The Freedom Schools: Student Activists in the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement

By Jon N. Hale

Launched in 1964, the Mississippi Freedom Schools were designed to counteract segregationist policies that inhibited opportunities for black youth. Providing quality, progressive education, they prepared African American students to fight on all fronts for freedom.

These and similar schools were critical to expanding the gains of the Civil Rights Movement. Forming an intimate network, they taught students how, when, and where to engage politically, shaping activists who trained others to contest inequality. Conducting dozens of interviews and consulting rich archival materials, Jon N. Hale weaves a social history of the Mississippi Freedom Schools from the perspective of former students and teachers. Having turned their training into decades of activism, these individuals speak invaluably on the ideologies that informed their practice and the effectiveness of their locally organized, widely transmitted curriculum. They also offer key strategies for further integrating the American school system and politically engaging today’s youth.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Release date: May 31, 2016
• ISBN: 9780231541824

Jon N. Hale

Jon N. Hale is assistant professor at the College of Charleston in South Carolina. His work has appeared in the Journal of African American History, History of Education Quarterly, South Carolina Historical Magazine, and Journal of Social Studies Research.

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THE FREEDOM SCHOOLS

JON N. HALE

THE FREEDOM SCHOOLS

STUDENT ACTIVISTS IN THE MISSISSIPPI CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT

Columbia University Press   /   New York

Columbia University Press

Publishers Since 1893

New York   Chichester, West Sussex

cup.columbia.edu

Copyright © 2016 Columbia University Press

All rights reserved

E-ISBN 978-0-231-54182-4

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hale, Jon N.

The freedom schools : student activists in the Mississippi civil rights movement / Jon N. Hale.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-231-17568-5 (cloth : acid-free paper)

ISBN 978-0-231-54182-4 (e-book)

1. African Americans—Civil rights—Mississippi—History—20th century. 2. Mississippi Freedom Schools. 3. Civil rights movements—Mississippi—History—20th century. 4. African American students—Mississippi—History—20th century. 5. Student movements—Mississippi—History—20th century. 6. Political activists—Mississippi—History—20th century. 7. Education—Political aspects—Mississippi—History—20th century. 8. Mississippi—Race relations—History—20th century.

I. Title.

E185.93.M6H35 2016

323.1196’0730762—dc23

2015034499

A Columbia University Press E-book.

CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at [e-mail].

COVER IMAGE: © Matt Herson, courtesy of Eddie James Carthan

COVER DESIGN: Kathleen Lynch/Black Cat Design

References to Web sites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

For David J. Dennis Sr., Freedom Fighter, Father Figure, Friend

For Luke Charles Chamberlain, and the generation

to whom the torch of Freedom must now be passed

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

Introduction: The Mississippi Freedom Schools

1. The Pathway from Slavery to Freedom: The Origins of Education and the Ideology of Liberation in Mississippi

2. There Was Something Happening: The Civil Rights Education and Politicization of the Freedom School Students

3. The Student as a Force for Social Change: The Politics and Organization of the Mississippi Freedom Schools

4. We Will Walk in the Light of Freedom: Attending and Teaching in the Freedom Schools

5. We Do Hereby Declare Independence: Educational Activism and Reconceptualizing Freedom After the Summer Campaign

6. Carrying Forth the Struggle: Freedom Schools and Contemporary Educational Policy

Epilogue: Remembering the Freedom Schools Fifty Years Later

Notes

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Writing this book has been an intellectual and personal journey that has brought me in touch with a network of people whom I am honored to have met and worked with. This book was only possible with institutional support. I am indebted and grateful to the National Academy of Education / Spencer Dissertation Fellowship that provided the support to complete the first stages of this research. Subsequent faculty research development grants from the College of Charleston and the Center for Partnerships to Improve Education at the College of Charleston provided funding to complete the final stages of this manuscript. I am especially grateful to have met and worked with Philip Leventhal, my editor at Columbia University Press, who reached out to me at a conference in New Orleans and has provided invaluable support ever since.

