Check out our new dedicated page about Freedom Summer and Letters from Mississippi, with 60th anniversary (2024) updates

Letters from Mississippi documents the long, violent, and consequential summer of 1964, when some 1,000 volunteers came from other states to join civil rights workers in Mississippi for a massive voter registration and community organizing project. The riveting narrative unfolds through first-person accounts by volunteers and has become a classic in civil rights literature and classrooms.

In 2024, in honor of the 60th anniversary of Freedom Summer, Zephyr has published a digital ebook edition, along with a dedicated webpage that provides further background on Freedom Summer, updated notes on the contributors, and relevant links for this anniversary year.

More about the book:

During the summer of 1964, a presidential election year, SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) sent some 1,000 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.

Letters from Mississippi chronicles the summer through personal letters written by some of the volunteers to friends and family up north. Just days after the first contingent arrived, fellow workers Michael Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman, disappeared, and their bodies weren’t found until nearly two months later. Volunteers write of setting up schools only to see them bombed or burned down; canvassing citizens too frightened to register lest they lose their jobs; and sheriffs’ departments that regularly jailed the workers and turned a blind eye when they were beaten.

Zephyr’s 50th anniversary edition (2014) retains the original introduction by Julian Bond and preface by editor Elizabeth Martínez, and updates the explanatory background notes and biographies of volunteers from that summer. It includes more than 40 pages of poetry written by students in the Freedom Schools, with a prefatory note by Langston Hughes, as well as numerous photographs. Our 60th anniversary digital edition contains everything in the print book, but with updated notes and bios of the volunteers.

Elizabeth Martínez (1925-2021) was a Chicana writer, activist and teacher, whose work focused on racism, multiculturalism, women’s struggles and other social movements. In the 1960s and 70s, she worked in the Black civil rights movement and the Chicano movement. She co-founded the Institute for MultiRacial Justice to help build alliances between communities of color. Martínez was 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"
ISBN: 978-1-938890-32-1 (ebook)
406 pages

Now available in all ebook formats, including:

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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
By Jim Kates, co-director of Zephyr Press and Freedom Summer Volunteer

Letters from Mississippi began on my mother's dining room table. More generally, it began with part of the strategy for the whole Missisippi Summer Project, organized by the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) through the Student Nonviolent Co-ordinating Committee (SNCC). Volunteers for what came to be known as "Freedom Summer" were encouraged to write back to our home communities as part of the effort to draw national attention to the local conditions and our work in Mississippi. My own letters were mimeographed and sent out, through the assistance of a local church, to about a hundred people and published in my hometown newspaper.

One of the readers of these letters was an executive with a New York publishing house. It seemed to everyone — especially to me — that one person's letters should not tell the story, and the idea to collect and edit this book was born.

One of the New York SNCC staffers, Elizabeth Sutherland (later, Elizabeth Martínez) was hired to assemble into a narrative whatever letters could be collected, and an appeal was mailed out to all the volunteers and their families. One hundred fifty-three of the volunteers were represented by letters received, and all of their manuscripts were laid out in my mother’s dining room to be retyped. Not everyone’s contributions were used, and in the interests of privacy and safety in the still lively memory of McCarthyism and the activity of the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, it was decided that the letter writers would be identified in the text only by first names. All those who had contributed material, whether used or not, were to be listed at the end as contributors.

When Letters from Mississippi was first published by McGraw-Hill in 1965, it served as a valuable promotion for the Mississippi movement, but it dissatisfied many of the volunteer contributors, because we thought it placed too much emphasis on us — the outsiders — and not enough on the communities within which we worked, who were the real heroes of the story.

After five years, the book went out of print, appearing only as a reference here and there in historical accounts.

Then in 2001, I was asked to give a talk to a college class about my Mississippi experiences. The professor said that he had given his students readings from the original Letters, excerpted in an Oxford University Press book of primary sources from America in the 1960s, and asked them to respond. Looking at their essays, I saw that the very first one was a response to a letter of mine. This set me thinking both about copyright issues and a growing interest in primary sources from the Freedom Summer.

I got in touch with Elizabeth Martínez to discuss the idea. To my surprise, she said that she had already sold the book to South End Press. I immediately called the publisher of South End and asked about his plans for the project, to which he replied that they would be offering Letters print on demand as a historical resource. When I told him of our proposal for expanding the book, he immediately and generously passed the project to Zephyr.

McGraw-Hill offered to sign over their copyright if I could obtain SNCC approval. At that time, there were only two people reachable who had been SNCC officers in 1965, Jim Forman and John Lewis. John Lewis was enthusiastic about letting us take over the project, and I stipulated that we would keep the book easily and inexpensively accessible to educational and activist groups.

And so began production. I began researching a set of contextual notes. Again, all the letters had to be retyped, and my brother — who had worked on the original typing at our mother's house — took up the work again. In the course of that, he came across a letter by a young woman who was debating whether or not to stay in Mississippi or go back to college at the end of the summer. He consulted his own alumni records, and found her, her graduation date, and her married name. This gave us another thought — how many of the original contributors could we track down, and learn their own subsequent histories?

Our first edition came out in 2002. In 2007, we updated more biographies and added a chapbook of Freedom School Poetry that also had come out in 1965. This suited our vision to widen the context of the summer’s activities in local communities, and it also tied the book closer to Zephyr’s primary publishing concern, contemporary poetry.

By the time we published the fiftieth anniversary edition in 2014, we had traced and recorded one hundred of the 153 — and we are still on the look-out for others. Any useful information will be gratefully received. We are indebted to all of the collaborators as well as to others who have provided assistance at every step of the project.

Letters from Mississippi

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Why Zephyr? By Jim Kates

Freedom Summer webpage