Project commemorating Freedom Summer coming to City of Moss Point
Moss Point will soon commemorate its role in the Civil Rights Movement through a memorial project.
‘The Witness: The Freedom Memory Project’ is led by the Mississippi Humanities Council.
It documents Civil Rights history in Mississippi communities whose stories have received less public recognition.
Gaven Wallace with the Roy Howard Community Journalism Center shows us some of the history Moss Point hopes to preserve.
When Moss Point native John Davis was 17, he volunteered for a project that would change his life.
During the summer of 1964, what later became known as Freedom Summer, Civil Rights activists came to Mississippi in the hundreds.
Their goal: to educate and empower unregistered Black voters through community-based Freedom Schools.
Davis, who traveled across Mississippi to help organize voter registration efforts, says the experience was transformational. “That was the greatest experience in my life. It opened my eyes to what’s going on in the world, in this nation, in this state, and in my city.”
Freedom Schools across the state taught practical civic education Davis says was missing in segregated Black schools. “We had civics, but they didn’t teach us anything about voting, anything about participating in the system. It wasn’t allowed then, not in the Black schools.”
Anne’ McMillion, the community lead for Moss Point’s memorial project, says collecting oral histories from people with lived experience is an important part of shaping the memorial. “That way we’re able to show that this is a project that supports the community, but it’s also about the community. It’s not a project where we’re developing something that we have no connection to.”
McMillion says many residents have welcomed the effort. “So, so many have shared the delight, the ‘it’s finally time.’ A lot of them feel it’s been past that time, it’s overdue, but thank God, we got it now.”
McMillion says the Moss Point project commemorating Freedom Summer could take two to three years to complete.
Community members will meet on July 23 at the Moss Point Library to discuss the project’s next steps.