Talented archivists across the country have shared their expertise while I combed through the archival sources used to reconstruct this history. Elaine Hill and Cynthia Lewis of the King Library and Archives at the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change, Jacky Johnson of the Miami University Archives, Clinton Bagley and the staff at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Angela Stewart and the staff at the Margaret Walker Center at Jackson State University, Dan Brenner of the Benjamin J. Rosenthal Library at Queens College, the staff at the McCain Library and Archives at the University of Southern Mississippi, and the staff at the Wisconsin Historical Society have granted access and provided much-needed guidance during the many archival trips this journey entailed.

I am indebted to my advisers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Christopher Span, James Anderson, and Yoon Pak, who set a standard of scholarship that I can only hope to emulate in my career. I am appreciative that V. P. Franklin, Clarence Lang, R. Scott Baker, and Derrick Alridge took time to provide feedback on various aspects of my research. The Growlers—Bil Kerrigan, Laura Hilton, Vivian Wagner, Jane Varley, and Sandy Tabachnik—provided crucial feedback while I began to draft this manuscript at Muskingum University. Jason Coy, Tammy Ingram, and Joe Renouard provided encouragement and crucial feedback during the final stages, both in and outside of Mellow Mushroom. William Sturkey generously shared sources and his exemplary work on this topic. Mario Perez, Kevin Lam, Michelle Purdy, Robert Chase, Stefan Bradley, Karen Graves, Philo Hutchinson, Wayne Urban, Kate Rousmaniere, Joy Ann Williamson, Dionne Danns, Michael Hevel, Isaac Gottesman, Benjamin Hedin, and the one and only Kevin Zayed are consummate scholars who always encouraged me to complete this project to the best of my ability. Katherine Fleck, Harriet Grimball, and Nicola Hodges provided painstaking technical support by transcribing interviews and tracking down permission forms. I am particularly indebted to Phyllis Jestice, chair of the History Department at the College of Charleston, who read and marked every single line of a draft of this manuscript before it went out for review. I can never thank enough Stanley Thangaraj, an insightful scholar and very dear friend who provided the emotional and professional support needed during the most trying times of balancing research, writing, teaching, and service to our communities. Thank you, Stan, for all that you have done and for all that you do.

I am the youngest of eight, and the standard my family has set is high. My parents, Charles and Karen Hale, instilled a work ethic that made writing a book possible while meeting the demands of a teaching institution. My siblings and their families provided immeasurable support through the years: Veronica, Stuart, and Georgia Parker; Kevin and Ofelia Hale; Brian, Michelle, and Bréanna Hale; Becky, Mark, Kyle, and Luke Chamberlain; Mark and Vivian Hale; Dan, Laura, and Anna Mia Hale; and Alan, Vanessa, William, and Sophia Hale. I am fortunate to have an extended family, too: Steve and Leslie Cavell; Emily and Will Tunstall; Randy and Julie Glau; Justin, Phuong, and Lincoln Petersen; and Andrew, Tiffany, and Charli Gapinski. I cannot thank you enough for being by my side throughout this journey.

I cannot begin to express all of my gratitude and love for the one who I am so fortunate to spend the rest of my life with: the very kind, compassionate, and beautiful Claire Dougherty Cavell Hale. I met Claire on July 19, 2012, and was finishing an earlier draft of this book that very same day. Since then, my cosmic match has provided unending and unwavering support with love and patience.

Finally, I am ultimately indebted to the Freedom Fighters, those who sacrificed their lives and livelihood for the notion of freedom that has long been promised but still is unrealized. Meeting the teachers and students of the Freedom Schools has been an incredible honor, and their lives are a genuine inspiration. Dave Dennis, Hymethia Washington Lofton Thompson, Arelya Mitchell, Eddie James Carthan, Hezekiah Watkins, Anthony Harris, Homer Hill, Roscoe Jones, Wilbur Colom, Staughton Lynd, Gwendolyn (Robinson) Simmons, Mark Levy, Chude Allen (Pamela Parker), Liz Aaronsohn, Frances O’Brien, Howard Zinn, Sanford Siegel, and Gloria Xifaras Clark have generously taken the time to share with me their stories, suggestions, and sources. They are heroic civil rights veterans, and I am forever grateful for the opportunity to have met and talked with each of these individuals. This book is a humble token of appreciation for your service to our nation as we struggle to find our path to freedom.

