Mount Zion is known in Hattiesburg as the "Civil Rights Church." During Freedom Summer in 1964 it held one of the movement's Freedom Schools, where young people learned the African American history and literature that public schools would not teach. The folk singer Pete Seeger taught music lessons there. The Rev. F. L. Barnes was the pastor that summer. Hattiesburg was a center of that summer's work, and its volunteers also founded freedom libraries and helped found the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party.
Mount Zion belonged to a neighborhood that organized itself. Older residents gave money, food and lodging to the student volunteers, and teenagers who attended the Freedom School went out with adults to sign up new voters. Victoria Gray Adams, a mother of three who had become the movement's manager in 1962, ran citizenship classes that used the state constitution and the voter registration form as reading texts. In the mid-1960s she, Fannie Lou Hamer and the Rev. John Cameron all ran for Congress, a landmark for Black Mississippians. Two weeks before his death in 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. spoke at Mount Zion about the planned Poor People's March on Washington.
The original church was demolished in 1993, so the building on Spencer Street is later than the movement. Mount Zion is one of nineteen stops on VisitHBURG's Freedom Summer driving and audio tour, which also covers Mobile Street, where the Woods Guest House, the movement's Freedom House, stood until a fire in 1998. A bench and a sign mark the spot.
The closest stops worth working into your route