Freedom Schools Research Articles

A Different Type of Summer Camp: SNCC, Freedom Summer, Freedom Schools, and the Development of African American Males in Mississippi

The civil rights movement of the late 1950s and 1960s had a transformational effect on American society and on grassroots movements for social justice at home and abroad during that era and beyond. But much of the history of the push for racial equality in America is often told as if it is on a constant repetitive loop, when other accounts are given less attention. One less talked about story is the innovative way that the youthful Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) carried out major campaigns in the south, and particularly Mississippi, when other groups were hesitant to do so. During and long before the movement, Mississippi was a stronghold of racial prejudice and violence against African Americans. Despite the dangers associated with engaging in civil rights work in Mississippi, the SNCC workers, many of them only college students, planned a massive campaign to confront the system of injustice in the state during the summer of 1964. This undertaking came to be known as the “Freedom Summer.” Significantly, the organization established summer “Freedom Schools” as a compliment to the summer project that would address the severe lack of attention school-aged Black children received as a result of Mississippi's intentional neglect. It is within this story that we find a compelling case for the need to identify alternative means of providing academic support for marginalized youth.

Reading the World in the Word: The Possibilities for Literacy Instruction Framed Within Human Rights Education

The purpose of this critical ethnography (Madison, 2005; Noblit, Flores & Murrillo, 2004) was to investigate the experiences of teachers and students when literacy instruction was framed within human rights education. Informed by theories of cosmopolitan education (Beck, 2002; Beck & Szneider, 2010; Goldstein, 2007; Harper & Bean, 2009; Hull, 2010), critical socio-cultural theory (Moje & Lewis, 2007) and incorporating Freirean concepts of critical literacy and praxis, this study details the experiences of two servant leader interns (teachers) and sixteen scholars (students) participating in human rights education within the context of a Children’s Defense Fund Freedom School.

The Impact of Oakland Freedom School’s Summer Youth Program on the Psychosocial Development of African American Youth

The present investigation considers the program outcomes of one community youth project, Leadership Excellence Inc., Oakland Freedom Schools. Oakland Freedom Schools are culturally relevant 6-week summer Language Arts enrichment programs for primarily inner-city African American youth aged 5 to 14 years. In this study, 79 African American youth participated. Results indicated that involvement in Oakland Freedom Schools positively influenced racial identity and youth views toward African/African American culture and precepts. The results also indicated an increase in pretest to posttest scores on social skills strategies and future commitment to social action. There were no statistically significant increases in attitudes toward reading and self-concept.

Developing sociopolitical consciousness at Freedom Schools: implications for culturally responsive teacher preparation

This article describes the programmatic ways in which the Children’s Defense Fund Freedom Schools® program develops culturally responsive teaching practices amongst its summer interns, particularly in the area of developing sociopolitical consciousness. This paper places specific focus on the role that historical knowledge, the acknowledgement of a ‘we’ discourse and instilling a lifelong commitment to service plays in cultivating teacher sociopolitical consciousness. The research reported here aims to serve as a case for lessons to be learned by traditional, university-based teacher education programs committed to preparing teachers to teach in culturally responsive ways.

Freedom's Struggle and Freedom Schools

Throughout U.S. history, the "truths" [Thomas] Jefferson declared as axiomatic [in the Declaration of Independence] have hardly been evident in the lives of many "Americans," certainly not in the lives of the two hundred or so slaves Jefferson held on his plantation.… [The recurring] contradiction between ideal and reality is the root of a continuing struggle over what the United States is to be as a nation.… For black people especially, this contradiction has been most persistent and destructive in "education."This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

Hands on the freedom plow: personal accounts by women in SNCC

In Hands on the Freedom Plow, fifty-two women--northern and southern, young and old, urban and rural, black, white, and Latina--share their courageous personal stories of working for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) on the front lines of the Civil Rights Movement. The testimonies gathered here present a sweeping personal history of SNCC: early sit-ins, voter registration campaigns, and freedom rides; the 1963 March on Washington, the Mississippi Freedom Summer, and the movements in Alabama and Maryland; and Black Power and antiwar activism. Since the women spent time in the Deep South, many also describe risking their lives through beatings and arrests and witnessing unspeakable violence. These intense stories depict women, many very young, dealing with extreme fear and finding the remarkable strength to survive. The women in SNCC acquired new skills, experienced personal growth, sustained one another, and even had fun in the midst of serious struggle. Readers are privy to their analyses of the Movement, its tactics, strategies, and underlying philosophies. The contributors revisit central debates of the struggle including the role of nonviolence and self-defense, the role of white people in a black-led movement, and the role of women within the Movement and the society at large. Each story reveals how the struggle for social change was formed, supported, and maintained by the women who kept their hands on the freedom plow. As the editors write in the introduction, Though the voices are different, they all tell the same story--of women bursting out of constraints, leaving school, leaving their hometowns, meeting new people, talking into the night, laughing, going to jail, being afraid, teaching in Freedom Schools, working in the field, dancing at the Elks Hall, working the WATS line to relay horror story after horror story, telling the press, telling the story, telling the word. And making a difference in this world.

