“I WANT TO BECOME A PART OF HISTORY”: FREEDOM SUMMER, FREEDOM SCHOOLS, AND THEFREEDOM NEWS

Abstract

If we are concerned about breaking down power structure, then we have to be concerned about building our own institutions to replace old, unjust, decadent ones which make up existing power structure. --Charles Cobb, Schools Coordinator, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, 1964 (1) For many young African Americans in Mississippi, Civil Rights Movement did not enter their lives until famous Freedom campaign in 1964, a decade after U.S. Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision. (2) The most publicized aspect of Summer was voter registration drives, and people throughout nation watched on television campaign's crescendo in Atlantic City, New Jersey, in late August during Democratic National Convention. Fannie Lou Hamer, Aaron Henry, and black and white Mississippians testified before Democratic National Committee's credentials committee and protested seating of all-white delegation representing Mississippi's Democratic Party. (3) But Summer's ambitious campaign was not just about right to vote and political participation. Summer volunteers and local people sought in many ways, such as through opening of free and independent of state control. These autonomous institutions employed unique strategies and programs to educate young black Mississippians about their past and present to prepare them for a more promising future. school students took advantage of these radical sites of learning to conduct an intellectual coup against the state, which was depriving them of information and training for individual and collective liberation. (4) schools were designed not just to educate students, but to motivate and activate them. The schools provided unique opportunities for young Mississippians to participate in civil rights organizing activities. While some African American youths were involved in civil rights campaigns before Summer, they were often subject to direct reprisals for their actions in form of school suspensions and expulsions, as was case with school children participating in demonstrations in Albany, Georgia, in 1961 and 1962 and Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963. Youth activism was limited to local civil rights campaigns where students played supporting roles to adult leadership. But youths who attended freedom schools took lead in creation of school and participated in organizing activities led by civil rights workers in Mississippi. (5) school students were offered opportunity, many for first time, to enjoy literature and pursue intellectual freedom. They used newspapers to join in ongoing dialogue about meaning of freedom, full citizenship rights, and increased access to educational opportunities. Most black Mississippians were victimized by discriminatory and impoverished system of black public schooling that failed to provide sufficient resources for acquisition of basic literacy skills. Education was always important to black Mississippians, but it had been severely restricted and significantly underfunded following black political disenfranchisement in Mississippi beginning in 1875. Historian Christopher Span discussed schools opened by African Americans prior to emancipation. The freed-people in Mississippi created schools in church basements or abandoned buildings that provided important opportunities for literacy training for African American children and adults. These privately funded normally funded by church groups or philanthropic foundations, were prominent in Mississippi before end of Reconstruction, and offered employment opportunities for black teachers and a more religiously based curriculum. (6) Some schools, funded by industrial capitalists, placed restrictions on courses of study and programs offered, especially after expansion of Hampton-Tuskegee model of normal and industrial education in late 19th century. …