Freedom Summer was organized by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC, which recruited 700 college students — mostly white students from the North — to travel to Mississippi and help African-Americans register to vote. The organizers, the students and the black people trying to register were all risking their lives, a measure of how pervasive racism was at the time.
A new documentary about the movement, called Freedom Summer, airs on PBS Tuesday.
"It was so dangerous, there was actually a list of some do's and don'ts that I found to be really fascinating," Stanley Nelson, the documentary's director, tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. "At night, don't stand with your back at the door of a house with the lights on, don't let people pass you on the highway — those kinds of things, which for me, as a filmmaker, showed visually the danger that was there."
Just as Freedom Summer was beginning, two white participants, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, and one African-American organizer, James Chaney, disappeared. It was later discovered they were murdered by the Ku Klux Klan.
