In 1964, civil rights activists organized a voter education and registration campaign to enfranchise Black Mississippians and to spotlight the intense, often violent, resistance faced by Black voters in the South. Freedom Summer drew volunteers from all over the United States, many of whom were college students. 

Goldman School faculty member and One Fair Wage President Saru Jayaraman imagined a 2020 version of Freedom Summer, with college students working to enfranchise voters, especially in swing states. But what could this look like during the pandemic when travel was severely restricted and knocking door-to-door was impossible? 

Then she had an idea.

One Fair Wage had started a fund to support low wage workers during the pandemic. Over 200K workers had applied for the $500 cash payment. 

“When we looked at who had applied and compared that data to a national database of who’s voted, we found that fewer than 20% had ever voted,” says Professor Jayaraman. “So we knew this was an important population of low-wage workers that were not connected to the political system. They happened to be the very same workers that we would have taken the students to these battleground states to talk to, if we could have traveled there in person.”

Working with MPP student Reed Levitt, Ms. Jayaraman developed a summer course where students studied grassroots organizing and social movements. They could directly apply what they were learning by reaching out by phone to low-wage workers. 

“I saw a lot of parallels between the Freedom Summer of 1964 and what we are living through now,” says Sophie McMullen, a UC Berkeley undergraduate enrolled in the course. “Reading about the impact of the brave volunteers of the Freedom Summer Project of 1964, I was inspired to be a part of empowering disenfranchised service industry folks and mobilizing around this critical election.”

Freedom Summer 2020 had forty-four students formally enrolled and over a hundred volunteers from colleges and universities across the country who participated without receiving class credit.

“This wasn’t just a voter registration program,” says Reed. “It was meant to permanently shift disenfranchised folks’ conceptions of what they could and couldn’t do by asking them to not only register themselves to vote but to become a peer leader in their community and take collective action on their own behalf.”

“Many of the individuals we called were at some of the lowest points of their lives, struggling to make ends meet, out of work due to the pandemic, or furious about the conditions they were being forced to work in,” says Sophie. “Many were ready and willing to mobilize around the fight for a fair livable wage with tips on top. They understood the importance of this November’s election.”

Over the course of the summer, the students spoke with thousands of low-wage workers. 

“It was clear people were really hungry for a way to be involved in this very historic election,” says Professor Jayaraman. “Freedom Summer 2020 gave students the unique opportunity to speak remotely with the lowest wage workers—the most vulnerable and least likely voters—in battleground states.”