Wednesdays in Mississippi was an activist group during theCivil Rights Movement in theUnited States during the 1960s.Northern women of different races and faiths traveled toMississippi to develop relationships with their southern peers and to create bridges of understanding across regional, racial, and class lines. By opening communications across societal boundaries, Wednesday’s Women sought to end violence and to cushion the transition towardsracial integration.^[1][2][3][4]

In the spring of 1964Dorothy I. Height, President of theNational Council of Negro Women (NCNW), working with NCNW volunteerPolly Spiegel Cowan, came up with the idea of sending weekly teams of northern women to Mississippi.^[1]

The teams wereinterracial andinterfaith. They would leave for Mississippi on a Tuesday and return on a Thursday. They were there all day on Wednesday, the program was known as "Wednesdays in Mississippi." Competent, well connected, and educated, these women worked withFreedom Summer and theFreedom Schools.

In 1964, Height and Cowan broughtDoris Wilson andSusie Goodwillie into Wednesdays in Mississippi to direct the project fromJackson, Mississippi.^[5]

The black women from the north visited with black women from the south; the white women from the north reached out to white women in the south. The women from the north went home with a fresh commitment to social and racial justice. In 1965 they came again, this time on a more professional level, speaking teacher to teacher and social worker to social worker.

In 1966 Wednesdays in Mississippi became Workshops in Mississippi, an ongoing effort to help black women and families, andpoor white women and families, achieve economic self-betterment.^[6]

In 2020, theNational Trust for Historic Preservation named the Sun'n'Sands Motel in Jackson as one of America's most endangered historic places, because of its connection to the Wednesdays in Mississippi movement.^[7]

The women of Wednesdays in Mississippi had many goals:

• racial justice;
• inter-racial, inter-regional, and inter-faith communications;
• working across racial and religious boundaries, opening the closed society of Mississippi;
• supporting the freedom schools andvoter registration;
• helping poor women in Mississippi learn how to help themselves, how to achieve economic self-sufficiency. They taught poor women how to survive in a society where the cotton economy had collapsed for poor tenants and laborers, and where a viable new economic structure not yet developed;
• and expanding the horizons and commitments of the northern women.

Archival records related to Wednesdays in Mississippi reside at theAlbert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library at theUniversity of Virginia^[8] as well as at theNational Archives for Black Women's History.^[5]

• Wednesdays in Mississippi at the University of Houston
• Wednesdays in Mississippi documentary film

• Civil rights movement organizations
• African-American history of Mississippi
• History of women in Mississippi

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• Short description is different from Wikidata