By Patrick Ervin, MCJ Program Manager, Civic Engagement
In the summer of 1964, hundreds of volunteers came to Mississippi with one goal: to help Black Mississippians claim a right that was theirs on paper but denied in practice — the right to vote. They knocked on doors in Sunflower County. They ran Freedom Schools in church basements. They registered voters under threat of violence, and some of them paid for that work with their lives.
More than 60 years later, that fight isn’t history. It’s ongoing. The tactics have changed — new voter ID requirements, more purged voter rolls, redrawn districts, attempts to arrest people for peacefully protesting — but the underlying question is the same one Freedom Summer organizers were asking: will the people who are most affected by our political process actually have a voice in it?
At the Mississippi Center for Justice, we carry on the legacy of Freedom Summer through our civic engagement and accountability project.
This work is expansive. It includes voter registration, civic education for young people, and helping people break down political processes that can feel intentionally confusing. But at its core, this work is about talking to people and making sure they are empowered to act. For us, it is not enough to register someone to vote, especially if they don’t turn out on election day. It is about building a community of people who are civically engaged for the long haul.
We do that by talking with people about their biggest worries and challenges. That community data matters because it helps us make the case for why voting matters in the first place. When people are choosing between groceries and health insurance, worried about whether their neighborhood is safe, or watching their kids’ schools struggle — we connect those dots. If those are the things keeping you up at night, then you need to vote.
What’s unique about our approach is that we don’t just care about volume. We care about intensity. That means going deep into a community rather than spreading ourselves thin, because that is how we actually see the impact of our work.
For example, I started working with a group of young people in Indianola, helping them understand our civic process and registering more than 100 of them to vote for the first time in their lives. That year, every incumbent who had been in office lost their election, and a new crop of policymakers — ones who actually reflected the priorities of those young people — took their place. That’s how we make a difference.
Right now, a lot of people feel disgruntled with the state of our political process. It’s hard not to when our democracy feels under attack on a daily basis.
But what I remind people about is that these rights were never guaranteed. People fought for them, organized for them, and in some cases died for them. We have a duty to exercise those rights — because if we don’t, the next generation will inherit fewer of them than we have now.
That is why we build civic engagement into every facet of our work. If we are talking to Mississippians about maternal health, we are also talking about the importance of voting. If we are helping people with a housing issue or fighting to protect land that rightfully belongs to their family, we are also talking about the importance of voting. If we are helping parents advocate for a just education system, we are also talking about the importance of voting. Civic power touches everything, so we treat it that way.
As we approach a critical election, here are some steps you can take to carry forward the legacy of those who organized during Freedom Summer to make sure our people could exercise their right to vote for the first time:
- Check your voter registration status. Make sure it is up to date, and encourage the people around you to do the same. Click here to check your status.
- Make a voting plan. Talk to your family, friends, and neighbors about the issues that matter most, and commit to voting for candidates who will actually address them.
- Make sure you vote.
None of this is guaranteed to us. It was won, generation by generation, by people who refused to accept that things had to stay the way they were. The least we can do — the very least — is show up.
That’s the legacy of Freedom Summer. Not a moment frozen in 1964, but an ongoing responsibility we get to carry forward, one registered voter, one informed neighbor, one election at a time.