Freedom Summer and Ferguson, MO

In the summer of 1964, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Martin Luther King, civil rights activists and more than 700 mostly white college students risked their lives and worked together in Mississippi, one of the most racist states of the Jim Crow South, to register African-American voters and open the polls. Freedom Summer powerfully weaves together footage of the marches, the Freedom Schools, the friendships that developed and the violent clashes of activists and police that followed. With first-person accounts from some of the movem ent's architects and frontline activists – including one of Pete Seeger's final appearances – the film commemorates that ten week period and celebrates its triumph in the passing of the Voting Rights Act in 1965.

Today, fifty years later, with the Voting Rights Act under siege, daily reports of police brutality and racial inequality seen in all realms of American life, we take a look back at the struggles for civil rights and social justice and look at the barriers that still endure.