50th anniversary edition of Letters from Mississippi

During the summer of 1964, a presidential election year, SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) sent volunteers into Mississippi to expand Black voter registration in the state, to organize a legally constituted "Freedom Democratic Party" that would challenge the whites-only Mississippi Democratic party, to establish "freedom schools" which taught reading and math to Black children, and to open community centers where individuals could obtain legal and medical assistance.

This 50th anniversary edition of Letters from Mississippi retains the introduction by Julian Bond, and updates the explanatory background notes and biographies of volunteers from that summer. The 50th anniversary edition also includes over 40 pages of poetry that was written by students in the Freedom Schools, with a prefatory note by Langston Hughes.

Elizabeth Martínez is a Chicana writer, activist and teacher. She speaks on racism, multiculturalism, women’s struggles and today’s new movements. In the 1960s and 70s, she worked in the Black civil rights movement and the Chicano movement. She co-founded and currently chairs the Institute for MultiRacial Justice to help build alliances between communities of color. Martínez is the author of six books and numerous articles.

Letters from Mississippi

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Letters from Mississippi: Reports from Civil Rights Volunteers and Poetry of the 1964 Freedom Summer
Edited by Elizabeth Martínez
ISBN: 978-1-938890-02-4 (paper)
5½ x 8¼
400 pages
I am so grateful readers have been given this new opportunity to hear the story of Freedom Summer told directly by some of the young people who helped make that extraordinary moment happen. Letters from Mississippi gives us a deeply personal look at one of the Civil Rights Movement’s key moments—and reminds us that change happens because regular people have decided they were willing to fight for it.
—Marian Wright Edelman, president, Children’s Defense Fund

These letters in perceptiveness, freshness of detail and description, variety of events and situations, and range of experience are unlike anything I’ve since encountered in civil rights literature. Collectively, they constitute an irreplaceable record of an extraordinary movement in American social and cultural history at midcentury.
—Ekwueme Michael Thelwell

These letters bring to life, sometimes with tears, always with pride, that extraordinary summer when young people from all over the country joined black people in Mississippi in their determined quest for equal rights. Elizabeth Martínez, with this volume, makes an invaluable and unique contribution to the history of social struggle in America.
—Howard Zinn

Letters from Mississippi

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