In the summer of 1964 I went to the segregated South with about 45 other volunteers as part of an independent civil rights group to support “free and fair elections” in Fayette County Tennessee. (Charlie Haynie a graduate student at Cornell University was the primary organizer) Fayette County was a rural area on the Northern Mississippi border with a Black majority population and with less then 7% of Blacks registered to vote.
There was a history of Black activism in this corner of Tennessee and in 1964 a Black man, June Dowdy, was running for tax assessor and a White man, L.T. Redfearrn (who was sympathetic to the movement), was running for Sheriff. We were invited by local leaders to come and support the struggle. We lived with Black families and spent our days traveling the dirt roads, meeting sharecroppers, tenant farmers, and sometimes small farm owners, promoting voter registration and then encouraging people to vote in the August election.