1964’s Freedom Summer Offers a Model for the Voting Rights Work We Need to Do

Marchers lead chants during the Black Voters Matter's 57th Selma to Montgomery march on March 9, 2022, in Selma, Alabama.The day after I graduated from college, I jumped into a car with my roommate and another friend and headed south to Mississippi. We were in good spirits after graduation, but we were in a racially integrated car and sensed danger on the road. A year earlier, three young people with the same destination for the same reason in the same season had been shot and killed.

Freedom Summer helped unleash a major effort to bring democracy to Mississippi. Voting rights were seen as part of an educational, economic and political transformation. Voting rights activists helped establish 41 freedom schools for more than 3,000 young Black people, helping provide literacy, history and organizing skills that would allow the struggle to continue.

Black Voters Matter embodies Freedom Summer’s belief in the power that can be tapped among the most disenfranchised Americans. Like SNCC, Black Voters Matter is a voting rights “democracy movement” rooted in the Deep South. Two Black activists, LaTosha Brown and Cliff Albright, founded BVM in 2016 after years of experience in community organizing, civil rights and get out the vote pro-democracy activism.

It is not surprising that Raskin founded this democracy movement. His father was Marcus Raskin, a prominent peace and democracy activist, who cut his teeth in the politics of the 1960s civil rights and antiwar movements. After founding Democracy Summer as part of his own 2006 campaign for the Maryland State Senate, in 2018, Raskin decided that as Trump and MAGA rose his new “democracy school” had to take place every summer to help build “” curriculum. By the summers of 2021 and 2022, after January 6, Democracy Summer expanded to partner with more than 100 democracy and voting organizations, and recruited over 1,000 high school and college students for summer democracy school.

Source: Law Daily Report (lawdailyreport.net)

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