Freedom Summer

During training before Freedom Summer in 1964, tension between the mostly-white volunteers and the mostly-black SNCC staff became evident immediately. "We have to know you. We have to love you, but we don't understand you." "Freedom Summer" premieres on American Experience PBS June 24, at 9/8c.

"I went downtown one day, and friends that I had known for 10 years would turn and walk away from me, or hang their heads. Some would speak and walk on as if I had leprosy or something." Watch "Freedom Summer" on American Experience PBS on June 24 at 9/8c.

Former sharecropper Fannie Lou Hamer's Congressional testimony is so powerful that President Johnson calls an impromptu press conference to get her off the air. But his plan backfires. Watch "Freedom Summer" on American Experience PBS on June 24, 2014.

"And then looking up and seeing Ben Chaney. James Chaney's little brother. I lost it. I totally just lost it." "Freedom Summer" premieres June 24, 2014 on PBS.

"The Citizens' Council was doing everything the Ku Klux Klan would have done. [...] I joined it because I believed in what they were doing and I believed in trying to preserve the society in which we lived." Watch "Freedom Summer" premiering June 24, 2014 on American Experience PBS.

"We didn't have the very complete understanding of what that risk was. But what impressed me was that there were black Mississippians who did know, who did know how dangerous it was." Watch "Freedom Summer" premiering June 24, 2014 on American Experience PBS.

"Is it responsible to bring all those kids into the state, most of whom are probably far too naive to understand what they were getting into in terms of the violent nature of the place." Watch "Freedom Summer" premiering June 24, 2014 on American Experience PBS.

"Learning that three of our members, two of whom were white, had disappeared really blew away all my ideas that possibly we would have protection from the fact that the majority of the summer volunteers were white. I knew now that that was not the case: that everybody was in grave danger, and that these Mississippians would kill all of us, white and black." "Freedom Summer" premieres 6/24/14.

"They became the closest thing to being a part of the black community as anybody can be because they had no choice." Watch "Freedom Summer" premiering June 24, 2014 on American Experience PBS.

This clip picks up from the first month that the campaign started in earnest. Volunteers arrived in Mississippi with the disappearance three volunteers - two white, one black - casting a dark shadow over their mission.