Event Title
Screening of "Freedom Summer"
Location
Edwards Hall, Auditorium
Start Date
28-9-2014 7:00 PM
Description
Director Stanley Nelson's sequel to his Emmy-winning documentary Freedom Riders (2010) describes the strategic campaign of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee led by Freedom Summer icon Bob Moses to expose Mississippi's brutal system of racial segregation to the scrutiny of the national news media. Working with the homegrown black civil rights leaders and students, and the staff of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Moses issued a call to predominantly white Northern colleges to send 1000 students to Mississippi for ten weeks during the summer of 1964 to engage in voter registration and education of blacks, and to form a multi-ethnic political party that would challenge the right of the all-white Democratic Party delegation to represent the state at the 1964 Democratic National Convention. Among the widely noted events in the film are the murders of three civil rights workers, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Mickey Schwerner, by the Ku Klux Klan, in Meridian, MS; the Democratic National Convention and the machinations of President Lyndon Johnson to silence the electrifying testimony of Mississippi's Fannie Lou Hamer before a national audience; and the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Screening of "Freedom Summer"
Edwards Hall, Auditorium
Director Stanley Nelson's sequel to his Emmy-winning documentary Freedom Riders (2010) describes the strategic campaign of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee led by Freedom Summer icon Bob Moses to expose Mississippi's brutal system of racial segregation to the scrutiny of the national news media. Working with the homegrown black civil rights leaders and students, and the staff of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Moses issued a call to predominantly white Northern colleges to send 1000 students to Mississippi for ten weeks during the summer of 1964 to engage in voter registration and education of blacks, and to form a multi-ethnic political party that would challenge the right of the all-white Democratic Party delegation to represent the state at the 1964 Democratic National Convention. Among the widely noted events in the film are the murders of three civil rights workers, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Mickey Schwerner, by the Ku Klux Klan, in Meridian, MS; the Democratic National Convention and the machinations of President Lyndon Johnson to silence the electrifying testimony of Mississippi's Fannie Lou Hamer before a national audience; and the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.