In spite of shootings, the bombing of their headquarters and the murders of their counterparts, Freedom House workers continued a campaign whose legacy still rings today from every hill and molehill in Mississippi.
Their largest success was in the political arena.
Before the Freedom Summer project that brought more than 1,000 civil rights workers into the state, fewer than 5 percent of blacks living in Mississippi — the state with the largest black population in the South — were registered to vote, according to the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies.
“A handful of people were voting; I mean a handful,” said John Ferguson, a Freedom House worker who would later become the county’s first black supervisor since Reconstruction. “We’ve been outnumbering white folks in the place for a long time, long before the first black mayor got elected.”
In 1964, white Northerners and black Mississippians partnered together to put 80,000 black voters on the rolls and boosted black participation in elections to 60 percent within two years.
“We as young people just weren’t going to settle for what they were giving us because it was nothing,” Ferguson said.
By 2012, black voters in Mississippi let their voice be heard louder at the polls than ever before. Their turnout surpassed white voters by about 5 percent, according to U.S. Census data. The state also has more blacks elected to public office than any other state.
“That’s an incredible statistic,” said Shelton Stromquist, a retired University of Iowa history professor who spent the summer of 1964 living in the Freedom House.
He arrived in Mississippi the night three civil rights workers were kidnapped and killed by Ku Klux Klan members in Neshoba County.
During that summer, he helped conduct voter registration drives in Warren County and was an organizer for the local Freedom Democratic Party.
The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party was a way for African-Americans who had been prevented from registering to vote and excluded from local Democratic caucuses to express their political views. By August 1964, the party had 80,000 members and had held local and state conventions. They sent delegates to the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, N.J., but left after the national party refused to seat all but two of its eight delegates.
The majority of black officials in Mississippi hold local offices. The number includes 134 county supervisors and 81 mayors, according to the civil rights organization One Voice Mississippi.
In 1979, Ferguson became the county’s first elected black supervisor since Reconstruction. He won by 201 votes over white businessman Ben Blansett. A decade later Robert Walker was elected as mayor of Vicksburg. He was the first black mayor for the city whose population is about 60 percent black and 40 percent white.
Locally, education for blacks also made strides during Freedom Summer thanks in part to a public library in the Vicksburg Freedom House.
“We got books from all around the country, way more books that we could possibly even use in the Freedom School classes,” Stromquist said.
Many Freedom House workers believe the cases of books stacked in the center of house on Oct. 5, 1964, absorbed the brunt of the explosion caused by the bombing. There were 14 people in the home and only two minor injuries were reported.
“It is remarkable that no one was killed. It was obviously a powerful bomb. The house was effectively destroyed and had to be bulldozed,” said Stromquist who had returned to Yale by Oct. 5.
Desegregation of public schools didn’t come until early 1970, when black students who went to school next to the city dump were allowed to learn alongside white students.
“Separate but equal was really a concept that didn’t go unnoticed, even in churches,” Ferguson said.
In the 2012-13 school year, Vicksburg Warren School District’s enrollment was 62.91 percent black and 34.57 percent white, according to the Mississippi Department of Education.
Yet, black students here consistently lag behind white students in both language and mathematics tests, according to an analysis of MCT2 test scores available from the state.
Perhaps the biggest problem is literacy, said retired Vicksburg-Warren School District teacher Patsy Gibbs, a Freedom Summer veteran whose brother was civil rights attorney James Winfield.
In 1964, the Freedom House library was full of books available at no cost for children and adults, and neighborhood church groups were encouraged to teach reading, she said.
“We need to go back and borrow something form the past and try to get active in the neighborhood,” Gibbs said.
Gibbs now teaches GED classes and most of her students struggle with basic literacy. The lack of literacy skills is a problem, but can be overcome with a community effort, she said.
“Education is not dead in Vicksburg, all we have to do is be resilient with it and wake it up. We come from a long line of people who were concerned with education,” Gibbs said.
Perhaps learning would be more interesting to students if they realized men like Ferguson and Henry Hunter, who both still live in Vicksburg, were shot at, arrested and bombed for fighting for this generation’s right to attend a desegregated school. Hunter was in the house when it exploded.
“They need this type of exposure. They are just wandering around lost,” Gibbs said of today’s youth. “They are absolutely lost. We don’t need them forever lost.”
Young people seem often to forget where they came from, Ferguson said.
“There’s been improvement, but there’s still a lot of room for improvement. If you forget what history was, you’re going to repeat it,” Ferguson said.
Stromquist visited Vicksburg this June and noticed that despite the improvement, the sate still has “deeply entrenched poverty, poor housing and lack of opportunity, for African-Americans in particular.”
“It’s a kind of mixed set of outcomes, and the story is obviously not finished,” he said.
His visit was June 3 — primary election day in a hotly contested Senate race. U.S. Sen. Thad Chochran had courted black voters in his race against state Sen. Chris McDaniel.
Stromquist met and chatted with Ferguson before stopping by the Plumbers & Pipefitters voting precinct where Hunter is the poll manager.
“Fifty years ago they wouldn’t let me near a polling place,” Hunter told Stromquist that afternoon. “And today, I’m running one.”