Initially known as The Mississippi Summer Project, a group of seven to eight hundred volunteers, including teenagers, participated in training for a summer trip to Mississippi where they would face off against racism and violence while attempting to register African Americans to vote. The training, initially intended to take place in Kentucky; however, the training was relocated to the safer venue of Oxford, Ohio's Western College for women in an attempt to train the volunteers away from areas of conflict. The significance of the Freedom Summer training and its volunteers was the fact that the majority were youth and white. However, in terms of research on Freedom Summer, which is significant in quantity, focuses on the work in Mississippi rather than motives to volunteer or reactions to the announcement of the murder of their fellow volunteers.
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