Charles Cobb Jr. played an integral role in getting Black people registered to vote during the Mississippi Freedom Summer Project in 1964.

Since then, Cobb, who lives in Jacksonville, has continued his fight for the rights of Americans with a focus on voting equality during a time when many feel Black voters are still being oppressed in different ways.

During the Civil Rights Movement, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was active in Mississippi and was met with violence among other opposition as it fought oppression.

Cobb said it inspired him as a freshman at Howard University to see people his age engaged in the civil rights struggle.

“They were simply our age and they were walking picket lines or getting arrested sitting in at segregated restaurants, and that’s what piqued my interest because these are all springing off of HBCUs,” Cobb said.

He was at a restaurant that catered to midshipmen in Annapolis, Maryland in a group with Stokely Carmichael, who would become a civil rights legend.

“We were challenging the segregation in the surrounding communities of Maryland,” Cobb said.

He was invited to a Civil Rights conference for young people in Texas by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). Cobb accepted the invitation because he thought it was a chance to see the South he learned so much about from afar.

“It’s one thing for me to be sitting in Maryland and Virginia as a Howard University student is something qualitatively different for students to be sitting in the state where Emmett Till had been so brutally murdered [in Mississippi],” Cobb said.

He bought a bus ticket that would take him from Washington D.C. through the Virginias, the Carolinas, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and into Houston where the conference would take place.

He got off the bus in Mississippi because he wanted to meet the students who were sitting in.

He told the CORE and SNCC leaders that he was just “passing through” and wanted to observe their strategy. Or at least he thought he was.

“A big guy, six feet, gets up, hovers over me, speaks to me with complete disdain saying ‘You’re going to Texas for a conference on civil rights? What’s the point in doing that when you’re standing right here in Mississippi?’” Cobb said.

The activists were getting ready to start a voter registration project in Northwest Mississippi and James Forman, the executive secretary of SNCC, challenged Cobb’s logic.

He knew he couldn’t leave the South and head back to college.

Cobb also met Fannie Lou Hamer, one of the movement’s most powerful voices. He helped her register to vote and helped her get settled when she got kicked off the plantation she worked on as a sharecropper.

“I just couldn’t say no to people like that, I got classes, but then again, as a result, I didn’t get out of Mississippi for another five years,” Cobb said. “The longer you stay, the deeper your involvement.”

In 1964, SNCC launched campaigns to get Black people registered to vote. According to the King Institute at Stanford University, about 17,000 Black Mississippians tried to register in the summer of 1964, but only 1,600 of the completed applications were accepted.

“I don’t think people today understand how states like Mississippi and Alabama and other states were violent,” Cobb said. “The kind of violence that existed where they could just kill you or make you disappear.”

That idea of the possible violence was in the back of Cobb’s head as he talked about when he was with Hamer the first time she tried to register to vote.

On August 31, 1962, Cobb, Hamer, and about 18 other people left from a small town in Mississippi to go to the courthouse to get registered.

“Everybody on the bus was scared…We’re in a county that’s notorious not just for the White Citizens Council, but for the Ku Klux Klan so nobody knew what could happen and everybody knew that anything could happen,” Cobb said.

He knew that there was nothing that he or SNCC could do to ease people’s fears as their lives were in danger.

Until a woman in the middle of the bus started singing.

“These songs, which really have roots in the church but had been reshaped in terms of the movement. Through the sheer power of her voice and those songs she did what we couldn’t,” Cobb said.

She eased the fears of the people on the bus with the power and conviction of her simply singing songs.

Hamer lived on cotton plantations all her life and she was well aware of the dangerous circumstances. Cobb asked her, what made her get on the bus to go get registered.

“She said, ‘Y’all said it was right, Charlie. I was raised to do what was right so how are we going to do this?’ And that to me is my own most inspirational moment,” Cobb said.

He said that moment is where he learned the makeup of Black Mississippians and what it takes to fight for something they believe in.

“There are these deep wells of strength, ordinary Black people that you don’t even know, and they dip into these wells, and they feel what they need can be found there, the strength that can be found there,” Cobb said.

We are only 60 years removed from President Lyndon B. Johnson’s signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The actions of activists like Cobb, Haley and Carmichael set the stage for other critical legislation like the Voters Rights Act of 1965.

Even in modern times, voters' rights are being challenged. Lawmakers in several states are fighting to protect them.

In 2013, the Supreme Court threw out the most powerful part of the landmark Voting Rights Act. The justices voted to strip the government of its tool to stop voting bias in southern states that have a history of voter discrimination.

This has led legislators in multiple states including Florida to pursue state voting rights acts for protection instead of relying on the federal government.

He said that he and other SNCC veterans mentor and speak with modern activists to teach them methods to mobilize community members through a partnership with Duke University to build the SNCC Legacy Project.

It’s a website and archive for telling SNCC’s story and other historic materials.

He said the activists during his time were excellent record keepers which was important for court evidence and the media.

Now those records are used by modern activists and scholars to understand successful organizing strategies.

“We’ve gotten people to help them begin to tell their story,” Cobb said. “Because we didn’t have people like that when I was active but we do now. We can be those people and they will listen to us.”