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