To Write in the Light of Freedom

by William Sturkey

  Throughout the mid-to-late 1960s, as Jim Crow began crumbling with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Freedom School students remained active across the state. Young black Mississippians boycotted schools for better resources or to protest unfair educational policy or racially motivated disciplinary measures. These types of protests developed into a major freedom movement initiative among young black Mississippi students. One of the first boycotts occurred at Shaw High School in early August 1964 and helped set the tone for student activity during the upcoming year. Led by the local Mississippi Student Union (MSU), Shaw students organized a school boycott to protest local educational inequalities and demand better resources for their school. The boycott was approximately 75 percent effective, and boycotting students were able to attend the Shaw Freedom School well into the school year. The next major boycott occurred in Sharkey and Issaquena counties, which students organized in January of 1965. The boycott was sparked when black students began wearing SNCC buttons to school and refused to take them off. The school’s black principal, following the instructions of an all-white school board, subsequently expelled them. Over three hundred students decided to boycott the school in sympathy. Some stayed out until the following school year altogether. During the Issaquena and Sharkey county boycotts, organizers continued offering Freedom School classes as alternatives to the counties’ regular public schools.67 The boycott inspired further action across the state. Students attending the Indianola public schools boycotted in support of the Sharkey and Issaquena county students. In Indianola alone, approximately two thousand students stayed at home. Many Freedom School veterans were among the boycotters, and a lot of their efforts were organized by the youth-run MSU, which declared that “Negroes are fed up with inferior schools, extreme brutality by the police, and similar discrimination. We’re doing something about it.” The brutality referred to the arrest of fifty-three protestors in Indianola and the police force’s use of billy clubs and cattle prods to break up the demonstration.68

  Across the state, politically charged students, many of whom attended or were influenced by Freedom Schools, shared stories of admirable resistance through connections facilitated by the Meridian convention. Forty-five students in Philadelphia carried forward the push for political equality when they fashioned SNCC “One Man, One Vote” buttons and defiantly wore them in school despite threats of expulsion. Students in Rolling Fork were similarly sent home for wearing freedom pins. Students in Panola County petitioned the school board to request an improvement of school facilities and threatened to boycott if their demands were not met. Valley View students protested the firing of an African American bus driver. Resistance to racially inferior education took many forms. A Jackson student was expelled for continuing to sing freedom songs in the building. In Holmes County, a principal expelled two students for singing freedom songs during the lunch period. Another principal in Starkville expelled a student for distributing an MSU petition.69 Across the state of Mississippi, students organized, demanded better resources and treatment, and forced school authorities to listen to their requests. The spirit of Freedom Schools guided much of the activism and resistance. Even if the young protestors had not attended the schools themselves, most had been affected by Freedom School students who had returned to their normal schools after the Freedom Summer to lead their peers.

  Freedom Schools Today

  Since 1964, the Mississippi Freedom Schools have served as a powerful institutional model rooted in the finest examples of American educational activism. As early as the fall of 1964, Freedom School administrators began receiving hundreds of letters asking for materials that would help other groups replicate the Mississippi Freedom School model. More than fifty years after Freedom Summer, their influence extends across the United States. Many contemporary educational institutions cite those 1964 Freedom Schools as important predecessors to their modern policies, programs, and tactics. The most visible of these are the vast numbers of Freedom Schools conducted by the Children’s Defense Fund (CDF). Marian Wright Edelman, a civil rights activist and the first African American admitted to the Mississippi State Bar Association, established the CDF in 1973 to help challenge “the United States to raise its standards by improving policies and programs for children.”70 Edelman’s organization is especially interested in helping children from disadvantaged communities. One of the CDF’s most visible activities is its modern Freedom School program. Conducted every summer in more than eighty cities across America, the CDF Freedom Schools seek to provide “summer and after-school enrichment that helps children fall in love with reading, increases their self-esteem, and generates more positive attitudes toward learning.” Since 1995, the CDF Freedom School teachers have reached more than seventy thousand students and their families. Over seven thousand college students, two thousand high school students, and fifteen hundred adult site coordinators and project directors have been trained to work in Freedom Schools, some of which operate in the same Mississippi cities that first hosted Freedom Schools in 1964.71 Students in today’s Mississippi Freedom Schools are socially active just like many of the youths who came to schools fifty years before. They encourage local communities to register to vote, organize community activities, and constantly help challenge undemocratic practices in society.