“THE STUDENT AS A FORCE FOR SOCIAL CHANGE”: THE MISSISSIPPI FREEDOM SCHOOLS AND STUDENT ENGAGEMENT

Previous articleNext article No Access“THE STUDENT AS A FORCE FOR SOCIAL CHANGE”: THE MISSISSIPPI FREEDOM SCHOOLS AND STUDENT ENGAGEMENTJon HaleJon HaleJon Hale is Assistant Professor of Educational Foundations at the College of Charleston in Charleston, SC. Search for more articles by this author Jon Hale is Assistant Professor of Educational Foundations at the College of Charleston in Charleston, SC.PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of African American History Volume 96, Number 3Summer 2011 A journal of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.5323/jafriamerhist.96.3.0325 Views: 289Total views on this site Copyright 2011 ASALHPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Not Your Typical Summer School Program: Reading Young Adult Literature in Freedom Schools

Not Your Typical Summer School Program: Reading Young Adult Literature in Freedom Schools

Fostering regimes of truth: understanding and reflecting on the Freedom School way

The aim of the present paper is to investigate the inner workings of a North American summer enrichment programme named Freedom School. More specifically this research explores how participants of the Children’s Defense Fund (CDF) Freedom School programme experience ‘the Freedom School way’, an amalgam of ideologies, discourses, and behaviours endorsed by the CDF. First, observations are analysed which forward a picture of the research context. In addition, survey data are gathered from 36 youth participants of the programme. Data also are generated from interviews with Freedom School interns. Using Michel Foucault’s regimes of truth as a unit of analysis, results from this research highlight: (1) the process by which various Freedom School activities bolster CDF ideology; (2) the ways in which CDF ideologies are part of Freedom School discourse; and (3) how CDF ideology and Freedom School discourse perpetuate a regime of truth.

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

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. …

“Making the Readings Come to Life”: Expanding Notions of Language Arts at Freedom School

The Children's Defense Fund Freedom Schools provide literacy-rich, summer experiences for both the K-12 children they serve and the servant-leader interns who serve as teachers. In this article, the author expands upon the scholarship of preparing teachers to be culturally responsive pedagogues of language arts instruction by illuminating components of the Freedom Schools' curriculum, teacher-activist preparation, and the servant-leader interns' perceptions of language arts. The preparation of the interns as teacher-activists provided opportunities that allowed for the cultivation of knowledge, skills, and dispositions needed to use language arts as a transformative vehicle for social, cultural, and historical awareness as well as social action.

School of Freedom. By Shishi Bunroku. Translated by Lynne E. Riggs. Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 2006. v, 256 pp. $29.95 (cloth).

School of Freedom. By Shishi Bunroku. Translated by Lynne E. Riggs. Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 2006. v, 256 pp. $29.95 (cloth).

Liberation Literature: Positive Cultural Messages in Children’s and Young Adult Literature at Freedom Schools

In U.S. schools, African American students are typically fed steady diets of stereotypical and culturally invasive literature and often do not see themselves positively and consistently represented in books. The crisis is fueled, in part, by teachers who (for various reasons) do not include and draw upon counter-narratives in their classrooms. Using the context of Freedom Schools, this article examines the value of liberation literature and what it can offer African American children. This inquiry into the literature is supported by two examples of books analyzed for qualities exemplified in liberation literature. It is suggested that schools and teachers work to maintain and sustain positive cultural messages through the consistent and thoughtful use of books that affirm African American children’s realities.

“ They taught me”: The benefits of early community-based field experiences in teacher education

Research in teacher education suggests that field experiences in community settings can offer pre-service teachers a context for understanding the link between theory and practice. This paper documents the experiences of pre-service educators participating in a service-learning experience at a Children's Defense Fund Freedom School in the south-eastern United States. Pre-service teachers engaged in critical reflection, online journals, and daily debriefing sessions and praised the benefits of a service experience in an urban context and explained how interactions within the programme gave them the insight into the teaching profession. The author argues that this project successfully bridged the gap between teacher education theory and practice.

