In November 1962, Steve Schapiro read a selection of captivating essays by author James Baldwin in The New Yorker. Schapiro asked Life magazine if he could work on a photo essay about Baldwin for the publication, and they obliged. Schapiro spent four weeks with Baldwin in 1963, following the writer around the South during his Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) sponsored speaking tour. Baldwin introduced Schapiro to the Civil Rights Movement and prominent civil rights leaders and activists, sparking the photographer’s life-long interest. Schapiro would spend the rest of 1963 on assignments from other publications such as Time magazine photographing other prominent leaders, including John Lewis, Fannie Lou Hamer, Jerome Smith, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
In late 1963, leaders from the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) including the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) gathered and created a plan to address Black voter disenfranchisement in the south. They would tackle Mississippi first, where Black voter registration numbers were the lowest in the country. Prior to Freedom Summer 1964, only 6.7 percent of eligible Blacks were registered to vote in Mississippi. The Mississippi Summer Project came to fruition just a few months later, becoming one of the most important moments in the advancement of suffrage for Black Americans.