ABBREVIATIONS

INTRODUCTION

The Mississippi Freedom Schools

The Freedom Schools shaped my future, my thinking, my outlook on life, they challenged me to do the things I’ve done and to the have the mindset that I have. If I had to attribute anything to my community involvement, I would attribute it to my attending the Freedom School.

EDDIE JAMES CARTHAN, FREEDOM SCHOOL STUDENT IN MILESTON, MISSISSIPPI

Eddie James Carthan was born in the Mississippi Delta on October 18, 1949. Many of his memories are set in the small community of Mileston in Holmes County, whose history and collective memory extends into the antebellum era when white aristocratic planters reaped the rewards of King Cotton. The strain of cotton production still rested upon the backs of entire communities, like Mileston, Tchula, and other towns across Holmes County. Especially in the Delta, an area internationally known for its cotton production, white segregationist landholders after the Civil War maintained their commitment to an economic order that exploited black labor. Whites sustained a system of total segregation by race, oppressive race relations, and the complete political disenfranchisement of the local African American population through strictly enforced racial codes. However, such oppressive race relations were always sites of resistance, and supremacy never existed free of challenge. Carthan inherited some of these traditions of resistance. His family owned and farmed its own land since the 1930s through a federal New Deal program that spawned a small community of independent black landowners who developed cooperatives, shared decision-making, and laid the foundations for the civil rights movement. As cracks in the overarching racial structure became more visible to those who toiled in the freedom struggles across the state during the 1960s, Carthan and his community connected to a larger statewide and national movement. At the age of fourteen, Carthan and two thousand other students attended Freedom Schools and joined the marches, boycotts, protests, and the front lines of the civil rights movement.

As the American public and an international audience commemorates and remembers the milestones of the civil rights movement, the story of students like Carthan and the Freedom Schools he attended are often lost or marginalized. Yet understanding the significance of Carthan’s work and the history of the Freedom Schools fundamentally challenges and necessarily reframes how we understand the history of the nation’s greatest social, political, and economic movement for equality. A history of the students who enrolled in Freedom Schools highlights overlooked yet profound truths of the civil rights movement. A history of the Freedom Schools reveals that young people still in middle and high school were on the front lines of the civil rights movement, and in many instances it was the young people—not rebellious college students or established National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) card-carrying members—who inspired local movements in their own community. A study of the Freedom Schools illustrates how central education was to the local grassroots civil rights movement. The Freedom School idea started small and was secondary to the voter registration projects that consumed organizers in Mississippi. This civil rights educational project grew in strength because the Freedom Schools organized entrée for thousands of young people into the civil rights movement, and middle and high school students served as both the leaders and foot soldiers at the local level. Examining the Freedom Schools also illustrates the dialectical relationship between the local and national context. Though marginalized within contemporary discourse and typically overlooked by civil rights movement scholars, the local development of the Freedom Schools enabled the growth of federal educational initiatives that transformed public education by the mid-1960s. A history of the Freedom Schools, and the civil rights educational programs these schools exemplify, demonstrates that the civil rights movement was more comprehensive in its reach, more dynamic in its interaction with a larger national context, and much more nuanced in its historic development than popular understandings and public commemorations suggest.

How Carthan and his cohort of students arrived at the front doors of the Freedom Schools, what they experienced inside the schools, and the ways in which the civil rights education they received defined the contours of the civil rights movement is the subject of this book. The processes that led young students to the Freedom Schools reveals much about the nature of the civil rights movement and the capacity of education to affect social change. Children in the Delta and elsewhere across the Deep South experienced the frighteningly efficient system of Jim Crow entrenched within the segregated public schools they attended. As schools are an important battleground of political, economic, and social ideology, it should be no surprise that the dual system of education in this area was governed by hegemonic racial sensibilities and, as such, was a microcosm of the larger segregated society. Simply stated, schooling was used to maintain the social, political, and economic status quo that always worked in favor of white segregationist land and business owners. Many in the state of Mississippi believed the state could only function properly if African Americans generally were laborers and second-class citizens. The segregated system of schooling functioned as it almost always had, reinforcing a tragic truth that historian James D. Anderson once summarized eloquently by stating that both schooling for democratic citizenship and schooling for second-class citizenship have been basic traditions in American education.¹ While white students received the lion’s share of funding and resources, acquired highly valued skills, and enjoyed preferential treatment in the job market after graduation, African American students in Mississippi received far less funding and resources, and a racial code rooted in the days of slavery subverted any aspirations of social mobility. By the time Carthan and his peers came of age in the 1960s, they felt the residual if not quantifiable effects of the Jim Crow system in multifaceted and profound ways.

