In 1964, with the Civil Rights Movement reeling from bombs and shotguns, 700 college students volunteered to spend summer in America’s poorest state.  Mississippi was making Jim Crow’s last stand.  Less than seven percent of blacks there could vote. Cops routinely beat Civil Rights marchers, and violence broke out wherever segregation was challenged.  Freedom Summer would change all that. 

During the first week of summer, three project workers vanished.  While the nation watched, FBI agents poured into swamps to search for the missing.  As the search dragged on, volunteers went to work.  Living with sharecroppers, teaching in Freedom Schools, registering voters, they showed Americans, black and white, how to treat each other with uncommon decency.

The summer of 1964 proved a turning point in American history. The Civil Rights Bill ended a century of Jim Crow. The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution plunged America into Vietnam. The Beatles toured America. And when Freedom Summer volunteers went home, they spearheaded the anti-war movement, the women’s movement, and other protests of the 1960s.  This is their story, the first full account based on letters, diaries, hourly phone reports, and more than 50 interviews.  In the age of Barack Obama, Freedom Summer honors the forgotten volunteers and “local heroes” whose courage during a single savage season made America a democracy.