In the summer of 1964, civil rights organizers launched a project aimed at registering Black voters in Mississippi. Hundreds of volunteers went to Mississippi to help, many of them college students. In June, three young activists were abducted and killed, drawing extensive media attention to the project.
John Allan ’67 went to Mississippi that summer, returning to URI in fall 1965. “The Civil Rights movement at that time,” he says, “had taken off. We were one small part of a much bigger movement.”
A FREEDOM SUMMER STORY
Among the many college students who went to Mississippi that summer was Lucien ‘Luke’ Kabat ’61. Kabat, who had been named “outstanding premed student” in his class at URI, was a medical student at Stanford University.
In her 2023 book, Love Letter from Pig: My Brother’s Story of Freedom Summer, Julie Kabat describes her brother’s Freedom Summer experience. She draws on her late brother’s letters, diaries, and essays, as well as conversations with other volunteers. (There are numerous URI and Rhode Island references.)
Kabat says, “Mississippi Freedom Summer was a brave and unique experiment in creating social change.” Luke, one feels after reading the book, was indeed brave. But he likely would have agreed with fellow volunteer Mark Levy, whose photos grace Kabat’s book, who says, “As much as we (the summer volunteers) risked, they (the local activists and their families) risked more. As much as we were able to teach, we learned more. As much as we gave, we gained more.”
IN THEIR OWN WORDS
In 2014, for the 50th anniversary of Freedom Summer, Melvin Wade, then-director of URI’s Multicultural Center, invited veterans of Freedom Summer to URI, interviewed them, and recorded their stories.
Watch the interviewsLEARN MORE
Robert Widell is associate professor and chair of URI’s history department and director of URI’s Oral History Lab. He is the author of Birmingham and the Long Black Freedom Struggle (2013). To learn more about Freedom Summer, Widell recommends:
Freedom on My Mind, a 1994 documentary you can stream on various platforms. Widell says this is “still the best film source for understanding Freedom Summer within the context of the Mississippi movement and the essential local histories.”
I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle, by Charles M. Payne.
This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible, by Charles E. Cobb Jr.
—Barbara Caron