The Freedom Schools of 1964 were the most recent manifestation of a tradition of education for empowerment, politicization, resistance, and organization that perennially challenged segregationist policy. Such a perspective is clear from Eddie James Carthan’s vantage point. When he looked back on the Freedom School experience during the summer of 1964, he connected it to his conceptualization of social relations, his constructed self-identity, and his worldview. Looking back as a local Mississippian, a youth and civic leader, a community businessperson, and an embattled elected politician, Carthan traced his success and, more importantly, his lasting impact on his community to a form of education that was built upon a long tradition of resistance grounded in the principles of the civil rights movement. While the Freedom Schools extended important traditions of education for democratic and participatory citizenship, the schools are also indicative of the rich ideological debate and deep-seated tension that defined the civil rights movement. Civil rights organizers and community members established Freedom Schools across the state of Mississippi while white legislators, school boards, and administrators maintained a segregated system of education ten years after the monumental Brown v. Board of Education (1954) decision. Within the Freedom Schools, students, educators, and organizers debated whether to desegregate the public school system, studied the political means to demand greater resources, and protested for more humane treatment in their own schools. Integration, in other words, was not the be-all and end-all of the black community in 1964. The emergence of the Freedom Schools illustrates the diversity of ideology, thought, and opinion about how schools should operate, how the curriculum should be organized, and what paths educational reform should follow during the era of desegregation.

In order to examine the overlooked yet generative role of grassroots education during the civil rights movement, this book reconstructs the history of the Freedom Schools from the perspective of students who attended them. The lived experiences of Eddie James Carthan, Hymethia Washington Lofton Thompson, Homer Hill, Brenda Travis, Arelya Mitchell, Hezekiah Watkins, and other young activists illustrate just how significant education was in the history of the civil rights movement. Freedom Schools continued a long tradition of a revolutionary ideology that stated education was an irrevocable pathway to freedom—a sentiment long embedded in Mississippi communities. But by their very nature the Freedom Schools also stood in stark contrast to the dual system of education provided by the state of Mississippi. Freedom School was physically held outside that system, in church sanctuaries and basements, in local community homes, in storefronts, and in Freedom Houses built by civil rights activists (figure I.1). Students studied a humanities-based curriculum that taught political efficacy, social critique, and the organizing strategies employed in the civil rights movement. They discussed the U.S. Constitution and questioned why their parents were not allowed to vote. Students worked in the community, marched on the picket lines, organized boycotts, and desegregated libraries, parks, and schools for the first time in the history of their home communities. Young people were not marginal players in the civil rights struggle. They played an instrumental role during that era and in post-segregated society. Attending Freedom School translated into protest and community-organizing skills; which students applied in the fall of 1964 to demand better resources in their own schools, to protest unjust expulsions, suspensions, and other racially motivated disciplinary actions; and to organize long-term school boycotts. The legacy of the Freedom Schools suggests that despite the best efforts of the architects of the Jim Crow system, community-based efforts taught students to act as historic change agents.

FIGURE I.1   Locations of Mississippi Freedom Schools during the summer of 1964.

