Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio.

Hello and welcome to the podcast, I'm Tracy B. Wilson, and I'm Holly Fry.

Over the last few months, the state of Georgia made a lot of headlines when its voters

elected Joe Biden for president and then in a runoff elected John Ossoff and Rafael

Werner as senators.

This broke a decades-long pattern of Georgians electing Republicans rather than Democrats

into these roles.

These elections followed just years of organizing and advocacy and legal work and voter registration

efforts in the state, and the person who's become most widely known for all this work

is Stacey Abrams, really though it involved multiple civil rights and voting rights and

labor organizations along with individual people and Abrams has made it entirely clear that

it was not work that she did by herself.

So I just wanted to call that part out to you.

As I was watching all of this unfold though, my mind kept returning to other earlier voter

registration efforts in the United States.

And one of those is the Mississippi summer project of 1964, which is now better known as

Freedom Summer.

This project was met with an extremely violent and deadly backlash, and in some ways that

backlash has overshadowed the work that the project set out to do, and that work actually

involved a lot more than registering people to vote.

So that is today's topic for the show.

And before we start, I just wanted to shout out the podcast scene on radio, especially

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