City of Springfield
LETTERS FROM MISSISSIPPI: EYEWITNESSES TO HISTORY Freedom Summer volunteers read and talk about their experiences Monday, February 11 at 6 pm |
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"Isn't it awful not to be able to go to a public library and get an interesting book/Without being put out, and given a hateful look?" Edith Moore, then a 15 year-old, used poetry to express her outrage over the injustices she experienced in McComb, Mississippi in 1964, just because of the color of her skin. Now, her poem appears in a book found on the shelves of many libraries, the revised edition of Letters from Mississippi: Reports from Civil Rights Volunteers & Poetry of the 1964 Freedom Summer, recently published by Zephyr Press. On Monday, February 11 at 6 p.m., join us at the Springfield City Library to hear Freedom Summer volunteers read from their letters and talk about their unique experiences. The free event will take place in the Community Room of the Central Branch Library, located at 220 State Street, Springfield. Copies of the book will be available for purchase.
During the summer of 1964, African American organizers, joined by predominantly white college students from the North, launched a voter registration drive in Mississippi that became known as Freedom Summer. Poll taxes, literacy tests, and intimidation, including beatings and lynchings, had worked to keep African American voter registration at less than seven percent statewide. Letters from Mississippi is a compilation of letters sent home by those Northern participants, who detail the uneasiness, fear, and pride they felt in doing the work for which they had volunteered. When first published, some dismissed the book, because it only included letters from white voter registration activists. The new edition adds 40 pages of poems written by African American children who attended the Freedom Schools organized as part of the registration drive. Activists such as Julian Bond, who wrote the original introduction, call the book very relevant today, almost 44 years later. In an NPR interview, he stated that the letters from ordinary young people "ought to remind people today of what teenagers were capable of then, and what they are surely capable of today, if not even more so."
For more information, call the Library, 263-6828, ext. 213.
For more information on Freedom Summer 1964 and the book Letters from Mississippi, listen to the podcast from NPR.
For further reading:
Freedom Summer -- Mississippi, 1964
Fiction about Civil Rights and Race Relations
The African-American Experience: Primary Documents
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