Local Mississippi leadership prepared themselves psychologically and militarily for Freedom Summer. The Ku Klux Klan rose up as one that April. Mississippi was on a hair trigger.
Fannie Lou Hamer helped fight for better representation among Mississippi Democrats in 1964.
A New York City teacher, Bob Moses went to Mississippi to help organize the largest grassroots civil rights campaign the country had ever seen.
On August 6, 1964 the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party held a statewide convention to elect 68 delegates to attend the Democratic National Convention later that month.