MSU Libraries Honor 60th Anniversary of Freedom Summer

Contact: Carl Smith

STARKVILLE, Miss.—The Mississippi State Libraires will honor the 60th anniversary of Freedom Summer 1964 with a lecture by renowned civil rights activist Leslie-Burl McLemore on Friday. [Aug. 30].

McLemore, a founding member of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and a professor at Jackson State University, will speak about the historic effort to register black Mississippians to vote during the Jim Crow era and the current importance of preserving American democracy. The 1 p.m. event in the John Grisham Room of the Mitchell Memorial Library will open with a welcoming speech by MSU President Mark E. Keenum and conclude with a small reception.

Leslie-Burl McLemore, the son of a sharecropper from Walls, MS, first became politically active in high school when his school library lacked books on black history. As a student at Rust College in Holly Springs, he founded the college branch of the NAACP and became involved in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee to help with voter registration. He also served as regional coordinator for the 1963 Freedom Ballot campaign. McLemore helped found the MFDP in 1964 and was one of the delegates, along with Fannie Lou Hamer, demanding a seat at the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey.

McLemore has had a long academic career, including founding the W.E.B. DuBois Department of African American Studies at the University of Massachusetts after earning his doctorate at UMass Amherst. At Jackson State University, he served as founding chair of the political science department, dean of the graduate school, founding director of the Office of Research, and interim president. He also founded the university's Fannie Lou Hamer National Institute on Citizenship and Democracy. As an official, McLemore was elected to the Jackson City Council in 1999, served as acting mayor of the capital city ten years later following the death of Frank Melton, and was elected to the Walls City Council in 2017.

McLemore received the Mississippi Historical Society’s 2023 Lifetime Achievement Award for his work with the MFDP.

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