NATCHEZ — The summer of 1964 was a hot one, with the high temperature for every day of the month exceeding 90 and lows that never dipped below 70, even hours after the sun set.

But even as the humidity sucked the moisture out of everybody and ruined their ironed work shirts by mid-morning and residents were forced to seek relief in deep glasses of ice water, the mercury was rising on another issue — race.

July 1964 was a deep breath before the watershed year that would start in August of that year and continue into the next, when Natchez’s black population would demonstrate and try to integrate parks and downtown businesses and anti-integration terror groups would respond with kidnappings, shootings, bombings and even murder.

Civil Rights Movement work had been going on in Natchez for nearly a year, but June and July 1964 was when the coalition of activist groups working to register as many black voters as they could would bring the Freedom Summer project to Natchez.

July was when the mutilated bodies of Henry Hezekiah Dee and Charles Moore would be found just upriver in the waters of the Mississippi, and when Joe Edwards would disappear from Vidalia after he was — according to some testimony — skinned alive by the Ku Klux Klan.

The same month, the Federal Bureau of Investigation permanently re-opened its Mississippi offices in response to escalating Civil Rights-related violence.

Cornelius Bradley remembers the summer of 1964 as the year white people slept at his house.

His parents, Lawrence and Dorothy Bradley, were a part of Martin Luther King Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and more than once he woke up to find out they were housing activists — white and black — who needed a place to stay for a couple of days.

Bradley’s parents didn’t talk about the movement work much around him — they would send him outside — but the 13-year-old recognized something out of the ordinary was going on.

“It was amazing that we had white people staying at our house in the neighborhood,” he said. “Back then, you could have been burned up, killed, hanged, whatever, for that.”

“I was just a kid, but it showed me that we were a part of history making. It was a collaborative of people, cultures and races working together for one common goal, to help people better their conditions and better themselves.”

Jessie Bernard Williams was 20 that summer, and — despite a number of random acts of violence through the years — felt people had managed to co-exist fairly well in Natchez.

But as she traveled to other places around the country, she realized that news coming into Natchez was often filtered and things weren’t as they should be.

“I realized that I wasn’t free to do the things that people should be able to do,” she said. “I realized that my uncles and brothers had been in these wars and fought for this country, and yet they were not afforded the simple freedom of voting without passing a test that was so ridiculous the people who gave it didn’t even understand it.”

When she was contacted by George Metcalfe and Wharlest Jackson — both of whom later had their cars bombed, Jackson fatally — about student unrest at Alcorn State University, Williams got involved with the members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and SCLC and started door-to-door canvassing for voter registration.

“People were afraid of the voter registration effort,” Williams said. “It was secretive. They were afraid, but there were people who were willing to do something and most of the time it was people who felt they didn’t have much to lose other than their life.”

Even facing people with fears, Williams said she didn’t realize how serious the need for the work — and how strong the opposition was to it — until she was picked up by police one day as she walked down Wall Street with an integrated group of activists.

“The fact of getting arrested and charged with vagrancy for this was when I really realized that there were problems,” she said.