Lewis Allen Allen was an independent logger with a wife and four children.  On January 31, 1964, Louis Allen was murdered outside of his home in Amite County, Mississippi. He was hit in the face with two loads of buckshot, dying almost instantly. Authorities never charged anyone with the crime.
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	James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, & Michael Schwerner James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner were involved with the Congress of Racial Equality (ìCOREî). On June 21, 1964, the three men were traveling to Neshoba County, Mississippi, to continue voter registration efforts. They were arrested by Neshoba deputy sheriff Cecil Price shortly after 3:00 pm and were incarcerated. They were released at 10:30 pm and were again stopped ten miles down the road by Deputy Price who turned the men over to a mob of Ku Klux Klan members. The klansmen executed the CORE workers and buried them in a dam under construction in a remote area of Neshoba County. Governor Johnson fired all Mississippi highway patrolmen that were Ku Klux Klan members.

Herbert Lee Herbert Lee, a Mississippi farmer, was shot and killed in Liberty, Mississippi, on September 25, 1961. Lee was murdered by E. H. Hurst, a member of the Mississippi State Legislature. Hurst murdered Lee because of his participation in the voter registration campaign sweeping through southwest Mississippi.  Authorities never charged Hurst with the crime.

  

Congress of Racial Equality (CORE)  CORE was founded by a group of Chicago students in 1942.The group promoted pacifism and helped organize such nonviolent protests as sit-ins, freedom rides, and the Freedom Summer. In 1966, the group became more involved in the Black Power movement.

  

National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) The NAACP was formed by Mary White Ovington and William English Walling with the first meeting held on February 12, 1909. The organization worked toward equal civil rights through campaigns against lynching, segregation of schools and other public places, and many other injustices done to African Americans.

  

Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) SNCC developed as a result of a conference held by sit-in participants in October 1960. They held the belief of action through nonviolence and participated in sit-ins, freedom rides, and the Freedom Summer.The group became more involved in the Black Power movement in 1966, and in 1970, it ceased functioning.

 

	Robert Moses Robert Moses was born on January 23, 1935, in Harlem, New York. He became actively involved in the civil rights movement and participated as a member of SNCC and the freedom rides. He rose to the top ranks of SNCC and was the main organizer of the Freedom Summer of 1964. The following is a link to an interview with Mr. Moses that references his experience in McComb, Mississippi.   http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/longterm/books/chap1/children.htm
	Mississippi Freedom Party (MFDP) The Mississippi Freedom Party, a part of the Freedom Summer, had over 80,000 members and sent sixty-eight delegates to the Democratic Party Convention in Atlantic City. They challenged the representation of Mississippi by the all-white delegation that attended the convention.   Local People Dittmer, J. (1994) Local People (Chicago: University of Illinois Press).  Charles Cobb Charles Cobb was born on June 23, 1943. He was the son of Charles, a social activist and minister, and Martha Cobb. He was born and raised in Washington, D.C. and he lived in Springfield, Massachusetts, and Frankfort, Kentucky. In 1961, while at Howard University, he joined with members of the Nonviolent Action Group (NAG), an affiliate of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and participated in sit-ins in Washington, Maryland, and Virginia.  In the summer of 1962, Cobb was given money by the Congress of Racial Equality to attend a civil rights workshop in Houston, Texas. While traveling south to Texas, he contacted the local SNCC group and was convinced to stay in Mississippi. Within a week, he was a SNCC field secretary in Ruleville in Sunflower County in the Delta. There, he and other SNCC volunteers engaged in voter registration. Since it is necessary for potential voters to interpret a section of the Mississippi State Constitution, they also became involved in adult education and in designing or adapting standardized methods to meet the requirements of teaching working poor and sharecroppers to read.  In fall 1963, Cobb wrote the prospectus for what became the Freedom Schools, which many see as the greatest accomplishment of Freedom Summer (1964). The goal was to deal with the inadequacies of the Mississippi school system and to expose Black students to new ideas, provide them with alternatives and new directions for action, and develop future leadership within the African-American community.      Voting Rights Act 1965 The Voting Rights Act of 1965 prohibits discrimination in voting practices or procedures because of race and color. In 1957 and 1960, Congress had enacted voting rights laws that took small steps toward increasing minority voting participation for all Americans. The 1965 Act, however, made huge strides towards making voting rights a reality.  The Act prohibited literacy tests and poll taxes that had been used to prevent blacks from voting. According to a report of the Bureau of the Census from 1982, in 1960 there were 22,000 African-Americans registered to vote in Mississippi, but in 1966 the number had risen to 175,000.  http://www.usdoj.gov/crt/voting/intro/intro_b.htm   (Great Link) http://www.stanford.edu/group/King/encyclopedia/entries/enc_civil_rights_bill.htm    Fannie Hamer Fannie Lou Hamer was born on October 6, 1917 to parents that were sharecroppers and farmed land on a plantation in Montgomery County, Mississippi. Fannie was the youngest child of twenty children, six girls and fourteen boys. To many, Fannie Lou Hamer, known as the lady who was "sick and tired of being sick and tired."  In 1962, when Hamer was 44 years old, SNCC volunteers came to town and held a voter registration meeting.  She was surprised to learn that African-Americans actually had a constitutional right to vote. When the SNCC members asked for volunteers to go to the courthouse to register to vote, Hamer was the first to raise her hand. This was a dangerous decision. She later reflected, "The only thing they could do to me was to kill me, and it seemed like they'd been trying to do that a little bit at a time ever since I could remember." Later, she became a SNCC Field Secretary and traveled around the country speaking and registering people to vote. Hamer co-founded the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP). In 1964, the MDFP challenged the all-white Mississippi delegation to the Democratic National Convention.  Hamer spoke in front of the Credentials Committee in a televised proceeding that reached millions of viewers. She told the committee how African-Americans in many states across the country were prevented from voting through illegal tests, taxes and intimidation. As a result of her speech, two delegates of the MFDP were given speaking rights at the convention and the other members were seated as honorable guests.  Hamer continued to work to better conditions in Mississippi by organizing grass-roots antipoverty projects. During the last ten years of her life, she worked on issues such as school desegregation, child day-care, and low-income housing. Hamer was an inspirational figure to many involved in the struggle for civil rights.  She died on March 14, 1977, at the age of 59.