Mississippi: Is This America?

2 Pages 445 Words

Mississippi: Is this America?
The video series Eyes on the Prize is an educational series of video footage documenting the Civil Rights Movement in the United States. Volume 5 in the series is of exceptional interest to me because it documents the events of the civil rights movement that occurred in Mississippi. As a Mississippi native I have heard and read about all of these stories, but seeing the actual video was awe-inspiring. I never knew that there was so much information regarding Mississippi’s role in the civil rights movement that was left out of my public education.
The events in this volume took place from 1963 through 1964. The video opens and shows the Mississippi Delta’s struggle to keep segregation alive by any means necessary. The leaders of the civil rights movement are trying to get black citizens registered to vote. This does not sound like such a revolutionary task unless one knows that black citizens exponentially outnumbered whites in a vast majority of Mississippi’s counties, but almost none of them were registered to vote. This came to be known as “Freedom Summer” and groups such as the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) tried to organize and encourage young black Mississippians to register to vote.
As John F. Kennedy was giving a speech on civil rights, Medgar Evers, who was the state secretary of the NAACP for Mississippi, organized a boycott which led to his assassination in his own front yard. Evers’ death gained national media attention which resulted in a white “closed society” which was at war with its black citizens.
In 1964 while Freedom Summer was in full swing, three young volunteers were kidnapped and their murdered bodies were later. Andrew Goodman, James Chaney and Michael Schwermer disappeared just after arriving in Mississippi to help register black voters. After there disappearance, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party was formed as a ref...