Multimedia Collection
Freedom On My Mind
VHS
110 minutes
E185.93 .M6 F741 1994
Nominated for an Academy Award, Freedom on My Mind tells the inspiring story of the Mississippi freedom movement in the early 1960s when a handful of idealistic young activists believed they could change history - and did.
Bob Moses, then a young Harvard student, recalls how we went to Mississippi, the center of 'massive resistance' to integration in the South, to head the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee's voter registration drive. Through interviews and news footage, we witness the growing confidence and courage of poverty-stricken sharecroppers, maids and day-laborers as they confront jail, beatings and even murder for the simple right to vote.
In 1964, organizers, fearing for their lives and hoping to attract the nation and federal government to their plight, recruited 1,000 mostly white college students from around the country to join them for Freedom Summer. Three students were murdered but the drive succeeded in signing up 80,000 members for the insurgent Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. Freedom Summer helped transform political power in the South forever, paving the way for passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Today Mississippi has more black elected officials than any other state.
Contact Us
(541) 737-2538
valley.circ@oregonstate.edu
