Teachers with courage (and tenure) could carve out pages 4 through 7 of this collection and give it to students with no context, have them read and generate questions. This is a report of an FBI agent's very candid conversation with the national secretary of the NAACP in November of 1964. It exposes several elements of the Civil Rights movement that are prominent in history, but not in the taught history
This is the raw material of history that never makes it into history classes that could automatically let students know they are on to a different type of experience.
Brief descriptions and links to key documents from the Freedom Summer Project, a nonviolent effort by civil rights activists to integrate Mississippi's segregated political system during 1964.
These records were created from late 1963 through early 1965 by staff of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO), local black residents, northern white volunteers, and segregationist opponents of the project. There are 15 topics that link to approximately 78 documents.
While George Wallace was running for the Democratic nomination for president in 1964, he received a letter from a woman in Michigan asking for material on segregation. This is his response. It includes context from Gilder Lehrman (after Birmingham bombing and standoff at University of Alabama). Modern readers will notice his claim echoed by President Trump “I personally have done more for the Negroes of the State of Alabama than any other individual,
