┌─╨─┐ ╡Ò_Ó╞ └╥─╥┘News▼ Activists Head to Mississippi to Commemorate Freedom Summer Civil rights activists, youth organizers and religious leaders from around the country will travel south this week to participate in the Mississippi Freedom Summer 50th Anniversary Conference. Dubbed Freedom 50, the commemoration (June 25-29) will remember the civil rights history made in Mississippi during the 1964 Freedom Summer and will create the largest convening of youth activists in the state since that original campaign for voting rights. “I’m going to Freedom Summer because I feel it’s a positive step in the unification of people of color,” says Keeshan Harley, a youth organizer with Make the Road New York who has been working against stop-and-frisk laws in New York City and who took a 20-hour bus ride to Mississippi. “It’s not that we are from New York and this is how New Yorkers do it, or this is how Los Angeles does it or Florida. We need a mutual conversation so we can move forward on the same page and understand that we are all afflicted by methods of modern slavery.” While many remember the 1964 Freedom Summer as a voting-rights campaign in the black community, this year’s Freedom Summer is expanding that vision to encompass a more diverse vision of the country. You need only look to the lineup of Youth Congress panels to see this expansion. “It’ll be kind of like a clearinghouse for black and brown folks,” says Nelini Stamp, who has been helping to organize the Freedom Summer commemoration for several months. “We have so many different people of color and undocumented folks, and we are making sure that queer and gendered folks are represented.”
Posted on: Tue, 24 Jun 2014 19:49:23 +0000
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