This traveling exhibit from Miami University takes a poignant look at the civil rights movement through the lens of the 1964 Freedom Summer training program at the Western College for Women in Oxford, Ohio. The program prepared approximately 800 volunteer college students to register Black voters in Mississippi.

Originally known as the Mississippi Summer Project, Freedom Summer took place on Oxford, Ohio’s, Western College campus in June 1964. Its participants, about 800 northern college students, learned about history and politics in the South while preparing to register African Americans to vote and to encourage a new political party. At the time, Black Mississippians were barred from Democratic party primaries and caucuses, and the movement sought to challenge the party’s all-white delegation at the Democratic National Convention that August.