Mississippi’s Freedom Trail Will Now Extend All the Way to New Jersey

Euvester Simpson was barely 18 in August 1964 when she boarded a bus in Mississippi bound for the Democratic National Convention in New Jersey.

She was seated next to Fannie Lou Hamer, a 46-year-old sharecropper from Ruleville, Miss., who was about to change history. The two Black civil rights activists had shared a jail cell the year before, but as the bus hurtled north toward Atlantic City, 60 years ago this week, they sang.

“‘Walk with Me, Lord.’ That was her favorite,” Ms. Simpson, 78, recalled.

On Tuesday, as Democrats meet in Chicago to rally around Kamala Harris for president, lawmakers and civil rights veterans will gather in Atlantic City to mark the 60th anniversary of a Democratic convention held at the height of Freedom Summer. At the commemoration, the convention hall in Atlantic City will be designated as the first out-of-state stop on the Mississippi Freedom Trail.

College students from the North had descended on Mississippi during the tumultuous summer of 1964, facing often hostile opposition to their efforts to join with local leaders like Ms. Simpson and Ms. Hamer to register disenfranchised Black voters.

The bodies of three young civil rights workers, shot dead in Mississippi, had been discovered in an earthen dam two weeks before the convention. Still, the mood among the busload of activists traveling to Atlantic City was buoyant. They were convinced the D.N.C. would have no choice but to seat delegates from the newly formed Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party instead of maintaining the state’s all-white contingent.