OXFORD, Ohio -- It wasn't supposed to happen here.

Training for 800 Freedom Summer volunteers in 1964 was supposed to take place 150 miles south, at Berea College in Berea, Ky.

But 50 years after the volunteers spread out across Mississippi in a pivotal call for civil rights, they're returning this weekend to Oxford ?? not Berea ?? to celebrate their roots.

The reunion of four dozen of the original Freedom Summer activists will be bittersweet with memories of registering African-Americans to vote, teaching in Freedom Schools ?? and working side by side with three young friends killed by angry segregationists.

Now old and graying, the returnees also will pay tribute to Oxford, the unlikely meeting place that nurtured their work and stirred their idealism to a fearless, fever pitch.

"This training, which generated international headlines, cements Ohio's place and the places of Western College and Oxford in the civil rights movement," said Jacqueline "Jacky" Johnson, interim archivist at Miami University, which merged in 1974 with Western College.

Why Oxford, Ohio?

Why then, June 1964?

How 800 college students, mainly from East Coast schools and mostly white, arrived in Oxford is a story cast in turbulent times that changed a nation.

Administrators at Berea College, founded in 1855 as the first interracial and coeducational college in the South, said they feared for the safety of Freedom Summer volunteers that summer of '64. Privately, according to other documents, administrators caved in to pressure from alumni not to house volunteers on campus.

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Roots of Freedom Summer planted at Ohio college