Although summer 2014 has ended, the importance of summer 1964 still resonates with a new commemoration of Freedom Summer starting Saturday at Miami University.

Miami had already observed Freedom Summer with special tours of the campus and other events, but the commemoration continues this weekend and next week, as people who were there 50 years ago return to share their memories. Miami University will host the reunion and national conference, 50 Years After Freedom Summer: Understanding the Past, Building the Future, Oct. 11-14.

On Saturday, returning Freedom Summer volunteers will visit the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati, where they will see a play by Miami theatre students depicting the 1964 Freedom Summer training in Oxford. At 1 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 12, Miami President David Hodge will unveil the new Freedom Summer Chimes at the Freedom Summer Memorial on Western Campus. The complete events schedule is at Miamis website.

Oxford resident Jane Strippel was part of a group called Friends of the Mississippi Summer Project, and she vividly remembers the nonviolence training that volunteers took as they prepared to travel to Mississippi to help black residents register to vote. Mississippi was known as a very dangerous place at the time, and the volunteers knew they would be risking their lives.

I saw this training where they were doing non-violent self-defense. They were outside on the ground. That was the one that really struck me deeply, the way there were doing different procedures. They were practicing what they might experience, with the conditions in Mississippi just the way their bodies were contorted and the way they made it look very real, it just struck me that I knew it was dangerous, but I felt even more anxious about it. It brought me very close to it. It made me realize the serious conditions theyd be under.

Three of the volunteers Michael Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman were murdered in Mississippi after leaving Oxford. Strippel remembered when word of their disappearance got back to Oxford. A man named Robert Moses was one of the leaders of the training.

You can imagine how it must have been for the students that were going to go that next week. And it was so hard for the leadership the leaders had a pretty good sense they had been killed. When Bob Moses had to go before the group, he hesitated a long time before he spoke, looking down at his feet and trying to get his words together. He said, You dont have to go. But they realized it was an impact. They started singing one of the freedom songs that was so important to them freedom is a constant struggle. Some of the parents pulled out a few of them, but most of them went anyway, she remembered.

While honoring the past, Miami will be doing so in a modern, hi-tech way, with its Freedom Summer app that takes players around campus, showing them the locations of the training, along with archival video and audio clips. That will be tested at 10:30 a.m. Sunday at Peabody Hall, said the apps creator, Ann Elizabeth Armstrong.

We have been doing play test. We imagined the game, we wrote it own on paper, we play-tested it physically we had to translate the game we imagined into what this platform would do. So that was challenging and exciting, and it opened a lot of opportunities to start thinking more about how a location-based game works.

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Freedom Summer volunteers return to Miami for commemoration