The Civil Rights movement was a search for justice. In the spring of 1964 Dorothy I. Height, President of the National Council of Negro Women, working with NCNW volunteer Polly Cowan, came up with the idea of sending weekly teams of northern women to Mississippi.

The teams would be interracial and interfaith. They would leave on a Tuesday and return on a Thursday. There all day on Wednesday, the program would be known as Wednesdays in Mississippi. Competent, well connected, and educated, these women would work with Freedom Summer and the Freedom Schools.

They would bring women together. They would extend HOPE. They would open up what James Silver had called “the Closed Society.” They would bring resolve, empathy, and understanding to the women of Mississippi.