  Today’s Freedom School teachers also go through training that teaches them many of the same principles of the original Mississippi Freedom Schools. Contemporary CDF Freedom School teachers must apply and be selected among competitive fields of applicants to work with the schools. Those accepted are invited to participate in the Ella Baker Child Policy Training Institute, a national training workshop held each year at the historic CDF Haley Farm in Clinton, Tennessee, and at the University of Tennessee–Knoxville. Unlike the mostly white 1964 Freedom Summer volunteers, most teachers hired to work in today’s Children’s Defense Fund Freedom Schools are African American and share a similar racial background with the scholars they teach.72 The change in the composition of Freedom School teachers is an important development that addressed some of the racial considerations of the mid-1960s. Teachers who are drawn from the community and adopt a culturally relevant pedagogy are important factors in successful education. The teachers in the 1964 schools were from vastly different communities than those of their students in terms of geography, race, and financial status. There are some other differences, especially in the Freedom Schools’ curriculum and pedagogy. The modern CDF Freedom Schools are much more institutionalized than the 1964 Mississippi ones. They have permanent funding sources, take attendance, closely measure success, and embrace a cultural awareness and cultural sensitivity in a way that closely mirrors Gloria Ladson-Billings’s concept of “culturally relevant teaching.”73

  Despite the differences between historical and contemporary Freedom Schools, the programs have a similar goal. An important legacy drives their mission. Modern CDF Freedom Schools attempt to engage students through a student-centered curriculum and pedagogical approach that focuses on issues relevant to their communities, much like the Freedom Schools of 1964. The model is still attracting students, parents, and educators. The CDF Freedom School program is constantly growing and currently attracts nearly twelve thousand students each year. The CDF Freedom Schools are widespread and important. They are also not alone.

  The term “Freedom School” is widely used today by educational activists across the country. Other educationally progressive institutions such as the Philadelphia Freedom Schools offer on-site tutoring and mentoring programs, distinct from the CDF, but similarly exemplifying the Freedom School legacy. The Black Radical Congress in Detroit, for instance, embraced educational and political approaches modeled after the Freedom Schools. Contemporary examples include the Chicago and Philadelphia Freedom School systems and the San Francisco Freedom School. Many of these contemporary institutions cite the influence of the 1964 Freedom Schools in their mission statements and similarly address citizenship, civil rights,
and political education. Other schools continue to use the name in reference only. Today’s organizers are still pursuing the dream of a more inclusive and equal democracy and incorporating students, families, and communities in the process of liberation.

  Bob Moses, the pioneering civil rights activist who helped lead SNCC into Mississippi, is currently running an educational program that also embodies many elements of the Freedom School ideology. The Algebra Project, founded by Moses in 1990, is based on the community-organizing component of the Civil Rights Movement. Moses continues to make a strong connection between the movement and education, drawing direct parallels between those early days in Mississippi and the struggles that remain for today’s underprivileged populations. “The most urgent social issue affecting poor people and people of color is economic access,” explains Moses. “In today’s world, economic access and full citizenship depend crucially on math and science literacy. I believe that the absence of math literacy in urban and rural communities throughout this country is an issue as urgent as the lack of registered Black voters in Mississippi was in 1961.”74

  In the 1990s, Bob Moses created the Algebra Project based on the idea that mathematical literacy was crucial for success in the twenty-first century. Overlooking or denying this crucial form of literacy, as is common practice in disadvantaged schools, violates the civil rights of all students. Like the organizational predecessors before it, the Algebra Project utilizes education as an organizing tool. Algebra is the point of entry into a larger struggle that not only advocates for mathematical literacy in a culturally responsive way at all levels of school, but also for changes in resource distribution, the fair treatment of all students, and equitable school policies. Moses currently helps organize branches of the Algebra Project across the United States. But in classic Highlander style, he does not simply tell communities what to do. Rather, he organizes them by asking questions and placing the opportunity for providing answers on local community members and young people. Moses and his organization help, but the onus of implementation ultimately falls on students and local communities. The Algebra Project and its attendant organization, the Young People’s Project, harness the grassroots organization legacy of the Freedom Schools and embody the radical, transformative goals of education embodied by the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Schools.

  As with the 1964 Freedom Schools, the actual number of current students involved with the Algebra Project is hard to gauge, but its impact has been profound and inspirational. In Jackson, Bob Moses’s own daughters have helped lead an effort at Brinkley High School to challenge their students to conceptualize math in their own terms.75 Here students engage with the past to develop a mathematical literacy needed for economic success. The Baltimore, Maryland, branch of the Algebra Project also particularly resonates with the grassroots organizing, nonviolent ethos, and political consciousness of the Civil Rights Movement. Young students run the Baltimore Algebra Project and have also participated in nonviolent protests, marches, and demonstrations aimed at raising money and resources for the city’s failing public schools and disrupting the state of Maryland’s plans to build a new juvenile detention center. The students occupied the center’s planned site to protest the institution that was designed to house youths under the age of eighteen who had been tried as adults. Police made several arrests, sending to jail new waves of young people who dared hold the front lines of grassroots protests.76

