History Is Lunch: Leslie-Burl McLemore, "Freedom Summer; A Personal Odyssey"

On July 10, 2024, Leslie-Burl McLemore presented “Freedom Summer: A Personal Odyssey” as part of the History Is Lunch series.
In 1964, volunteers from across the United States came to Mississippi to help register Black voters as part of a campaign that came to be known as Freedom Summer. That spring Mississippi native Leslie-Burl McLemore graduated from Rust College in Holly Springs, where he had been the founding president of the college’s NAACP chapter and the regional coordinator for the 1963 statewide Freedom Vote campaign.
In April of 1964, McLemore became a founding member of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) and a member of its executive committee, and later that summer was one of 64 Freedom Party delegates to the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City.
“By then I was also a field secretary for the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and had been assigned to the MFDP office in Washington, DC, as a lobbyist and advance person in Atlantic City,” said McLemore. “I had the unique experience during Freedom Summer of working on the ground in Mississippi with such people as Fannie Lou Hamer, Bob Moses, Victoria Gray Adams, and Aaron Henry, and also in the national office with Ella Baker, Frank Smith Jr., and Eleanor Holmes Norton.”
Leslie-Burl McLemore is a member of the board of aldermen of Walls and professor emeritus of political science at Jackson State University, where he was former dean of the graduate school and Interim president as well as the founding chair of the Department of Political Science and founding director of the Fannie Lou Hamer National Institute on Citizenship and Democracy. McLemore served on the Jackson city council from 1999 to 2009 and was council president for six years and the acting mayor of Jackson in 2009. He earned his BA in social science and economics from Rust College, his MA in political science from Atlanta University, and his PhD in government from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. McLemore has done post-doctoral work at Johns Hopkins University and Harvard University. He is co-author with John Dittmer and Jeff Kolnick of the book Freedom Summer: A Brief History with Documents.
History Is Lunch is a weekly lecture series of the Mississippi Department of Archives and History that explores all aspects of the state’s past. The hour-long programs are held in the Craig H. Neilsen Auditorium of the Museum of Mississippi History and Mississippi Civil Rights Museum building at 222 North Street in Jackson and livestreamed on RUclips and Facebook.