Freedom Summer in 1964 was a turning point in the civil rights movement, when more than 900 northern volunteers, 120 activists, and thousands of local Mississippi residents faced Ku Klux Klan firebombs and police shotguns to secure voting rights and challenge segregation. Michael Edmonds, deputy director of the Library-Archives division at the Wisconsin Historical Society, designed the Society's online archive of 35,000 documents about Freedom Summer and edited a book of eyewitness accounts of Freedom Summer. Edmonds will discuss how America changed forever during the summer of 1964 and why one of the nation'’s premier research collections on civil rights ended up in our city. Excerpts will be shown from the documentary, FREEDOM SUMMER, to highlight aspects of the presentation.
Funding for the series, Created Equal, was provided by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History.
Books will be available for sale after the program.