Entry · catalog no. 8408
Freedom Summer
/ /ˈfridəm ˈsʌmɚ/ /FREE-dum SUM-er
noun · Mississippi · 1960s
✓ Verified
1.
The summer 1964 campaign in Mississippi to register Black voters and run Freedom Schools, led by the Council of Federated Organizations.
“Her mother housed volunteers during Freedom Summer.”
2.
Used for any big summer organizing drive.
“They called the campaign their own Freedom Summer.”
Origin & Attribution
Freedom Summer was organized in 1964 by the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO), a coalition including SNCC, CORE, the NAACP, and SCLC, with strategist Bob Moses and local Black Mississippians at the center. Roughly a thousand volunteers, many of them white college students, came to help register voters and teach in Freedom Schools. On June 21, 1964, civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner were murdered in Neshoba County. Local Black families, who housed and fed volunteers at great risk, carried the work.
1964
COFO launches Freedom Summer in Mississippi
1964
Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner murdered in Neshoba County
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
Nationwide
Mississippi · 1960s
Spoken by
Civil rights organizers, volunteers, and Mississippi residents
$FREEDOThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Steady62 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
50/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1964
in the culture
Cultural energy indexed from documented usage, search interest, and citation frequency. The recorded date is the archive’s permanent point of record.
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Citations & Sources
■
Freedom Summer, Wikipedia
article
■
Freedom Summer, Encyclopedia.com
article
■
+ Cite a sourceSchwerner, Goodman, and Chaney Deaths, EBSCO Research Starters
article
See also