Moreover, an analysis of the Freedom Schools reveals how young the activists were when they were politicized during the civil rights movement.² One of the most distinguishing aspects of the Freedom Schools is the fact that they served a K–12 population, a group that generally falls between the ages of six and eighteen, though it was not uncommon for younger students and older adults to attend Freedom Schools as well. But the Freedom Schools generally educated young people in elementary, middle, and high school, and this cohort of students constituted a politically and socially constructed category. By the 1960s educators and activists affirmed G. Stanley Hall and an earlier generation’s construction of adolescence as a separate category that was physiologically and cognitively distinct from both childhood and adulthood.³ Civil rights activists targeted this cohort while building a wider base for the civil rights movement through the Freedom Schools. Charlie Cobb, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) member who first proposed the idea of forming Freedom Schools in Mississippi, and others who organized the 1964 summer campaign saw a distinct opportunity and need to reach young people enrolled in elementary, middle, and high school. Students not yet in college or the workforce offered something more appealing to organizers than older adults. Young people were more likely to stay in the state, at least until completing high school, which provided an opportunity to create a more stable and long-term network of activists. Young people were in a formative stage of their lives, and their political consciousness was malleable and could be shaped by the principles of nonviolence and justice. Young people were old enough to understand the injustices embedded within the system of Jim Crow and were fearless enough in their desire to challenge it.

The category of youth, however, has been usurped by collegiate and postsecondary activists, which is evident in the metanarrative and historiography of the civil rights movement. College students and the institutions they attended were indeed central battlegrounds of the movement. The University of California, Berkeley; Northwestern University; the University of Illinois; Columbia University; and southern campuses, including the University of Mississippi, Tougaloo College, and South Carolina State University, to name but a few national exemplars, encapsulated the most defining moments of the civil rights movement for both black and white students across the country. These campuses encompassed a wide spectrum of organization to desegregate public spaces, secure voting rights, protect academic freedom, and reform curricula throughout the 1960s. Protest often evolved from the radical work of college students who comprised SNCC, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), the Southern Student Organizing Committee (SSOC), and other organizations at the grassroots level. Focal points that define traditional civil rights narratives and college students’ place in it are the sit-ins of 1960, the Freedom Rides in 1961, the integration of the University of Mississippi in 1962, and the Freedom Summer campaign of 1964, all of which involved college-aged students or college campuses.⁴ Yet focusing on the college campus limits the categorization of youth activism to the ages of eighteen or older, which fails to attend to the nuances of activism in the Freedom Schools. To focus solely on the college campus is in effect to overlook educational programs of the civil rights movements where many activists learned and practiced the art of resistance.

This history reminds us that the civil rights movement unfolded at all levels of education. Tragically, it also reminds us that young people who elected to join the front lines were not spared the violence associated with challenging social norms. Hardly one year after the monumental Brown decision struck down segregation by race, these schoolchildren learned a powerful lesson in the dangers associated with challenging the white establishment. The lesson in subservience came when Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old African American youth visiting from Chicago, allegedly whistled at a white woman in a store in Money, Mississippi, in 1955. Local whites Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam kidnapped the boy from his uncle’s home, brutally beat him to a point of disfiguration, shot him in the head, and threw him into the Tallahatchie River with a cotton-gin fan tied around his neck. The slaying of Emmett Till was extreme even by Mississippi standards. Violent acts such as the murder of Till were sanctioned by and acceptable to whites because an all-white jury acquitted Bryant and Milam in the small Delta town of Sumner, Mississippi.⁵ The Till case resonated with those who eventually worked in the Mississippi civil rights movement. I was shaken to the core by the killing of Emmett Till, said John Lewis, SNCC chairperson and later a U.S. congressman from Georgia, "I was fifteen, black, at the edge of my own manhood just like him. He could have been me. That could have been me, beaten, tortured, dead at the bottom of a river."⁶

A history of the Freedom Schools and the young students who attended them is a testament to the courage and conviction needed to join the front lines of the civil rights movement. It is also a testament to the important role education played in the long struggle for freedom in the state of Mississippi. Although activists often sidelined civil rights educational programs to focus on other efforts such as registering voters, the Freedom Schools provided an education that facilitated entrée for thousands of young people into the civil rights movement. In the process, educators and student activists outlined a model of civil rights education that restored American schooling to the ideal of providing an education for democratic, active, and participatory citizenship. The local context of the Freedom Schools facilitated a connection to a larger national context. Head Start, a federally funded early-childhood program that sought to alleviate poverty, was implemented across the Mississippi in 1965. The rapid development of this federal program illustrates how the organic growth of a local movement enabled a national program to develop in a short period of time and appropriate the ideological and political network of the grassroots movement. Although the numbers of schools precipitously declined by 1966, Freedom School teachers and students served on the front lines of other struggles that emerged in the late 1960s such as the black power, antiwar, and women’s liberation movements. This dynamic interplay between the local and national context illustrates a dialectical relationship that is often overlooked yet enriches our understanding of the role of civil rights educational projects at the grassroots level. By providing a comprehensive history of the Freedom Schools, this book reinserts education into the civil rights lexicon of American history.

