Contact: Carl Smith

STARKVILLE, Miss.—Mississippi State Libraires is honoring the 60th anniversary of 1964’s Freedom Summer with a lecture from noted civil rights activist Leslie-Burl McLemore on Friday [Aug. 30].

McLemore, a founding member of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and Jackson State University professor, will speak about the historic effort to register Black Mississippians to vote during the Jim Crow era and the current importance of preserving American democracy. The 1 p.m. event held in Mitchell Memorial Library’s John Grisham Room will open with a welcome address by MSU President Mark E. Keenum and close with a light reception.

The son of a sharecropper from Walls, MS, Leslie-Burl McLemore first became politically active in high school when his school library didn’t have any books about Black history. As a student at Rust College in Holly Springs, he started the college chapter of the NAACP and became involved with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee to help with voter registration. He was also a regional coordinator for the 1963 Freedom Ballot campaign. McLemore helped form the MFDP in 1964 and, along with Fannie Lou Hamer, he was one of the delegates demanding to be seated at the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey.

McLemore has an extensive record in academia, including establishing the W.E.B. DuBois Department of African American Studies at the University of Massachusetts after earning a doctorate from UMass Amherst. At Jackson State University, he served as the founding chair of its political science department, dean of the graduate school, founding director of the Office of Research and interim president. He also established the university’s Fannie Lou Hamer National Institute on Citizenship and Democracy. As a public official, McLemore was elected to the Jackson City Council in 1999, served as the capital’s acting mayor after the death of Frank Melton 10 years later and was elected to the Walls Board of Aldermen in 2017.

McLemore received the Mississippi Historical Society’s 2023 Lifetime Achievement Award for his work with the MFDP.

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