Freedom Summer 2026 is a coalition of organizations that have come together to preserve the right to vote and democracy itself in the U.S. It includes almost every group that’s engaged right now in the fight—labor unions and their allies, faith groups, community organizations, political parties, lawmakers, and so many others. The movement launched on Juneteenth and will continue through Election Day, Nov. 3.
The next major event on the Freedom Summer calendar is the Aug. 28, 2026, March on Washington, held on the anniversary of the historic march led by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1963.
Coalitions like Freedom Summer 2026, however, are more than just lists of organizations issuing press releases and statements of support. They are made up of individuals, each of them bringing something unique to the collective movement for freedom, for preserving the vote, and for saving democracy.
One of those people is Joelle Fishman, chair of the Connecticut Communist Party USA. She also leads the party’s political action commission, and her party will have a contingent at the Aug. 28 march.
Fishman says, “The movement I saw firsthand at the Aug. 28, 1963, March on Washington, when I was just 16 years old, shaped my life. I was sent to that historic event as a representative of my family, and the effect on me was so profound.”
She might not have known it at the time, but her participation in that march, along with the many thousands who were there with her, was a critical start to a lifetime of dedication to the working class in the United States.
“Having come from a family where political education was part of a loving early childhood, the march strengthened my learning that there can be no progress on any issue important to working people as long as we have institutional racism in place,” Fishman told People’s World in an interview earlier this week.
“I came to further understand how, unless there are civil rights and unless we overcome racism, we will not be able to make real progress in this country.”
She talked about how many of the people there extended a warm and friendly greeting, welcoming a teenager in their midst. “They helped me out every step of the way,” she said.
Fishman followed her participation in the March on Washington with decades of support for actions by workers. Whether it was teachers, graduate students, college students, machinists, laborers, tenants, women’s rights activists, LGBTQ activists, or so many others, she was there, often out on the picket lines with them.
“How did joining and becoming first a member and then a leader in the Communist Party advance that cause?” Fishman was asked.
“The Communist Party was always in the forefront of the battle for civil rights and workers’ rights, seeing them as parts of the same struggle,” she said.
She pointed out how the party is one of the many organizations participating in this year’s Freedom Summer and how it was involved in building the original march led by Dr. King and in many civil rights and labor organizing struggles going back generations before that.
“The party has no policies, no actions that are not completely supportive of civil and workers’ rights,” she said. “It is a good home for people who believe in those things.”
Fishman talked about how the fight for civil rights today is centered specifically around preserving the right to vote.
“The right to vote is under threat by the fascist occupying the White House and the political forces that support his agenda,” she said. “The Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act, including the section that called for federal oversight of states making changes to their voting policies. The movement has to step in and fight hard to ensure that we preserve the right to vote in this country.”
Fishman said this was one of the reasons the CPUSA stresses the importance of elections and voting. She said Rev. William Barber, the longtime leader of the Poor People’s Campaign, was correct in his emphasis on voting, particularly where he has noted that if 10 or 12 percent of the poor people who did not vote in the last general election head to the ballot box this time, things would be quite different.
“Rev. Barber sees the need for a systemic change, not just supporting this or that candidate. His call for a Third Reconstruction is particularly impressive,” she said.
Fishman was asked what could be done to overcome the tremendous financial and other strengths of the right wing and MAGA. How do we stop their attacks on voting rights?
“The way to overcome the attacks on civil and worker rights is to have the most massive turnout ever in the midterm elections,” Fishman said. “The vote has to be so huge that the opponents of voting rights will not be able to cancel election results they dislike after the polls close.”
She stressed that such a massive turnout, more than backing one or another political candidate, will actually constitute building a movement, “a movement to bring about long-term political change.”
Joelle Fishman’s book, Lessons from Revolutionary Organizing, is available from International Publishers.
Fishman seems to be living proof that the fight during Freedom Summer 2026 is a continuation of a fight that goes way back, even to the 1860s in Galveston, Texas, when formerly enslaved people rose up to grab the freedom that had been granted them on paper two years earlier but never realized until they rose up and grabbed it.
It is the same today, Fishman says, when labor and its allies in the civil rights and all movements must prevent their rights from becoming nothing more than something written on paper. The unprecedented turnout in the elections, she said, will help achieve that.
Fishman says there is more reason than ever to continue today with the fight embodied in Freedom Summer. “The fight today continues because we have a fascist in the White House,” she said.
With lifelong activists like Fishman helping lead the fight of a broad coalition to save the vote and to build a massive demonstration in Washington on Aug. 28, the prospects for success would seem to be good.
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