmental affairs at Jackson State University. He is one of the leading chroniclers of civil rights history in Mississippi, having founded and served as executive director of the Hill Country Project, alongside his Freedom School teacher and fellow organizer Aviva Futorian. The Hill Country Project records histories of residents of Benton County, MS, who have lived through the modern Civil Rights Movement. Learn more at the Hill Country Project website

Leslie McLemore

After becoming involved with activism as a student at Rust College, Leslie McLemore began working closely with SNCC in 1963 and took on a pivotal role in the MFDP. From the party’s Washington, D.C., office, he lobbied federal and state officials to seat MFDP’s delegates rather than the exclusionary state party at the DNC. He served as one of the delegates that was ultimately turned away in Atlantic City. He later went on to earn a doctorate in government at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and served on the faculty of Jackson State University, where he founded the Fannie Lou Hamer National Institute on Citizenship and Democracy. In 1999 he was elected to the City Council of Jackson, MS, and served as acting mayor upon the death of Mayor Frank Melton. He retired from office in 2009 to focus his efforts on the Hamer Institute and remains a sought-after speaker and lecturer. Learn more at the SNCC Digital Gateway

David Dennis, Sr.

David J. Dennis, Sr. participated in the first freedom bus ride from Montgomery, Alabama, to Jackson, Mississippi, in 1961. He served as co-director of the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO), director of Mississippi’s Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), a key organizers of the Mississippi Freedom Summer and a co-organizer of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party’s challenge to the national party at the 1964 Democratic National Convention. Later, he became the director of the Southern Initiative of the Algebra Project, advocating for quality education as the cornerstone of civil rights in the 21st century. He co-authored the book The Movement Made Us with his son, David Dennis, Jr. Learn more at the SNCC Digital Gateway.

Moderator

Christopher Fisher, Ph.D.

Christopher T. Fisher is the Interim Dean for the School of Humanities and Social Sciences and Associate Professor of History at The College of New Jersey (TCNJ) in Ewing, NJ, where he teaches US history in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, with an emphasis on diplomatic history, human rights, civil rights, and race relations. He has served in the chair of African American Studies, led administrative searches and collegewide governance committees, held leadership posts for the Society for Historians of America Foreign Relations (SHAFR) and the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH), and is currently co-editor of the award-winning book series from Rutgers University Press, Ceres: Rutgers Studies in History. Dr. Fisher earned a B.A. in History and Political Science from Rutgers College in 1993 and a Ph.D. in History from Rutgers University in 2001. He co-authored a textbook, Global America in the Twentieth Century (Oxford University Press, 2017) and has published in Pacific Historical Review, International History Review, Genealogy, American Biology Teacher, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Star-Ledger, among other venues.  Dr. Fisher is currently writing a book on Woodrow Wilson and the election of 1910.

The History

During Freedom Summer, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party was founded to challenge de facto one-party rule in the state by the (segregationist) Mississippi Democratic Party. In August, the MFDP sent an alternate slate of delegates to the Democratic National Convention, which was being held in Atlantic City, NJ, aiming to have their slate seated rather than that of the segregationist MDP.

The resulting struggle played out before the eyes of the nation and laid bare many of the terrible injustices and violence inflicted upon Black people. Among the most iconic moments was Fannie Lou Hamer’s testimony before the Credentials Committee at the event, which was carried live on television before being cut off by an impromptu press conference by President Lyndon Johnson. In her powerful testimony, which was broadcast in full later in the evening, Hamer described in plain terms the violent abuse meted upon her and others who sought to register to vote.

While unsuccessful in winning the seating of the full MFDP slate, the powerful testimony is now seen as a key moment leading to civil rights protections won in subsequent years.

Please RSVP below to save your seat for this important and interesting commemoration event.

At 10:00 a.m., the Mississippi Humanities Council will place a Mississippi Freedom Trail marker in JFK Plaza outside the Convention Hall – the first such marker outside the State of Mississippi. Information on that event can be found at https://mshumanities.org.

Thank you to Mississippi Humanities and Visit Mississippi for their partnership and sponsorship of these events.