Hattiesburg to celebrate Freedom Summer through film and photo

Hattiesburg was once the largest Freedom Summer site in MS with over 3,000 volunteers.

Hattiesburg is getting ready to celebrate Freedom Summer (again). Once a cradle of the civil rights movement with figures like Clyde Kennard and sisters Joyce and Dorie Ladner, Hattiesburg will celebrate the 60th anniversary of Freedom Summer this year, commemorating the summer of 1964 when college students came to Mississippi for mass registration of Black voters. 

The Hattiesburg Public Library will be hosting a film screening of two Mississippi civil rights-era documentaries on Aug. 8 from 7 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. thanks to Scott Varnado, a Hattiesburg local and PhD student in film studies at UCLA. The library will also open a special photography exhibition, “Freedom Summer at 60: Mississippi as a Catalyst for Change,” curated in association with Special Collections at the University of Southern Mississippi and the Harvey Richards Media Archive on the same day as the film screening. 

Varnado said the films are a “chronicle of the early part of organizing Freedom Summer, and just really essential viewing for anyone that has an interest in Freedom Summer, Mississippi history and civil rights history.”

The two films, “We’ll Never Turn Back” from 1963 and “Dream Deferred” from 1964, are around 30 minutes each and tell the story of voter registration in Mississippi. The filmmaker, Harvey Richards, a social activist and union organizer from rural Oregan, traveled to the Mississippi Delta in 1963 to seek out voting rights activist Amzie Moore. Together, the two men filmed the documentaries in secret and at great risk, working against local segregationists who would have tried to stop or even kill them. 

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Varnado said Richards was remarkable for his work depicting “the lower rungs of society in an attempt to show images and communities and social issues that were absent from mainstream media.”

Richards’ son and curator of the Harvey Richards Media Archive will give a brief video introduction before the screening.

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The photo exhibit will display a collection of black and white photographs of voter registration efforts in and around Hattiesburg by New York photographer Herbert Randall, who, like Richards, traveled to Mississippi to document Freedom Summer in 1964. Randall’s photographs will be presented alongside color photographs from Richards of Black southerners across Mississippi taken in the same time period. 

“Hattiesburg was an important center for that civil rights activity,” Casey Varnado, Hattiesburg attorney and father of Scott Varnado, said. “We had more Freedom Summer volunteer workers in Hattiesburg than any other location in the state.”

The largest Freedom Summer site in Mississippi, Hattiesburg was once home to more than 90 out-of-state volunteers and more than 3,000 local volunteers.

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Adam Singletary, director of The Hattiesburg Public Library, said the photography exhibit and film screening complement one another by offering a full portrait of Freedom Summer with both specific Hattiesburg content and coverage of the state at large. 

“The films are also unique in that they are not widely known,” Singletary said, adding, “The fact that we can get the license to show them is exciting for the city and for our patrons because they may not otherwise have a chance to watch them.”