Analysis Of Freedom Summer Assignment

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Analysis of Freedom Summer Assignment A) Social Movements have had a dramatic impact in our society. They bring out to the forefront a lot of inequality, social injustices and conflict. When people are bothered by the way things are – grievance. With these grievances a social movement may occur. There are many explanations for why people mobilize. The one that I will focus on is relative deprivation, which means the conscious feeling of a negative discrepancy between legitimate expectations and present actualities. -- Things are not as good as you hoped they would be. In Freedom Summer, The summer of ‘64 the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE), Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) organized its Freedom Summer campaign. Its main objective was to try an end the political segregation of African Americans in the Deep South. Volunteers from the three organizations decided to concentrate its efforts in Mississippi. It was the first widespread entrance of young elite whites from the north, into the movement. Whites, of course, have long been involved in the civil rights struggle. SNCC needed volunteers who could support themselves for the summer because SNCC had very little financing. This translated into a recruitment campaign geared to the nation’s elite colleges and universities. The students’ parents were influential. The Leadership of SNCC was consciously trying to recruit the power elite. Of these kids, all of the applicants all shared a generalized optimism, idealism, and sense of potency that was the subjective heritage of their class and generation. Left over from the “hero” generation of the World War II, this current generation felt that America was the “good guys.” They felt America stood for something great and better then most other countries. Even though they felt so
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