Norton to Travel to Mississippi to Commemorate Her Time There as a Civil Rights Worker in the 1960s
WASHINGTON, DC – Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-DC) on Friday will travel for the weekend to the Mississippi Delta and Selma, Alabama to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Mississippi Freedom Summer, the effort to register and mobilize African American voters in Mississippi, which she helped organize in 1963 as a member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in preparation for the summer of 1964. Norton was an author of the brief for the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) challenge to the Mississippi delegation at the 1964 Democratic National Convention and she ran the outreach operation to get recognition for MFDP to replace the exclusionary Mississippi delegation. Norton will join over 20 Members of Congress on the trip and will speak on a panel with veterans of the civil rights movement about the planning, activities, challenges and results of Freedom Summer.
“During Freedom Summer, we lost three civil rights workers – James Earl Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner – but the civil rights advances since then showed they did not die in vain,” said Norton. “We have come a visible distance since that eventful Summer of 1964, but we need look no further than our own city, the District of Columbia, which stands alone, singled out without a vote and without the most elementary rights. I am going back to Mississippi, therefore, not only to remember but to be reinvigorated as we continue with the most stark and shameful leftover business of the civil rights movement, here in the District.”
On Friday, the delegation will be welcomed in Clarksdale, Mississippi at the Ground Zero Blues Club, owned by Morgan Freeman and Clarksdale Mayor Bill Luckett, where they will learn about the music that emerged from the Delta. Then, they will travel to Ruleville and Money, Mississippi and will attend programs on Fannie Lou Hamer, one of Norton’s mentors, and Emmett Till. On Saturday, Members will tour the Medgar Evers Home Museum and other Jackson, Mississippi sites, and will attend a program with the Mississippi Veterans of Civil Rights Movement at Tougaloo College, where Norton will participate on the panel. On Sunday, the delegation will travel to Selma, Alabama and visit churches and historic civil rights landmarks.
Published: March 5, 2014