Candlelight ceremony for 45th anniversary of Freedom Summer Oct. 9

A candlelight vigil to remember the events of and lives lost during Freedom Summer 1964 will be held at 8:30 p.m. Friday, Oct. 9, at the Freedom Summer Memorial on Miami University’s Western campus, adjacent to Kumler Chapel on Western Drive.

Introductory remarks will be made by Freedom Summer activists J. Charles Jones, an attorney in Charlotte, NC, and Richard Momeyer, professor of philosophy at Miami. Musical guests are Guy and Candie Carawan, social activists and folk musicians who were instrumental in turning the song “We Shall Overcome” into the theme song of the civil rights movement.

The event is part of “Freedom Summer: Unity and Change, Then and Now,” a conference and reunion Oct. 9-11 hosting many local and national activists of Freedom Summer, including nationally known scholars and many other freedom fighters from the 1960s civil rights movement. For more information, go online at http://www.muohio.edu/freedomsummer2009.

In 1964, more than 1,000 volunteers gathered at Western College for Women – now a part of Miami’s campus – to receive training for Freedom Summer, an effort to increase voter registration of African Americans in Mississippi who were denied access to the democratic process. For two weeks, participants trained and then traveled to Mississippi to register voters and organize freedom schools.