Editor's Note

In 1964 and 1965, more than a thousand college students went to Mississippi to participate in Freedom Summer. The idea was to advance the democratic promise of racial inclusion by registering Mississippi's disenfranchised black voters. Vivian Rothstein's essay in this issue of the Boston Review describes those remarkable efforts and the celebration of them held this past summer in Jackson, Mississippi. In Boston, a group of activists organized a different kind of celebration -- Boston Freedom Summer '94. A renewal rather than a reunion, this project brought young people to Boston to work on community-building projects in a few inner-city neighborhoods. The idea was, once more, to revitalize the struggle for racial equality by rejuvenating it. Cynthia Parker, administrative director of Boston Freedom Summer, writes about the Boston project and its connections to 1964; and five of the participants join Cynthia Parker and Judy Richardson -- a veteran of Mississippi Freedom Summer -- for a discussion of the project and future hopes and possibilities.