Wednesdays in Mississippi
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Wednesdays in Mississippi - Part of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s. Northern women of different races and faiths traveled to Mississippi to develop relationships with their southern peers and to create bridges of understanding across regional, racial, and class lines. By opening communications across societal boundaries, Wednesday’s Women sought to end violence and to cushion the transition towards racial integration.
The Civil Rights movement was a search for justice. In the spring of 1964 Dorothy I. Height, President of the National Council of Negro Women, working with NCNW volunteer Polly Cowan, came up with the idea of sending weekly teams of northern women to Mississippi.
The teams were interracial and interfaith. They've leaved on a Tuesday and return on a Thursday. There all day on Wednesday, the program was known as Wednesdays in Mississippi. Competent, well connected, and educated, these women worked with Freedom Summer and the Freedom Schools. They brought women together. They extended hope. They brought resolve, empathy, and understanding to the women of Mississippi.
Wednesdays in Mississippi operated under the umbrella of the National Council of Negro Women. Dorothy Irene Height was President of the NCNW and a long-standing leader in the fight for racial and social justice and the protection of black women, children, and families. She was the linchpin of Wednesdays in Mississippi. Polly Cowan was the Executive Director of Wednesdays in Mississippi, as well as Height’s colleague, amanuensis, and close friend. In 1964, Height and Cowan brought Doris Wilson and Susie Goodwillie into Wednesdays in Mississippi to direct the project from Jackson, Mississippi.
The black women from the north visited with black women from the south; the white women from the north reached out to white women in the south. The women from the north went home with a fresh commitment to social and racial justice. The women in the south felt a breath of fresh air and the support of national women's organizations. In 1965 they came again, this time on a more professional level, speaking teacher to teacher and social worker to social worker.
In 1966 Wednesdays in Mississippi became Workshops in Mississippi, an ongoing effort to help black women and families, and poor white women and families, achieve economic self-betterment. The National Council of Negro Women remains an active force for social welfare in Mississippi today, forty years after the inauguration of Wednesdays in Mississippi.
The women of Wednesdays in Mississippi had many goals: racial justice; inter-racial, inter-regional, and inter-faith communications; opening the closed society of Mississippi; supporting the freedom schools and voter registration; and expanding the horizons and commitments of the northern women themselves. They were confident that they would in some measure succeed.
The first Wednesdays in Mississippi summer led to a second one. After that Wednesdays in Mississippi became Workshops in Mississippi. The NCNW – still working across racial and religious boundaries – helped poor women in Mississippi learn how to help themselves, how to achieve economic self-sufficiency. They taught poor women how to survive in a society where the cotton economy had collapsed for poor tenants and laborers, and where a viable new economic structure not yet developed. The NCNW remains in Mississippi to this day.
