Freedom Summer anniversary puts spotlight on Historical Society collection

In the archivist world, they call them the stacks, the seemingly endless rows of boxes and folders that contain the details of history.

At the Wisconsin Historical Society, a portion of these stacks contains much more than the minutiae of an era. A massive civil rights collection holds items from of a powerful time in American history evidence of hope and hatred, examples of breathtaking bravery and pure evil.

One is always tempted to ask, What in the world is all this stuff doing in Wisconsin, of all places? said Mimi Feingold Real, a UW-Madison history graduate student in 1965-66. And why not Wisconsin?

For the next several months, the Historical Society will highlight the portions of its collection that pertain to the civil rights movement and the Freedom Summer Project, the 1964 nonviolent movement to integrate voting in Mississippi. The documents are part of more than a thousand boxes of material relating to the civil rights movement. For the Freedom Summer project, more than 30,000 documents have been digitized and are available to anyone with the click of a computer mouse.

That the documents are in Wisconsin at all is due to the work of students like Real, who headed into the heart of the South to collect them at a time when tension was high and danger ever present.

In a movement that had Freedom Riders, Freedom Summer and Freedom Schools, they were the Freedom Archivists. Their work resulted in a unique grassroots collection that has been a valuable resource for scholars.

There is no serious civil rights book written in the last 50 years whose author didnt come handle these papers, said Michael Edmonds, deputy director of the Library-Archives Division of the Historical Society and the organizer of the Freedom Summer project.

The often personal nature of the documents gives the collection its power, Edmonds said. There are letters from volunteers to friends and family, as well as hate mail. There are phone logs that give a play-by-play of history as it happened, including a chilling entry from June 21, 1964, of a call that came into a toll-free line set up for workers in the field:

Mickey Schwerner, driving w Andy Goodman (NYC) & Jas. Chaney (Negro/Meridian) left Meridian this am 9-10 heading for Philadelphia in Neshoba Co to investigate church burning. Expected back 4:00. Havent been heard from since.

The civil rights workers had been picked up by police, released but then followed and stopped by the Ku Klux Klan. Two days later, their car was found burned. Six weeks later, their bodies were found buried under a dam near Philadelphia, Miss.

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Freedom Summer anniversary puts spotlight on Historical Society collection