Our best known and celebrated national holiday is The Fourth of July. On this date each summer, we commemorate the commitment and courage of those who issued The Declaration of Independence in 1776. In declaring independence from Great Britain and the establishment of a new nation, the founders articulated their core principles including the famous sentence, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are
For 248 years, the struggle to live into this core principle of human equality has been at the heart of our nation’s history. The struggle is against not only foreign adversaries but also internal forces opposed to racial equality beginning with enslavement, continuing through legal racial segregation, and into the present reality of ongoing racial disparities. On this holiday weekend, I want to lift up one important example of this struggle from 60 years ago in what became known as Freedom Summer. The focus was on registering Black people to vote in Mississippi. Although they had the right to vote since the passage of the 15th Amendment in 1870, states in the South including Mississippi developed a variety of barriers to keep Black people from exercising that right. These included poll taxes, limiting registration hours, and so-called literacy tests that were designed to insure that the vast majority of Black citizens would fail. In the summer of 1964, hundreds of young Black and white volunteers came to Mississippi to challenge this kind of injustice. They faced brutal forms of harassment, intimidation, and violence from the forces committed to racial segregation including the KKK and local law enforcement. On June 21 the very first day of Freedom Summer, three volunteers went missing after investigating the burning of a Black church that hosted a voter registration event. James Chaney,