Towards collective work and responsibility: Sources of support within a Freedom School teacher community

Alternative and parallel schooling contexts such as the Children's Defense Fund Freedom Schools ® provide educational experiences for U.S. K–12 students grounded in notions of social justice and culturally responsive teaching. College-aged young adults known as “servant-leader interns” are the teachers in this context. In this article, the author examines the nature of the various ways in which servant-leader interns were supported in their development as teachers both at the national training institute and at their local site. This discussion gives explicit attention to the kinds of deliberate support intended by the Freedom Schools program and the kinds of support that the servant-leader interns created or initiated on their own. Implications for teacher support that occur in alternative and parallel schooling contexts are discussed.

Searching for Restorative Justice: The Trial of Edgar Ray Killen

The brutal assassination of Medgar Evers, the Field Secretary of the NAACP in Jackson, Mississippi, on June 12, 1963, revealed to the entire nation the great difficulty of bringing multicultural democracy to the brutal Deep South. Several months after Evers's death, a member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in the Mississippi Delta, Charles Cobb, came up with an idea that might concentrate media and political attention on the state's mistreatment of Blacks. Cobb proposed that SNCC create a mass mobilization, “Mississippi Summer,” that would recruit about one thousand mostly white college students and volunteers into the state to assist in desegregation and voter registration organizing. A central task for these volunteers would be the construction and operation of “Freedom Schools,” that teach African–American history of the Black Freedom Movement, as well as mathematics, English, and other academic disciplines. Bob Moses, the director of SNCC's Mississippi Project, liked the proposal and when Northern students began to volunteer to do organizing in Mississippi during the spring 1964, many were informed that they should be prepared to teach. Others were to work on the ongoing voter registration efforts. Staughton Lynd, a young white historian who had taught at Spelman College in Atlanta, was hired to train college volunteers in Oxford, Ohio, at Miami University. Lynd personally traveled by automobile to nearly every “Freedom School,” to check on their development. From the beginning of June, 1964, SNCC organizers and the student volunteers learned that their efforts would come under severe attack by local white racists. In McComb, Mississippi, for example, a Freedom School that had been open for just two days was firebombed in the middle of the night. Yet despite the bombing, over one hundred Black children and young adults walked to the bombed-out school to attend Freedom School classes. Among the first group of summer volunteers who had come to Mississippi was Andrew Goodman. He joined Mickey Schwerner who had been in Mississippi since January 1964, working with his wife Rita, and local people including an African–American youth activist from Meridian, James Chaney on voter registration and community organizing out of a community center established in Meridian by COFO. When the three men disappeared on the night of June 21, 1964 in Neshoba County, civil rights activists feared the worst. Their fears were confirmed weeks later, when the FBI discovered their buried bodies after offering a $30,000 reward. Eventually, eight of the individuals connected with the Ku Klux Klan who were responsible for the murder of Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman were convicted of civil rights charges. By the end of Mississippi summer, 80 civil rights volunteers had been severely beaten, hundreds had been harassed and arrested, and thirty-seven African–American churches had been firebombed. But the summer mobilization set into motion the subsequent passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that extended the electoral franchise to millions of African Americans for the first time in nearly a century. Rita L. Bender, currently a partner in the legal firm of Skellenger Bender, based in Washington state, is the widow of Mickey Schwerner. In these remarks, presented at the “National Conference: Crimes of the Civil Rights Era,” at Northeastern University, Boston, on April 28, 2007, she relates an insider's perspective on the courage and sacrifices that were necessary in the modern Black Freedom Struggle. —Manning Marable

Servant-Leaders in Action: Philadelphia Freedom Schools Foster Servant-Leadership

Servant-Leaders in Action: Philadelphia Freedom Schools Foster Servant-Leadership

Reconstructing Education from the Bottom up: SNCC's 1964 Mississippi Summer Project and African American Culture

On 30 December 1963, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee's (SNCC) executive committee approved Bob Moses' proposal for a summer voter registration project involving hundreds of white volunteers. Initially intended to highlight the brutality inherent in Mississippi's culture and to register large numbers of disfranchised black voters, the plans expanded to include more long term and holistic methods of addressing civil rights that encompassed what SNCC and its sister organizations in Mississippi called “educational and social” programmes. As freedom schools co-ordinator Liz Fusco asserted, this represented an acceptance that what could be done in Mississippi, could be deeper, more fundamental, more far-reaching, more revolutionary than voter registration alone … [It was] a decision to enter into every phase of the lives of the people of Mississippi … a decision to set the people free for politics in the only way that people really can become free, and that is totally. Freedom schools were central to SNCC's programme. Both institutions emphasized that knowledge of one's culture was crucial to the individual. In the case of the freedom schools, students would be encouraged to think freely and develop their own ideas about a free society. Charles Cobb, who conceived the idea of the freedom schools, envisaged the schools to be places “where the students could freely ask questions about all those things, political as well as academic, which troubled and excited them.”

