During the summer of 1964, a coalition of civil rights groups and almost a thousand student volunteers converged in Mississippi to register African-American voters. The “Mississippi Summer Project” was met with unrelenting violence: 1,000 arrests, 35 shootings, 30 bombed buildings, 35 burned churches, 80 beatings, and at least six murders. The following year, to sustain the focus on the plight of African-American voters in the South, civil rights leaders marched from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. On March 25, 1965, the final day of the march, Martin Luther King Jr. vowed to continue fighting for the right to vote, earn, and learn—all without racial barriers:
