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Friend,
At the edge of Jackson State University, a mere 100 yards from the closest school building, stands a sacred place in the annals of the civil rights movement in Mississippi.
It was there that Dave Dennis, co-founder of the activist umbrella group Council of Federated Organizations (COFO), in 1963 established COFO’s Mississippi headquarters.
And it was there that Martin Luther King Jr., Medgar Evers, Fannie Lou Hamer and many other courageous leaders of the movement congregated to strategize and plan how to attain civil rights for Black people. This meant registering as many Black Mississippians to vote as possible – in the face of poll taxes, literacy tests and violent intimidation by white supremacists – at a time when just 7% of eligible Black voters in the state were registered.
The headquarters at 1017 John R. Lynch St. – a street known as the cradle of civil rights activity in Mississippi – became the nerve center of the Mississippi movement.
Today, the building, with its original façade and now owned by Jackson State, is known as the COFO Civil Rights Education Center, a meeting and training space for student activists with exhibits that pay homage to the past.
It is here that a coalition of students is working to rekindle the spirit of the movement and continue the march for justice by registering, educating and mobilizing voters. To their adviser, political science professor Byron D’Andra Orey, the former Lynch Street headquarters seemed like the perfect place to resurrect student-led efforts.
“Living in a place like Mississippi, you have to become part of the solution,” said the Delta-born Orey, whose mother was a social worker in Clarksdale and father a union worker.
The student group is among those at five colleges and universities that recently received more than $80,000 in Vote Your Voice (VYV) grants under the Southern Poverty Law Center’s new College Pilot Program.
The Vote Your Voice initiative is a partnership between the SPLC and the Community Foundation for Greater Atlanta to increase voter registration, participation and civic engagement among communities of color in the Deep South. The SPLC has pledged to invest $100 million in Vote Your Voice grants through 2032. This year, a total of 44 grassroots voter outreach organizations across the Deep South have received more than $4.6 million in funding as part of the 2022-2023 round of VYV grants.
While the challenges are much different than they were in 1963 – when Jim Crow laws and customs enforced segregation and Klansmen murdered civil rights activists – Orey and his students know there is much work to do.
Today, Mississippi remains one of the five U.S. states with the most restrictive voting laws and ranked near the bottom for voter participation in the 2020 presidential election.
Only 28% of Jackson State’s students voted in the 2020 election, and Orey vows to reverse the poor showing.
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In solidarity,
Your friends at the Southern Poverty Law Center
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