Amazing Fact About the Negro No. 85: Why was the summer of 1964 pivotal in the fight for civil rights?

Tomorrow night, you will have an opportunity to experience “Freedom Summer” the way my family did: on television. Only back then, we…

Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

Tomorrow night, you will have an opportunity to experience “Freedom Summer” the way my family did: on television. Only back then, we didn’t know whether civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner would be found alive down in Mississippi. We also didn’t know whether the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (our subject next week), without badly needed voting-rights protections, would begin to fulfill Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream of a new American racial order, following a hundred years’ war between advocates for full and equal black citizenship and the architects of all the snares that had hampered black progress since the collapse of Reconstruction in 1876.