How long does it take to read Freedom Summer?
Doug McAdam
Freedom Summer by Doug McAdam takes about 6 hours 6 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 6 hours 6 minutes
A weekend read
First published 1988. 333 pages, about 91,575 words.
13 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 10 hours 11 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 6 hours 6 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 3 hours 49 minutes |
The page count is the median across 4 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
In June 1964, over one thousand volunteers--most of them white, northern college students--arrived in Mississippi to register black voters and staff "freedom schools" as part of the Freedom Summer campaign organized by the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. Within ten days, three of them were murdered; by the summer's end, another had died and hundreds more had endured bombings, beatings, and arrests. Less dramatically, but no less significantly, the volunteers encountered a "liberating" exposure to new lifestyles, new political ideologies, and a radically new perspective on America and on themselves. Doug McAdam offers the first book to gauge the impact of Freedom Summer on the project volunteers and the period we now call "the turbulent sixties." Tracking down hundreds of the original project applicants, and combining hard data with a wealth of personal recollections, he has produced a riveting portrait of the people, the events, and the era. McAdam discovered that during Freedom Summer, the volunteers' encounters with white supremacist violence and their experiences with interracial relationships, communal living, and a more open sexuality led many of them to "climb aboard a political and cultural wave just as it was forming and beginning to wash forward." Many became activists in subsequent protests--including the antiwar movement and the feminist movement--and, most significantly, many of them have remained activists to this day.
Subjects: Mississippi Freedom Project, African Americans, Race relations, Civil rights, Suffrage, History
