Risking Everything

The forty-four original documents contained in this anthology span the lead-up to the Freedom Summer, the preparations and training, the voter registration and school-building efforts, the on-the-ground opposition and violence, and the aftermath. You’ll read the letters of workers and volunteers, 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. Together the documents paint a vivid picture of a turning-point moment in American history.

The selected documents are among the 25,000 pages about the Mississippi Freedom Summer Project held 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.

“Risking Everything superbly marshals documentary evidence in the most forceful way possible to show how everyday people organized themselves to break down Jim Crow in Mississippi in the 1960s. In so doing, it serves the essential function of providing the information and organizing tools for a more democratic future.”

—Wesley Hogan, author of Many Minds, One Heart: SNCC’s Dream for a New America

“The Wisconsin State Historical Society possesses the nation’s foremost collection of materials on the movements of the 1960s. An Afterword to this volume chronicles the difficulties and dangers experienced by those who collected these documents. The documents themselves offer a rich feast of memory both for those who were there and for those who want to learn more about Freedom Summer.”

—Staughton Lynd, historian, lawyer, and social activist

“If you couldn’t be part of the glory and the sorrows of the Mississippi Freedom Summer, the closest alternative is this book. Priceless historical collections have been combed to assemble rarely viewed materials in one volume. They disclose audacious creativity of brave local people, resilient staff, and earnest volunteers, who were challenging a state that was asphyxiating itself on hatred, institutionalized racism, and state-condoned vigilante and terror groups. Anyone who cares about liberty, social justice, and democracy should have this remarkable volume—to revisit the meaning of ‘freedom’ and how high was its price in 1964.”

—Mary King, author of Freedom Song

“Through eyewitness reports and information from more than 40 documents, editor Michael Edmonds brings readers an in-the-trenches look at Freedom Summer in a way you'll never get from any class. Included are letters home from Freedom workers, training manuals, essays, testimonies, transcripts, photographs and curriculums; as Edmonds himself said, "No punches are pulled.”

—Terri Schlichenmeyer, author of the nationally syndicated column The Bookworm Sez

“What emerges out of the collected documents is a sense that Freedom Summer leaders and participants believed that a holistic approach was necessary for political empowerment of black communities. . . . Highlights of the collection include Fannie Lou Hamer’s deposition about the torture of herself and other black women by police officers and a Freedom Schools curriculum. . . . Because these documents are all accessible online courtesy of the Wisconsin Historical Society, Edmonds’s collection would be most ideal for teaching undergraduates.”

—David Ponton III, The Journal of Southern History

“Rather than relying purely on a historical narrative, this volume . . . provides readers with the documents, letters, and firsthand accounts produced by the people who made the Freedom Summer of 1964 possible. . . . [They] provide a truly unique window into the intelligence, moral rectitude, and unfathomable guts shared by the ordinary civil rights workers who propelled the civil rights struggle in the 1960s.”

—Stephen Kercher, Professor of History, University of Wisconsin–Oshkosh