Civil Rights Movement
Letters & Reports From Freedom Summer

Mississippi, Louisiana, Florida
SNCC, CORE, SCLC, COFO, MFDP, DM
Photos

Among Freedom Summer's strategic objectives were raising national awareness of southern realities, demanding Federal action, and mobilizing political support for the MFDP. Summer volunteers were urged to write frequent letters to family, friends, teachers, and ministers about the Freedom Movement and their experiences. Many volunteers arranged to have their letters published in local newspapers, school or church bulletins, or reproduced and distributed to informal networks.

Freedom Summer projects and volunteers were also supposed to send regular progress reports to movement headquarters. Some actually did so.

This was before the era of cheap photocopy machines, so letters and reports had to be retyped with carbon copies, or mimeographed from hand-typed stencils (often by parents who just days or weeks earlier had been desperately pleading with their daughters and sons not to to to Mississippi).

Daily 1964 Summary Reports from Freedom Summer compiled by the SNCC Communications Department in Atlanta.

"Julian and I in the Communications office of the SNCC office on Hunter Street were in essence the "pulling-together place" for reports so that we could reliably summarize events and share actualities with journalists. Julian would often leave at about 4 pm (for dinner with his wife and kids), saying to me, "So long, Mary. You're in charge." I would then try to pull together any and all reports that we were waiting for, arriving from many and possibly all of our offices. At a certain point we were also dispatching tape-recorded reports of incidents called in from our offices. An actual recording from a site of action is termed an "actuality" in newspeak. I remember working from a list of radio stations and calling each individually to give them an actuality by phone.

"This was an advanced form of news media liaison — in fact highly advanced for the time — but nonetheless, it required that each transmission by phone be handled individually. I can remember my fingers hurting from managing the manual holding of the tape recorder close to the phone, working generally until late at night, often alone. It had to be done. I also recall that the Black radio stations were extremely grateful for these actualities because they could turn around and broadcast them as a "Special Report from LeFlore County, Mississippi," which enhanced their ability to get the news out and their stature.

"I do recall phoning to initiate contact with our offices in late afternoon and early evening when they failed to transmit their expected reports. I was acutely aware that these might someday provide reliable circumstantial information that could be very useful in accurately portraying the pressures, events, and catastrophes affecting our offices. I sometimes had to chase reports down. This was also something that reporters traveling to local offices cherished, as they could drop data right into the reports they were typing on manual typewriters that they would phone in to their editors."

 — Mary King, SNCC.

Please send us Freedom Summer letters for posting here.

You can postal-mail photocopies to us or email PDF scans to webmaster@crmvet.org. See Submissions Policy for more information.

See also:
 Summer Project Documents
 Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) Documents
 Freedom Summer Press Releases
 Freedom Summer Articles by Movement Veterans
 MFDP Articles by Movement Veterans

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