January 1964

Throughout Freedom Summer 1964, Mississippi white employers and landlords systematically fired, evicted, and cut off credit to Black residents who attempted voter registration. In Ruleville, Fannie Lou Hamer was evicted from the plantation where she had worked for 18 years within hours of attempting to register. SNCC documented hundreds of such cases of economic coercion.

Following J. Edgar Hoover's declaration that MLK was 'the most dangerous Negro in America,' a January 6, 1964 FBI memo outlined plans to 'neutralize King as an effective Negro leader' and elevate a more compliant figure. The FBI used surveillance recordings to attempt to pressure King's associates, donors, and the SCLC board to remove him from leadership.

The FBI's COINTELPRO program placed SNCC under intensive surveillance from 1964, planting informants, intercepting communications, and attempting to discredit leaders including John Lewis and Stokely Carmichael. Internal FBI memos described SNCC as a 'Black nationalist hate group' requiring neutralization. The program disrupted fundraising, leaked damaging information to employers and media, and manufactured intra-organization conflict.

The 24th Amendment to the Constitution was ratified, abolishing the poll tax as a requirement for voting in federal elections. Poll taxes had been used since Reconstruction to disenfranchise Black voters across the South. The amendment passed Congress in 1962 after decades of failed attempts; the Voting Rights Act of 1965 later extended the prohibition to state elections.

Louis Allen, a Black logger in Liberty, Mississippi, who had witnessed the 1961 murder of Herbert Lee and faced years of harassment for it, was shot dead in his driveway. Allen had been beaten, had his jaw broken by a deputy sheriff, and had applied for FBI protection before his murder. No one was ever charged.

The poll tax in federal elections is abolished.