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Freedom Summer of '64 activists gather in Oxford

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OXFORD, Ohio Fifty years ago, young volunteers trained in Oxford risked and, in three cases, lost their lives fighting for civil rights in Mississippi. This weekend, veterans of 1964's "Freedom Summer"willgather at Miami University to tell stories of those momentous days and send a clarion call to engage in today's civil rights struggles.

The conference and reunion, named, "50 Years After Freedom Summer: Understanding the Past, Building the Future,"will reunite 48 volunteers among the 800 who trained for a dangerous voter registration campaign and the establishment of Freedom Schools in Mississippi to educate African-American children who were denied equal access to a public education.

The activists' worst fears were realized on Sunday, June 21, 1964, when three volunteers James Chaney of Mississippi, and Andrew Goodman and MichaelSchwernerof New York failed to check in after investigating a recently fire-bombed church nearPhiladelphia,Miss. wherethey had planned to conduct a Freedom School.

Six more weeks would pass before the remains of the three men were found buried in an earthen dam inNeshobaCounty, Miss. They had been arrested in Philadelphia on a speeding charge, jailed and then released with a posse of Klansmen waiting for them. Another 35 years would pass before sevenKKKmembers would be prosecuted for the crime.

The training took place at Western College for Women, which merged into Miami in the1970s. Conference organizers created an iPhone appthrougha National Endowment for the Humanities grant. The app will debut this weekend andoffer an interactive tour of the Western campus and explain events like role-playing through which students learned to react nonviolently to violent racists trying to impede their work.

Become a WCPO Insider to see how conference organizers want to affect the events of today.

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Freedom Summer of '64 activists gather in Oxford

Freedom Summer volunteers return to Miami for commemoration

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Although summer 2014 has ended, the importance of summer 1964 still resonates with a new commemoration of Freedom Summer starting Saturday at Miami University.

Miami had already observed Freedom Summer with special tours of the campus and other events, but the commemoration continues this weekend and next week, as people who were there 50 years ago return to share their memories. Miami University will host the reunion and national conference, 50 Years After Freedom Summer: Understanding the Past, Building the Future, Oct. 11-14.

On Saturday, returning Freedom Summer volunteers will visit the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati, where they will see a play by Miami theatre students depicting the 1964 Freedom Summer training in Oxford. At 1 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 12, Miami President David Hodge will unveil the new Freedom Summer Chimes at the Freedom Summer Memorial on Western Campus. The complete events schedule is at Miamis website.

Oxford resident Jane Strippel was part of a group called Friends of the Mississippi Summer Project, and she vividly remembers the nonviolence training that volunteers took as they prepared to travel to Mississippi to help black residents register to vote. Mississippi was known as a very dangerous place at the time, and the volunteers knew they would be risking their lives.

I saw this training where they were doing non-violent self-defense. They were outside on the ground. That was the one that really struck me deeply, the way there were doing different procedures. They were practicing what they might experience, with the conditions in Mississippi just the way their bodies were contorted and the way they made it look very real, it just struck me that I knew it was dangerous, but I felt even more anxious about it. It brought me very close to it. It made me realize the serious conditions theyd be under.

Three of the volunteers Michael Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman were murdered in Mississippi after leaving Oxford. Strippel remembered when word of their disappearance got back to Oxford. A man named Robert Moses was one of the leaders of the training.

You can imagine how it must have been for the students that were going to go that next week. And it was so hard for the leadership the leaders had a pretty good sense they had been killed. When Bob Moses had to go before the group, he hesitated a long time before he spoke, looking down at his feet and trying to get his words together. He said, You dont have to go. But they realized it was an impact. They started singing one of the freedom songs that was so important to them freedom is a constant struggle. Some of the parents pulled out a few of them, but most of them went anyway, she remembered.

While honoring the past, Miami will be doing so in a modern, hi-tech way, with its Freedom Summer app that takes players around campus, showing them the locations of the training, along with archival video and audio clips. That will be tested at 10:30 a.m. Sunday at Peabody Hall, said the apps creator, Ann Elizabeth Armstrong.

We have been doing play test. We imagined the game, we wrote it own on paper, we play-tested it physically we had to translate the game we imagined into what this platform would do. So that was challenging and exciting, and it opened a lot of opportunities to start thinking more about how a location-based game works.

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Freedom Summer volunteers return to Miami for commemoration

Roots of Freedom Summer planted at Ohio college

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OXFORD, Ohio -- It wasn't supposed to happen here.

Training for 800 Freedom Summer volunteers in 1964 was supposed to take place 150 miles south, at Berea College in Berea, Ky.

But 50 years after the volunteers spread out across Mississippi in a pivotal call for civil rights, they're returning this weekend to Oxford ?? not Berea ?? to celebrate their roots.

The reunion of four dozen of the original Freedom Summer activists will be bittersweet with memories of registering African-Americans to vote, teaching in Freedom Schools ?? and working side by side with three young friends killed by angry segregationists.

Now old and graying, the returnees also will pay tribute to Oxford, the unlikely meeting place that nurtured their work and stirred their idealism to a fearless, fever pitch.

"This training, which generated international headlines, cements Ohio's place and the places of Western College and Oxford in the civil rights movement," said Jacqueline "Jacky" Johnson, interim archivist at Miami University, which merged in 1974 with Western College.

Why Oxford, Ohio?

Why then, June 1964?

How 800 college students, mainly from East Coast schools and mostly white, arrived in Oxford is a story cast in turbulent times that changed a nation.

Administrators at Berea College, founded in 1855 as the first interracial and coeducational college in the South, said they feared for the safety of Freedom Summer volunteers that summer of '64. Privately, according to other documents, administrators caved in to pressure from alumni not to house volunteers on campus.

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Roots of Freedom Summer planted at Ohio college

The Freedom Zone 2014: The future of the BBC. Should the licence fee be scrapped? – Video

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The Freedom Zone 2014: The future of the BBC. Should the licence fee be scrapped?
Andrew Allison (Campaign Manager, Freedom Association), Dave Atherton (Chairman, Freedom2Choose), Andrew Bridgen MP, Alex Deane CC (Managing Director of Public Affairs, FTI Consulting), ...

By: tfa4freedom

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The Freedom Zone 2014: The future of the BBC. Should the licence fee be scrapped? - Video


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