Young and old will gather from all parts of the country and beyond June 2-4, 2011, to celebrate and commemorate the struggles and successes of the Southwest Georgia Civil Rights Movement, to address the persistence of racism and poverty, and to formulate plans for future action.  We expect Civil Rights Activists, Community Leaders, Educators, Youth, Professionals, and Community people to join us in Albany for three days of thoughtful talks, informative workshops and proactive planning to pass on the legacy of the Movement.

2000 marks the fortieth anniversary of the southern sit-in movement, the emergence of the civil rights struggle of the 1960s, and the founding of its most dynamic component, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). We believe it is important to look back at the achievements of those courageous men and women, both to celebrate their struggle and to learn from their experience. The following article is adapted from a talk originally given last summer at a seminar far college and university teachers, on the history of the civil rights movement at Harvard’s W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Studies. —Eds.

re: "putting your body on the line"

The brutal assassination of Medgar Evers, the Field Secretary of the NAACP in Jackson, Mississippi, on June 12, 1963, revealed to the entire nation the great difficulty of bringing multicultural democracy to the brutal Deep South. Several months after Evers's death, a member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in the Mississippi Delta, Charles Cobb, came up with an idea that might concentrate media and political attention on the state's mistreatment of Blacks. Cobb proposed that SNCC create a mass mobilization, “Mississippi Summer,” that would recruit about one thousand mostly white college students and volunteers into the state to assist in desegregation and voter registration organizing. A central task for these volunteers would be the construction and operation of “Freedom Schools,” that teach African-American history of the Black Freedom Movement, as well as mathematics, English, and other academic disciplines. Bob Moses, the director of SNCC's Mississippi Project, liked the proposal and when Northern students began to volunteer to do organizing in Mississippi during the spring 1964, many were informed that they should be prepared to teach. Others were to work on the ongoing voter registration efforts.

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