Carpenters for Christmas

Carpenters for Christmas was conceived to counteract a series of church bombings and arson attacks in Mississippi during and following the Mississippi Freedom Summer in 1964. During the summer of 1964, the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) organized a nationally supported campaign that challenged the racial segregation of the Mississippi Democratic Party and the state's systematic exclusion of black citizens from voting. Churches played a central role in this campaign, often housing Freedom Schools, serving as freedom election polling places, and serving as the venue for mass meetings. To counter this central role, segregationist forces began a campaign of terror against civil rights workers and the churches that gave them support:

Over the course of Freedom Summer, there were at least three murders, approximately 70 bombings or burnings, over 80 beatings, and over 1,000 arrests of civil rights activists. The COFO incident report, a single-spaced document that offered brief daily summaries, was over ten pages long.^[1]

In the fall of 1964, numerous churches in Mississippi and elsewhere in the South were burned, bombed or otherwise attacked. Students from Oberlin College and others organized a church rebuilding project to create national support for southern churches. They chose the Antioch Missionary Baptist Church in Blue Mountain, Mississippi to highlight the problem of church destruction, and in December 1964, with national media attention, the church was rebuilt with volunteer labor and donated materials. The church burned right after Fannie Lou Hamer gave a speech there.

The project received widespread publicity in national media, and contributed to broader recognition of need to afford protection to southern churches that supported the civil rights movement.