Fannie Lou Hamer would have turned 100 this year. A civil rights activist who famously stormed Mississippi’s all-white delegation at the Democratic Convention in Atlantic City during 1964’s Freedom Summer, Hamer also organized voter registration drives in the Magnolia state, educating black people about their constitutional rights. The Hechinger Report recently wrote about efforts to […]
Lessons from Freedom Summer
As the 50th anniversary of Freedom Summer approaches, The Hechinger Report will look back at the violence surrounding the 1964 campaign to register blacks to vote in Mississippi and the murders of three civil rights workers. Change has been a long time coming; racial divisions and inequities still run deep. Yet there are many efforts underway to stem the achievement gap between black and white students and to make sure history does not repeat itself.
