As advocates across the country rally to register voters ahead of November’s 2024 presidential election, Leslie McLemore, the Rev. Rims Barber and Euvester Simpson – three of the remaining foot soldiers who championed the fight for voting rights in 1964 Mississippi – recall a time when registering Black voters cost some Americans their lives.
“I mean, just the idea of the act of going from your house to the county courthouse to register to vote, you know, you were putting your life on the line,” McLemore, who was a 20-year-old student at the Mississippi HBCU Rust College in 1964, told GMA3 Co-Anchor DeMarco Morgan.
In interviews with Morgan, the three voting rights advocates reflected on their involvement 60 years ago in the historic Freedom Summer Project – a groundbreaking movement in Mississippi that, according to the Martin Luther King Research and Education Institute at Stanford University, highlighted the need for federal voting rights legislation and fueled political momentum that would bring the Voting Rights Act of 1965 into fruition.