Freedom Summer

Civil rights activists, historians, and students participated in a panel discussion about the 1964 youth-led effort to end the political disenfranchisement and educational inequality of African Americans in the Deep South, and discuss the role of young people in shaping America’s past and future. The webcast was hosted from the Old Capitol Museum in Jackson, Mississippi.

Summit speakers:

Dr. Robert Moses, director of the Mississippi Summer Project and founder of the Algebra Project

Portrait featured in Mariana Cook's Justice: Faces of the Human Rights Revolution.

Dr. Marshall Ganz, civil rights activist and Senior Lecturer in Public Policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University

Dr. Michelle Deardorff, Professor and Department Head of Political Science at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga

Larry Rubin, former Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee staffer and labor activist

Noah Martin, high school student, McComb, Mississippi

• Participating in the Summit's online chat: David Goodman, brother of Andrew Goodman and president of the Andrew Goodman Foundation

Regional Youth Summit locations:

• American Jazz Museum (Kansas City, Missouri)
• Arab American National Museum (Dearborn, Michigan)
• History Colorado (Denver, Colorado)
• Institute of Texan Cultures (San Antonio, Texas)
• Japanese American National Museum (Los Angeles, California)
• National Museum of American Jewish History and The African American Museum in Philadelphia (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania)
• National Underground Railroad Freedom Center (Cincinnati, Ohio)
• North Carolina Museum of History (Raleigh, North Carolina)
• Oklahoma History Center (Oklahoma City, Oklahoma)
• Senator John Heinz History Center (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania)
• Western Reserve Historical Society (Cleveland, Ohio)

The National Youth Summit is presented by the National Museum of American History with Smithsonian Affiliations and PBS's American Experience with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, PBS's American Experience, and the Verizon Foundation.