This is not the first study to notice the importance of the Freedom Schools. Educators, activists, and scholars began discussing the Freedom Schools during and immediately following the movement of the 1960s. Howard Zinn, Sally Belfrage, Florence Howe, Sandra Adickes, Staughton Lynd, and Liz Fusco—all white volunteers who volunteered to work with the Freedom Schools during the summer of 1964—expressed a passionate faith in the pedagogy, curriculum, and goals of education that advanced the goals of the freedom movement.⁷ These teacher activists dedicated themselves to Freedom School education with the zeal and ardent devotion to social justice that became associated with the youthful activism of the 1960s. Their energetic and idealistic commitment also presents another layer to understand the development of the Freedom Schools. The volunteer teacher corps was mostly white, politically and economically affluent, and from the North or at least outside the state of Mississippi. The white volunteers continued traditions, sometimes problematic, of white benevolence devoted to assisting the South in achieving the ideal of freedom.

These activists and scholars since the summer of 1964 have shaped a larger narrative of the civil rights movement that eclipsed the role of educational programs like the Freedom Schools. As activists began to ask why the revolution never happened, or, rather, why their revolution never happened, scholars began to privilege other aspects of the civil rights movement such as voter registration and school desegregation but not the grassroots educational programs that trained a generation of activists. The Freedom Schools have been unjustly overlooked as a result. Today the American public has commemorated the anniversary of the civil rights movement’s major milestones and in the process has captured our collective imagination. Popular major motion pictures like Mississippi Burning, The Great Debaters, The Help, Freedom Writers, Remember the Titans, 42, The Butler, and Selma have dramatized, oftentimes inaccurately, this historic movement toward equality. Public television documentaries like Eyes on the Prize, Freedom Riders, and Freedom Summer have replayed footage of protests that questioned a nation’s commitment to democratic ideals. Remembering events of the 1960s shape the way we think about the civil rights movement without incorporating the legacy of the Mississippi Freedom Schools.

Some revisionist academic analyses have begun to document overlooked grassroots organizations like those that spawned the Freedom Schools. These interpretations offer competing versions of the national metanarratives of the civil rights movement. Historians and sociologists such as Clayborne Carson, Charles Payne, John Dittmer, and Neil McMillen, among others, analyze the long-organized struggle for equal opportunity among local people in Mississippi.⁸ Emilye Crosby, François N. Hamlin, Constance Curry, and Chris Myers Asch examine rural counties and towns within Mississippi that offer a localized perspective to illustrate the complexity, continuity, and differences among various locales across the state.⁹ Doug McAdam, Mary Aickin Rothschild, and Bruce Watson examine the Freedom Summer campaign, a highly publicized effort during the summer of 1964 to register voters and focus attention on civil rights violations in Mississippi, thereby dispelling the myth that African Americans would not vote if provided the opportunity.¹⁰ Daniel Perlstein examines the connection between the grassroots organization of SNCC and the Freedom Schools.¹¹ The Freedom Schools, as these and many other scholars, teachers, students, and activists have noted, played an important yet secondary role within the Freedom Summer campaign and the Mississippi civil rights movement. When thousands of people organized to dismantle Jim Crow in Mississippi in 1964, entrenched racism became visible across the world and the participants learned how to carry forth the struggle for equality. Examined in terms of the organizers’ experience, the literature historicizes the legacy of grassroots organization, but it does not comprehensively examine the role and impact of educational programs within the movement.

