Status Updates From Freedom Summer

This meant that 86 percent of all nonwhite families in the state were living below the official federal poverty level.

What set Mississippi apart in 1964 was how little the effects of this demographic revolution had been allowed to penetrate the state. If cotton was no longer king, someone had forgotten to tell Senator John Eastland and the score of delta planters who continued to control the state politically and economically.

While the volunteers remained optimistic about the prospects for significant social change, Mississippi stood as mute testimony to the changeless quality of the "Southern Way of Life." Convinced of their collective potency, the volunteers found in Mississippi a monument to the political and economic impotence of most of its citizenry.

In its first year, Life calculated, a baby is not just a child but already a prodigious consumer, “a potential market for $800 worth of products." Even before returning from the hospital, an infant had "already rung up $450 in medical expenses." Four-year-olds are not just sugar and spice or puppy-dog tails but rather represent "a backlog of business two decades to fulfill."