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.