Long recognized as a classic film on the civil rights movement, it focuses on one dramatic, landmark episode in the long struggle for equal rights; the voter registration drives in Mississippi in the early 60’s.  Mobilized by idealistic young black activists like Robert Moses, poverty-stricken sharecroppers, domestics and day laborers stood up to the most violently racists state in the union to demand their constitutional right to vote.  In 1964 black activists, hoping to draw national media attention to their cause, invited 1,000 progressive white students from the North to join them for what became famous as Freedom Summer.  Although three organizers were murdered by white supremacists, that inspiring summer and the fearless mass movement leading up to it, resulted in the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965, and changed the political face of the South forever.

Nominated for an Academy Award, winner of both the American Historical Association and the Organization of American Historians awards for best documentary, this landmark film tells the story of the Mississippi freedom movement in the early 1960s when a handful of young activists changed history.

When Bob Moses, a young Harvard student filled with gentle determination, came to Mississippi in 1961 to head up the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee's voter registration drive, a black man could be convicted of “eye rape” for looking at a white woman; all African Americans were denied the right to vote. The first man to accompany Moses to the courthouse to register, a farmer named Herbert Lee, was later shot dead by a state legislator.

We witness the growing confidence and courage of poverty-stricken sharecroppers, maids and day laborers as they confront jail, beatings and even murder for the simple right to vote. One who joined the campaign, Endesha Ida Mae Holland, a former prostitute, today a Ph.D., recalls, “White people looked me in the face for the first time. I couldn't turn back.”

In 1964, organizers, fearing for their lives and hoping to attract the attention of the nation and federal government, recruited 1,000 mostly white college kids from around the country to join them for Freedom Summer. Volunteers recall the culture clash between the largely white, middle class outsiders and the poor black residents whose homes and dinner tables they shared.

Although three students were murdered, the drive signed up 80,000 members for the insurgent Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and sent an optimistic delegation, led by sharecropper Fannie Lou Hamer, to the 1964 Democratic convention. We share their crushing betrayal by President Johnson and Hubert Humphrey which, Moses argues, led a generation of disillusioned young black people to reject “the system.”

Yet Freedom Summer helped transform political power in the South forever, leading to passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965. Today Mississippi has more black elected officials than any other state. Those who participated in the struggle took away a profound sense of possibility and a deepened commitment to justice. So too will viewers of this film.