More Than a Symbol of Freedom: Education for Liberation and Democracy

Mr. Payne finds that today's African American young people are confused and conflicted about their history. This alienation from the past contributes to civic disengagement in the present. Part of the solution, he suggests, is a revival of the Freedom School approach, which links an appreciation of African American history to the cultivation of a sense of social responsibility. For the slaves, literacy was more than a symbol of freedom; it was freedom. It affirmed their humanity, their personhood. - Theresa Perry1 IN THE 1920s, according to the historian Lawrence Levine, black college students were often reluctant to sing spirituals in public, for they associated the music of their parents and grandparents with the degradation of slavery.2 Eighty years later, one need not attend many blues festivals to see that young African Americans show little interest in that part of African American heritage. Indeed, something beyond ordinary change in generational taste seems to be responsible. Asked why they distance themselves from the blues, young black people frequently echo their counterparts from the 1920s, rejecting the blues as a symbol of a shameful past that is best forgotten. Nobody wants to go back to shacks and picking cotton in the hot fields, as the blues artist Little Milton puts it, explaining the perceptions he has to struggle against.3 A cultural form that generations of black people found life-affirming may now be more emotionally accessible to young white people than to the descendants of the people who shaped the music. Most Americans think of the civil rights movement as a moment of triumph, but in recent years, when doing presentations about the civil rights movement in black schools, I have learned not to be surprised if some students feel a need to distance themselves from even that history, sometimes very aggressively. Watching news clips from the period, students may laugh at the demonstrators and deride them for their foolishness and weakness, for taking all that stuff from white people. A movement that has inspired other movements around the world has come to be rejected by some of the people one might most expect to identify with it. In his history of the struggle to establish unions in Memphis, Tennessee, Michael Honey describes a generation of black men and women fresh out of the fields of Tennessee and Mississippi who had to fight shop by shop and job category by job category to make it possible for black people to get decent work at union wages. The cohort of younger blacks coming after them, of course, walked through relatively open doors. As we might expect, they did not understand the price their predecessors had paid to open those doors, but their attitudes went beyond that. Some of them thought of the previous generations as Uncle Toms, as having taken too much crap from white folks. Ignorance about one's predecessors is one thing; faint contempt is another.4 The confusion of African American young people about the African American past and their fear of that history raise important questions about their civic engagement: what they are being taught, what they are picking up from popular culture, and how they are putting it all together. And those questions raise a series of questions about how these youngsters are processing race in their daily lives and about what that portends for their capacity to engage in some of the collective striving that helped liberate their ancestors. Pushing away the past may foreclose possibilities for civic participation in the present. This article will explore some of these issues. Negotiating Race Consider the words of Peter Humphries Clark, a 19th-century black leader: I do not forget the prejudice of the American people; I could not if I would. I am sore from sole to crown with its blows. It stood by the bedside of my mother when she bore me. It darkens with its shadow the grave of my father and mother. …

Emancipatory education versus school-based prevention in African American communities.

Schools have become strategic settings for the work of community psychologists. In a review of 177 primary prevention programs for children and adolescents, Durlak and Wells (1997) found that 129 (72.9%) were based in schools. The literature in community psychology describes many school-based prevention programs targeting problems such as substance abuse, school "maladjustment," delinquency, and violence (e.g. C. A. Mason, A. M. Cauce, L. Robinson & G. W. Harper, 1999). A large number of these programs are based in schools in African American communities and include social-cognitive, decision making, affective education, and other skills-building modules along with direct instruction. In this paper, it is argued that ideas from emancipatory education (e.g. Freire, 1998) and African-centered education (e.g. H. Madhubuti & S. Madhubuti, 1994; M. J. Shujaa, 1995) should guide school-based interventions in communities of people of African descent. There is an extensive and distinguished history of emancipatory schools and school-based programs in African American communities. Included in this history are the freedom schools during reconstruction, the SNCC Freedom Schools, the Liberation Schools of the Black Panther Party, the Malcolm X Academy in Detroit, Sankofa Shule in Lansing, the Institute for Positive Education/New Concept Development Center in Chicago, the Benjamin E. Mays Institute in Hartford, and the schools affiliated with the Council of Independent Black Institutions (CIBI) to name just a few. This paper will first provide a brief, critical review of the role of schools and social oppression. Second, primary prevention programs in communities of people of African descent will be examined, questioning some of the dominant methods and assumptions. Next, underlying assumptions about relationships between African identity, educational success, and healthy outcomes for young people will be addressed. This will be followed by a discussion of African-centered emancipatory education, focusing specifically on the role of students as agents of social change and the importance of critical reflection on African cultural resources. The Benjamin E. Mays Institute will be presented as an example of how ideas from an African-centered emancipatory approach to education have been incorporated within a school serving a community of people of African descent in Hartford, Connecticut.