Students register to vote at a tabling event in front of the Student Union during National Voter Registration Day in 2023. Photo Courtesy: William Teer.

The University of Mississippi Center for Community Engagement will host its second annual UM Voting Summit from March 19-23. The event seeks to honor and reflect on the history of Mississippi and promote civic engagement.

The focus of this year’s voting summit is the 60th anniversary of Mississippi’s Freedom Summer. Freedom Summer was a campaign organized in 1964 to encourage college students to volunteer to fight for civil rights in the state of Mississippi. Many of those volunteers helped African Americans in Mississippi register to vote and gain access to education programs, civil liberties that had been denied to Black people during the Jim Crow era.

The voting summit will culminate with a trip to Philadelphia, Miss., to remember three activists that were murdered in Neshoba County while conducting their work.

“This year’s voting summit seeks to educate, inspire and inform the LOU community about the 60th anniversary of Mississippi Freedom Summer and the lessons we can learn from it today,” Marshall Pentes, a junior economics major and the student leader for the Voting Engagement Ambassadors, said.

As an ambassador for CCE, Pentes, along with other ambassadors, helps UM students from across the country navigate the voter registration process.

Pentes believes that the voting summit serves two important purposes.

“The first is that it advances an important, and often overlooked topic: the civil rights and voting rights activists working in Mississippi both in the 1960s and today,” Pentes said. “Second, we get to remind people that their vote is important and to exercise that power in this year’s 2024 election.”

Pentes is hopeful that the voting summit will motivate members of the university community to show up at the polls on Election Day.

“We have big dreams about raising this university’s participation in the next elections. This voting summit is only the beginning,” Pentes said.

Pentes also emphasized that engaging with Mississippi’s civil rights history is beneficial to students and members of the Lafayette and Oxford community.

“The legacy of civil rights and voting rights activists in Mississippi is long and sometimes bloody, but it is absolutely worthwhile to experience it. This is why the final event of the Voting Summit is a tour of Philadelphia, Miss.,” Pentes said. “We are giving the LOU community a chance to visit the places where activists bravely sacrificed themselves for a better future.”

The three volunteers disappeared in Neshoba County on June 21, 1964. The bodies of Michael Schwerener, Andrew Goodman and James Chaney were found 44 days later in Philadelphia, Miss. The incident drew national attention.

Destiny Kirksey, a sophomore Biology major and Philadelphia, Miss., native, is proud of the university for acknowledging the civic history of her hometown.

“I think it’s a good thing that the university is holding this event in Philadelphia, because I didn’t realize that not a lot of people know about the murders that specifically happened in my hometown,” Kirksey said. “I think it’s an amazing opportunity for people to truly learn more about the background of Freedom Summer and get more information.”

Pentes said he is proud of the planning that has gone into the summit and anticipates that the events will make an impact.

“I’m proud of what we have accomplished in bringing this summit together. A lot of hard work has been put into every event, and I know that anyone who attends one of our events will come away informed,” Pentes said.