![]() ![]() In 1964, The Council of Federated Organizations (COFO), with heavy student leadership from SNCC, launched the Freedom Summer project, a new campaign that built on and expanded the community organizing that SNCC had been doing for a few years in the South. ![]() SNCC, in contrast, operated through direct confrontation, grassroots organizing, and civil disobedience. SNCC's approach was more radical than that of the national black organizations and the African American elite, who sought change through cooperation with whites in positions of power and through the legislative and judicial systems. SNCC used this model of grassroots, community organizing to make change in the daily lives of ordinary people – in contrast, they argued, to the slow pace of federal change and its lack of impact on most regular folks. The SNCC organizational structure was made up of a non-hierarchical Coordinating Committee and groups of fieldworkers who worked with local African American communities and determined their own direction in response to the local needs. The student arm of the civil rights movement, led by SNCC (the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, founded in 1960 at a conference of 120 black student activists in North Carolina), focused on fighting segregation through mass action and local, community-based activity. In addition, Goodman, Cheney, and Schwerner disappeared after Freedom Summer began, meaning that participants already had committed to Freedom Summer and had begun training, or even already arrived in Mississippi, when the three men were discovered missing. However, note that the activities the students are participating in do not reflect what an actual Freedom Summer information session would have been like. In your welcoming remarks the word "Negro" is used to maintain some historical accuracy to the vocabulary that would have been used at the time (and to remind students that they are stepping into a very different era). Throughout the round-robin students are asked to imagine themselves as potential participants in the Freedom Summer by attending an information session. The letters from Freedom Summer participants can then be covered in a subsequent class session. If you are teaching the lesson on your own, consider doing Station 3 with the whole class and then have students do parts of the other two stations on their own, bringing the class back together for the four corners activity at the end of Station 1. Also note that the round robin described involves having two additional staff to run stations. If you have limited time, you may want to have each group go to only one station (rather than doing a round robin), choose one or two stations for the whole class to focus on, or concentrate on the letters from Freedom Summer in Part IV. Completing this entire lesson, as it is outlined below, will take multiple class sessions. ![]()
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