A number of historians, educators, practitioners, and other scholars of education more extensively develop and elaborate upon the promise of a Freedom School education and curriculum. These scholars examine the pedagogy and curriculum these schools embraced, a unique feature that also helps explain the significance of the schools. Curriculum theorists George Chilcoat and Jerry Ligon examine the curriculum and modes of instruction in the schools and relate their significance to contemporary educational practice. Sandra Adickes’s memoir focuses on her time teaching in a Freedom School and organizing her students during the summer of 1964. John Rachal examines the role of adult education during the Freedom Summer campaign. William Sturkey examines the role of the press and newspaper development in the Freedom Schools to motivate, activate, and connect students as participants in the movement. Kristal Clemons examines the role of black women who taught in the Freedom Schools. These scholars, among others, examine the contributions and attributes of the Freedom Schools and reinforce their importance within the civil rights movement.¹²

While noted in the fields of history, sociology, and education, the Freedom Schools are not the subject of extensive analysis or research, nor is their contribution seriously considered within the larger context of the civil rights movement. Education during the freedom movement is marginalized at the expense of covering the more visible aspects of the struggle that captured national headlines. This book builds upon and further develops the existing literature by providing a comprehensive historical account of the Mississippi Freedom Schools, which, from the perspective of those who participated in the schools, were a phenomenal and inspirational success. This study also builds upon this historiography by closely examining another overlooked though insightful perspective: the experiences of the Freedom School students.

This book follows a number of Freedom School students and their families in several towns and counties across Mississippi to provide a history of the Freedom Schools from various locations across the state. It also follows the teachers and shows how their lives briefly though very profoundly intersected with young people during the civil rights movement. Each of the Freedom School locations in Mississippi covered in this book—Jackson, Clarksdale, Tchula, McComb, Meridian, Holly Springs, Hattiesburg—illustrates a very different and localized movement, but together they represent a statewide movement of education for freedom. Even though communities across the state supported the Freedom Schools and over two thousand students attended that summer, this book focuses on the history, experience, and legacy of just some of the locations. Not all of the participants were identified for this study, nor did all choose to participate. The students, teachers and locations examined in this book are representative of the Freedom School population in that they represent the age range of the students who attended, they are representative of the four different geographical and congressional divisions of Mississippi, they had similar familial support for their involvement in the movement, and they all remained committed to the principles of the movement in one way or another after the summer of 1964. The student experiences and histories examined in this book demonstrate the commonalities shared among Freedom School participants. At the same time, the participants identified throughout this study illustrate the distinct and unique experiences of the Freedom School population. Students entered the movement at different ages, through different networks, and for different reasons. All participants remained committed to movement principles, yet their activism after 1964 varied widely in scope and content. Moreover, each participant remembers different aspects of the Freedom Schools, which highlights the diversity of thought and curriculum of this civil rights educational program. While many traits are shared across the state, each locale and every student point toward distinguishing aspects that make this history truly unique.

In reconstructing this history, this book builds on three themes that emerge from what has been written about the schools. First, this history begins with the vantage point of the students who attended schools and of the communities in which they lived. This history makes the case that elementary, middle, and high school students have been overlooked, though they are very important historical actors. This perspective also reveals that the students who attended the schools occupied important spaces on the front lines of the civil rights movement prior to the historic Freedom Summer campaign of 1964, thereby challenging a history that emphasizes the role of white organizers or the teachers in the movement. Second, this book is grounded in the fact that the field of education emerged as a crucial battleground of the civil rights movement. The state of Mississippi legally disenfranchised nearly half of its total population, from slavery through the era of Jim Crow. In the years before and during the civil rights movement, activists used education as a way to challenge and finally dismantle Jim Crow. Through legal challenges to equalize teacher salaries and resource allocation and to acquire the right to attend all-white schools, activists used the schoolhouse as a front to fight a larger war that eventually become memorialized as the civil rights movement. Third, this book incorporates the pedagogically distinct aspect of the Freedom Schools and the notion of civil rights movement education in general into this historical analysis. The Freedom Schools developed a unique, politically oriented curriculum through a progressive student-centered pedagogy that differed sharply from education typically offered to students in Mississippi and across the country. This form of education and the political activity it engendered revolutionized how students learned to become active citizens in a changing democracy. By looking at this history through a normative, organizational, and pedagogical analytical lens, the history of the Freedom Schools emerges as a unique and profound moment in the history of the civil