Background
In the spring of 1964 Dorothy I. Height, President of the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW), 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 would leave for Mississippi 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.
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. 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.
Read more about this topic: Wednesdays In Mississippi
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