In January of 1963, Rev. Edwin "Ed" King returned to his home state of Mississippi, where he was born in 1936, and became the chaplain at Tougaloo College during the height of the Civil Rights Movement. In October he was selected by Bob Moses as the Freedom Vote candidate for Lieutenant Governor of Mississippi, the white running mate of the African American, Delta pharmacist Aaron Henry. In 1964, King and his wife Jeannette served as local organizers of the Summer Project and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP). Though neither joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), they were involved with the voter registration initiative, the formation of freedom schools, and the MFDP challenge. Ed King began a campaign to agitate and desegregate white conservative and moderate churches, which (as he saw it) set the stage for the necessity of Freedom Summer. He said, "If white moderates, stirred by a Christian conscience… began to support any kind of change in racial patterns in Jackson… then the door was open, not just the church door, but the door to the possibilities of moderate, gradual change in all Mississippi."

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