On Sunday, Feb. 23 through Thursday, Feb. 27, the 14th annual UTM Civil Rights Conference will commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Mississippi Freedom Summer, a campaign that encouraged African-Americans to vote in June 1964.
“In Mississippi the number of black people who were registered to vote was about 5 percent of the eligible population. That’s because Mississippi … prevented black people from voting,” said Dr. David Barber, UTM Civil Rights Conference coordinator.
“The object of that summer project was to register those voters and do so by putting a national spotlight on Mississippi. They did that by bringing in about 1000 white college students from all over the country who helped with the registration project.”
Barber says that the Mississippi Summer Project was very helpful in shining a light on what was happening in Mississippi at the time.
Dave Dennis, one of two coordinators of the Mississippi Summer Project, will be the keynote speaker for the conference. Dennis will be speaking about his time organizing the project, which Barber is delighted to have as part of the conference.
Barber said that the topic of losing voting rights is not something limited to the 60s, but it is also something recent legislation addresses.
“Right now, it seems as though the right to vote is once again under attack. … The Supreme Court recently ruled that the Voting Rights Act of 1965 [can] no longer [be used] as a mechanism for maintaining surveillance on the states that were discriminatory in voting rights during the 60s and prior to that time,” Barber said.
“It’s complemented by the fact that state after state you now have new laws that are being passed that makes it difficult for voting. In Tennessee, as an example, about two weeks ago, the state Senate voted to say that students could not use state-issued photo IDs, your student ID card, to prove that you are who you say you are for the purposes of voting. So that’s [another] attempt to make it more difficult to vote.”
Barber said that these hindrances on voting is one way that our democracy is failing.
“I would think any society that puts itself forward as being democratic would be attempting … to try to find a means of encouraging people [and] making it easier for people to vote. But in contrast, our legislature is in a state of making it more and more difficult to vote,” Barber said.
With this in mind, Barber wants a large focus of the conference to be on encouraging students to vote. Barber said that with 6,000 to 7,000 students at UTM, young voters may have the ability to swing an election, provided students take interest in the issues.
“We could put a Congressman in office or a state representative in office. What we need is the belief that what we do makes a difference,” Barber said.
Another large issue addressed in the conference will be inequality through segregation. Dr. Mark Anthony Neil will focus on this in his talk on segregation and resegregation in the American education system.
“Since the mid-1980s, there has been a steady tendency to resegregate. In some parts of the country, schools today are more segregated than they were prior to the Civil Rights movement,” said Barber.
Also speaking at the conference are Caucasian people who were part of the Civil Rights movement. The focus will be on the difficulties of supporting the then-unpopular sentiment.
“They stood up and stood for the struggle of African-American rights in that time, a very courageous and difficult thing to do; to stand against the majority of the community that you come from and say, ‘No, you’re wrong, and we’re going to do something different,’” Barber said.
“We honor the Civil Rights movement not by having a holiday in somebody’s name, but by doing what that person … was fighting for. What they were fighting for was a just society.”
Barber said that overall, he wants to celebrate the great things people have done in the past, but more importantly he wants to encourage further greatness in the present.
