Shel Stromquist: We did some training working with people to prepare them to go to the courthouse to try to register to vote.

Richard Beymer: This is going down the road and knocking on someone's door and asking them to put their life on the line.

Stromquist: They would go in the courthouse, try to register, be turned away because they didn't know specific provisions of the Mississippi Constitution or whatever other sort of cockeyed criterion the registrar decided to use that day.

Beymer: 95 questions or something like this, just ridiculous. Like who was the governor of Mississippi in 1922 or something. Just you couldn't answer these questions, particularly with people who, for the most part, the sharecroppers, they had very little education. So that was the way to keep them. But also if you came down to register to vote, just because you came down and had to sign your name, you were fired by the time you got home. So if you had a family, it all depended on the white guy’s cotton field, you know.

Marcia Moore: The problem was that they might lose their job if they registered to vote. It was not a simple thing.

(music)

A young black man looking down and away from the camera.

A young black woman looking down and away from the camera.

Moore: And seeing the often Black people who were so unwilling to look us in the eye because they were so used to looking down in the presence of a white person.

(music)

An older black gentleman wearing a hat and looking away from the camera.

Moore: And the idea that we would be sitting there talking directly to them about voter registration, part of our effort was just to give them a chance to get used to being in the presence of a white person who wasn't going to beat them or didn't look down on them.

(Mississippi John Hurt sining “I Shall not Be Moved”)

a black woman sitting on her front porch as three Freedom Summer volunteers try to encourage her to register to vote.

An elderly black man sitting on his porch as two freedom summer volunteers explain to him the process of registering to vote.

Stromquist: There were some confrontations in the courthouse, some people were attacked on the courthouse steps or even in the courthouse itself for trying to register to vote. It took an enormous amount of courage for people to do that because they knew in many ways it was symbolic, they had to demonstrate that they were being denied this right and in that way they were putting themselves on the line.

(“I Shall not Be Moved”)

A line of black women standing on the stairs leading into the courthouse going to register to vote. A police officer stands with his billy club in front of him looking towards the street.

Beymer: And there were a couple of times when it just got pretty hairy and I stopped going on a white man's land to talk to the sharecroppers because then they have the right to shoot you.