In the summer of 1964, civil rights activists descended on Mississippi to help African Americans register to vote.

It was perilous work — and the rest of the world began to see how far racists would go to silence black people politically when the Ku Klux Klan murdered civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner.

“We had begun organizing in Mississippi in 1961, and we had to battle reprisals then,” said Charles Cobb, who was field secretary for the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee in the Mississippi Delta and architect of the Freedom Schools, which opened in 1964 and sought to boost youth's political and civic awareness.

“There were local Mississippians being killed by local vigilantes, and the state was protecting them…”

Yet that all stopped when the nation began to pay attention to the atrocities, and the federal government began to enforce civil rights laws embedded in the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

But today’s danger doesn’t lie in the threat of death for attempting to vote.

Today’s threat lies in people either being too disillusioned to vote because they believe they have little control over what their representatives do, or that they are no match for the voting hurdles that some states, such as Tennessee, have erected to keep many of them voiceless.

That’s why it's time to prepare for a Freedom Summer 2020.

It’s time because even as Americans largely back sensible restrictions on guns — things such as red-flag laws and assault-weapons bans — too many lawmakers fear the power of the National Rifle Association more than the power of their voters.

And as they cower, the body count continues.

July ended with a disgruntled employee shooting and killing two people in a Southaven, Mississippi, Walmart. August began with a racist massacring 22 people, mostly Latinos, in an El Paso, Texas, Walmart and an unhinged shooter slaughtering nine people in downtown Dayton, Ohio.

Then, days later, a white supremacist in the Orlando suburb of Winter Park, Florida, was arrested for making an online threat to shoot up a Walmart there, while a neo-Nazi in Las Vegas, Nevada, was allegedly planning to firebomb a synagogue and shoot up a gay nightclub.

For Cobb, the El Paso massacre and the specter of other white-supremacist violence is frighteningly familiar.

“These mass shooters are now targeting black and brown people,” he said, “and, quite frankly, I don’t see much difference between these mass shootings today, and black churches being blown up in the 1960s, except the president is encouraging it through his rhetoric.”

It’s time for a new Freedom Summer because, as it was with Alabama Gov. George Wallace in 1964, the nation now has his doppelganger in President Donald Trump.

His racist language has charged up an atmosphere which emboldens people to act on their impulses and their prejudices. Like Wallace, Trump believes his path to re-election is to paint brown and black people as perils to the nation’s progress.

And he isn’t alone.

Republican lawmakers in states like Tennessee view African Americans and Latinos as threats, too. That’s why, when the Tennessee Black Voter Project turned in some 90,000 registration forms in 2018, many from mostly-black Memphis, the GOP-dominated General Assembly seized on complaints that too many of the forms contained incomplete information and other problems.

Instead of helping the group find a remedy, the lawmakers opted for punishment. They passed a law that would, among other things, fine groups which use paid canvassers thousands of dollars for turning in too many incomplete forms. Some group leaders could even face jail time if they don't undergo official registration training.

Clearly, that’s voter suppression masquerading as voter integrity.

“The specifics of how it’s being done now is different, but the state is, once again, being used as an instrument to suppress the vote,” Cobb said.

“The difference is that now, we have a president who is in favor of this, and we have a core group of people in power who don’t believe in democracy if it means empowering black and brown people.”

But, Cobb said, these suppressors, or rather, oppressors, haven’t won yet.

During a 2020 Freedom Summer voting drive, activists could survey the places where obstacles to voting exist and work to overcome them.

For example, as unfair as the law is, and even as the Tennessee Black Voter Project awaits the outcome of its court challenge to it, it can recruit volunteers to do registrations and reduce the numbers of incomplete forms so that, come 2020, the suppression attempt doesn't have the desired outcome.

Already CharlaneOliver, a co-founder and board president of the Equity Alliance, which partnered with the voter project, is eyeing ways to continue its work in Tennessee despite the state's shackles.

Yet all of that should be a buildup to a new Freedom Summer; a summer to energize people who understand that true freedom doesn’t lie in anyone being able to amass an arsenal, but in everyone being able to return home alive after a shopping trip, or to not fear being slaughtered by a mass shooter because of their skin color or their religion.

It should be a summer to mobilize African-American, Latino and young voters against the forces who are putting more efforts into silencing them than in articulating an agenda that speaks to them.

“These people can be beat,” Cobb said. “If people like Fannie Lou Hamer could organize and win in the 1960s, we can organize and win today.”

They must win — because losing the fight means too many people will lose their voice.

And we can’t allow that to happen again.

Tonyaa Weathersbee can be reached at tonyaa.weathersbee@commercialappeal.com or on Twitter: @tonyaajw.