In 1962, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) began a voter registration drive in Greenwood, Mississippi, the county seat of Leflore County, which was more than two-thirds black, but only five percent of the voting-age African American population was registered to vote. African American poverty in the area was widespread and threatened to intensify, which Bob Moses (b. 1935), the leader of SNCC in Mississippi, notes in this excerpt from the documentary The Streets of Greenwood (1964). SNCC organizers in Greenwood were shot and arrested, as the city was the state headquarters for the White Citizens’ Council, which Moses also discusses.

Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division. A film by Jack Willis, Fred Wardenburg, John Reavis

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