James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner

My charcoal drawing of the three men killed in the Freedom Summer effort, Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner, is a representation of how a combined effort can lead to significant lasting change. This piece was made as an artistic response to the Freedom Summer documentary we watched in Dr. Stephanie Danker’s ART195 (Intro to Art Education) class, which talked about the Freedom Summer effort and how the college-aged volunteers who were untrained in activism and had never been to the south before trained at the Western College for Women to prepare to go to Mississippi and help get more Black people registered to vote. I think that watching the documentary and being assigned this artistic response/reflection assignment was crucial in getting myself and my classmates to empathize more deeply with this revolutionary event that happened on what is now a part of our campus. Many of us had never even heard about the Freedom Summer movement, especially those of us who are from different states, so having this new knowledge and being able to use art as a tool for visual communication and advocacy was a really good experience for us. For me, personally, my dream job is to teach art as a means of visual communication to English Language Learners, and this assignment reinforced how valuable it is for everyone to be able to express their feelings and respond to the world around them. I’ve done some work regarding advocacy and social justice education in the past with my art and online presence, but having this assignment framed in such a way that made the visual element the vessel for communicating my thoughts and feelings was infinitely and indescribably valuable to me, and I hope to implement similar concepts in my future personal work and teaching practices.