Risking Everything: A Freedom Summer Reader

Risking Everything: A Freedom Summer Reader documents the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer Project, when SNCC and CORE workers and volunteers arrived in the Deep South to register voters and teach non-violence, and more than 60,000 black Mississippians risked everything to overturn a system that had brutally exploited them.

In the 44 original documents in this anthology, you’ll read their letters, eavesdrop on their meetings, shudder at their suffering, and admire their courage. You’ll witness the final hours of three workers murdered on the project’s first day, hear testimony by black residents who bravely stood up to police torture and Klan firebombs, and watch the liberal establishment betray them. 

These vivid primary sources, collected by the Wisconsin Historical Society, provide both first-hand accounts of this astounding grassroots struggle as well as a broader understanding of the Civil Rights movement.

The selected documents are among the 25,000 pages about the Mississippi Freedom Summer Project in the archives of the Wisconsin Historical Society. The manuscripts were collected in the mid-1960s, at a time when few other institutions were interested in saving the stories of common people in McComb or Ruleville, Mississippi. Most have never been published before.

• Mississippi Witness: The Photographs of Florence Mars
• So the Heffners Left McComb (Civil Rights in Mississippi Series)
• Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It: The Memoir of Jo Ann Gibson Robinson
• This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible
• The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr.
• A More Beautiful and Terrible History: The Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History
• Many Minds, One Heart: SNCC's Dream for a New America
• Brown v. Board of Education and the Civil Rights Movement
• Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North
• A More Beautiful and Terrible History: The Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History