Moral Freedom Summer Organizer in Asheville
This June marked the 50th anniversary of the momentous Freedom Summer.
During the summer of 1964, more than 1,000 out-of-state volunteers, alongside thousands of Black Mississippians, participated in an effort to register African Americans to vote.
These volunteers were taught not only to survive in Mississippi, but also how to reach out to poor people in the state who had lost hope of ever bearing witness to any progress against systemic racial oppression and injustice.
In an effort to push back against the draconian legislation coming out of Raleigh, North Carolina, the NAACP has dispersed 37 Moral Freedom Summer Organizers across the state. The Asheville-Buncombe organizer is Zechariah Etheridge, who will be here in WNC for two months.
Zechariah is a rising senior at UNC Greensboro, majoring in Sociology and African American Studies. He is enthusiastic about educating voters and building lasting coalitions in the Buncombe County community.
History has come full circle in many ways. Organizers today are doing much of the same work students did 50 years ago. With the legislature’s policies on voter suppression, cuts to education, carte blanche to corporate polluters, attacks on women’s rights, evisceration of every safety net for low income families including Medicaid, etc., these organizers are hard at work educating voters on the issues and the importance of their votes.
Zechariah is honored to be standing on the shoulders of the brave people from that Freedom Summer of fifty years past. Interested in talking to Zechariah about his work this summer? You can email him at [email protected].
