In the early summer months of 1964 a group of about 300 African Americans began a peaceful protest in Jackson, Mississippi. This number soon grew to the thousands. There were about a thousand out of state whites that also came to give aid( Freedom Summer,1). "They were not going to respond to a thousand blacks but would respond to a thousand young white college students". (The Fight for Civil Rights, 54).The main goal of this protest was to enable blacks to register to vote without so much opposition. At that time only 7 percent of the black population in M.S. was voting. "The campaign was known as Freedom Summer" (Unfinished Nation, 768). Freedom Summer was a 1964 voter registration project in Mississippi, part of a larger effort by civil rights groups such as the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE) and the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) to expand black voting in the South. Mississippi was chosen as the site of the Freedom Summer project due to its historically low levels of African-American voter registration.