  Bob Moses’s work also indicates a shift in civil rights education at a larger policy level. Moses reconnected two themes, the Civil Rights Movement and educational policy, in important ways that offer significant implications. The Algebra Project is indicative of the directions the freedom movement has taken and symbolizes future possibilities. Whereas 1950s and 1960s–era activism succeeded in securing a great deal of civil, political, and economic rights, today’s activists like Moses have been arguing, lobbying, and organizing for education to also be considered a fundamental right guaranteed by the Constitution. Moses served on the coordinating committee for Quality Education as a Constitutional Right (QECR), a national organization that seeks to build community and political support for a constitutional amendment for quality education. In this way, education has been shaped and grounded in Civil Rights Movement principles, not only because it works to amend federal policy, but because it works to use education as a way to ensure nationwide civil rights for all children.

  Another powerful example of contemporary educational activism comes from McComb, Mississippi, which hosted a Freedom School of its own in 1964. Recently, a small group of students from McComb High School organized a commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the Burgland High School walkout of 1961, an important movement moment that was largely unrecognized until the young people began advocating for a tribute. In 2011, students at McComb High School organized a chapter of the Young People’s Project to develop a remembrance service for the walkout and produce a documentary detailing the historic event. The group’s documentary won four awards at the Mississippi History Day competition and earned several young students a trip to National History Day in Washington, D.C., where their documentary was very well received. Today, students from the McComb School District work with local community members to run a blog called “McComb Legacies” that commemorates the important history of the McComb freedom struggle and provides updates on current McComb student projects. Their important work also includes developing a “Local Cultures” course in the public school curriculum, which they developed in response to Mississippi House Bill 2718—a bill passed in 2008 that incorporates Civil Rights Movement history into the state’s social studies curriculum. In addition to their community engagement and commemorating important milestones, local McComb students have also advocated for a progressive educational agenda that includes sex education to combat the rise of pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections. They also address issues such as parenting.77 These students are organizing on their own to achieve a quality education and use history as a way to engage and improve their communities.

  Sadly, the fight for educational equality, an epic struggle throughout the American past, remains an unfulfilled promise. Especially in the era of “No Child Left Behind,” frustrated educators, policy makers, parents, and scholars have sometimes looked to the democratic idealism expressed in educational programs such as the Mississippi Freedom Schools for historical lessons in addressing contemporary educational problems. The problems addressed by such schools stem from debates over community control and racialized issues such as the achievement gap, racial tracking, and resegregation. Today’s schools have become highly segregated both in and out of the South, a troubling reality that warrants further critical examination of educational reform in the post-Brown era. Nonetheless, the lessons of freedom in terms of classroom pedagogy and educational policy learned in the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Schools can still inform contemporary educational practices as today’s activists continue fighting to fulfill the unfinished educational promises of the black freedom struggle.

  Conclusion

  This collection contains Freedom School newspapers gathered from archives, libraries, and personal collections across America. Because Freedom Summer volunteers arrived from all corners of the United States (and some even beyond), their personal papers are now spread in archives across the nation. Surely, the newspapers also exist elsewhere, in attics and basements in Mississippi and other scattered personal collections, but most of the ones published here came from libraries that hold significant Freedom Summer–related collections—especially the State Historical Society of Wisconsin in Madison, Wisconsin, the McCain Library and Archives in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, and the King Library and Archives in Atlanta, Georgia—and a half-dozen other archives that hold smaller civil rights–document collections. Several newspapers were donated by former Freedom School teachers who kept them through the years and we are thankful for their generosity. Some of the newspapers are actually quite rare and difficult to find. Some were
scattered through separate collections. Page one might have been in one place with page two located elsewhere. For example, parts of the Meridian Freedom Star were discovered years apart in Atlanta and New York. Collecting these newspapers was a time-consuming but incredibly rewarding task. It is our hope that this collection can make a small contribution to the original mission of the Freedom School project and also offer some use for today’s students, teachers, and activists interested in examining the Mississippi Freedom Schools as models for social change.

  To the best of our knowledge, all the newspapers published in this book were produced by Freedom School students during the summer of 1964. Several other civil rights–era community newspapers and black middle- and high-school newspapers did exist. Many communities started producing civil rights papers shortly after Freedom Summer or continued publishing issues of the newspapers started by Freedom School students. In several cases, Freedom School newspapers were taken over by older activists and became more sophisticated community newsletters. The newspapers published here were selected because they were definitively produced by the Freedom School students during the summer of 1964. All available evidence shows that Freedom School students, with the help of their teachers and other local community members, ran the newspapers and wrote the articles themselves. This book does contain two noted examples of older activists writing articles for the newspapers (a brief list written by a Freedom School teacher and another letter written by an older McComb activist), but the rest of the words seen and transcribed verbatim here were written by black Mississippi youths. Their perspectives, which are often missing in histories of the movement, are incredibly important.