Mind Stayed on Freedom: Education for Liberation Through the Freedom Schools Movement

This special issue focuses on the broad reach of scholarship around and practices of urban Freedom Schools. Freedom Schools were first formed in Mississippi during the 1960s Civil Rights Movement to counter the lack of access to quality education for Black children. The Children's Defense Fund (CDF) reimagined the historical Freedom Schools movement and CDF Freedom Schools^® programs have been in operation since the 1990s. In 2022, the CDF Freedom Schools program served 10,287 scholars. There were a total of 174 sites in 88 cities in 29 states, the vast majority of which were in urban settings.

The Mississippi Freedom Summer Project of 1964 included three main initiatives: Freedom Schools and community centers, voter registration on the official state rolls, and a freedom registration plan designed to independently elect a slate of delegates to the 1964 Democratic National Convention (Levine, 2001). Voter registration was the cornerstone of the Mississippi Freedom Summer, as approximately 17,000 Black residents of Mississippi attempted to register to vote in 1964 but only 1,600 of the applications were accepted by the registrars (McAdam, 1990). Earlier, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) leader Amzie Moore had asked the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) organizer Bob Moses to open offices in Mississippi. Bob Moses launched a voter registration drive in 1961, and in 1962 he helped form the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) to coordinate the efforts of civil rights groups in Mississippi. COFO, SNCC, the NAACP, and the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE) organized the Freedom Summer Project campaign.

In late 1963 Charlie Cobb, a student at Howard University, wrote the prospectus for the first Freedom Schools. He described the inadequate teaching and learning conditions of Mississippi schools. Cobb outlined in his proposal that Black students in those schools received an education in every way inferior to that available elsewhere, and as a result they were victims of “social paralysis” (Rothschild, 1982, p. 402). Cobb's initial proposal contemplated a two-month session for tenth and eleventh grade high school students. The main objectives were to achieve three things:

Supplement what they were not learning around the state;

Cobb wanted Freedom Schools to build upon cultural knowledge as well as equip students with basic skills like typing and public speaking. Political and social studies education would be the focal point of the curriculum. Freedom Schools operated on a limited budget and opened their doors on July 4, 1964. The schools gathered in church basements, community centers, and various community outdoor settings. There were 250 volunteers and between 3,000 and 3,500 students worked together to develop an experience which profoundly affected many of their lives (McAdams, 1990, p. 85).

In June of 1964, summer volunteers began training at Western College for Women in Oxford, Ohio. One thousand of the Freedom Summer volunteers were White, northern, college students. The training sessions in Oxford were intended to prepare volunteers to register Black voters, teach at local Freedom Schools, and assist the efforts of COFO. Freedom Summer organizers hoped the presence of the volunteers would draw the nation's attention to the hostile and violent repression of voting rights for Blacks in Mississippi and throughout the country. It was also a move to solicit the support of the federal government to intervene and ameliorate the racial apartheid of the American south. “The idea of bringing 1, 000 mostly White, Northern, middle-class students into Mississippi were the product of SNCC staff's frustration with the notably vicious and intransigent system of White supremacy which governed the state's race relations from the end of Reconstruction into the early 1960s” (Levine, 2001, p. 126).

CDF Freedom Schools programs today continue to emphasize liberatory education through literacy learning, social action, intergenerational leadership development, and family engagement. They serve as counters to the miseducation of Black and Brown children, providing spaces for affirming children and families’ histories and racial/ethnic affiliations, developing sociopolitical consciousness, engaging in social action aimed at improving communities, and literacy learning grounded in liberatory pedagogies. In the present environment of calls and action to tackle the long-standing structural racism embedded in urban schooling in the US, this special issue is a critical contribution to efforts that advance anti-racist pedagogies.

The range of scholarship represented in this special edition addresses questions such as: how does the history of Freedom Schools inform current struggles for freedom through quality education and genuine community empowerment? Given that these schools function outside conventional structures of schooling, what are the particular features of Freedom Schools’ liberatory pedagogies? What are the impacts of these pedagogies on teacher development, collaborations among stakeholders, and the centering of community-based resources for teaching and learning? This special edition demonstrates the program's desire to engage in more scholarly research to measure impact and efficacy. The five articles and book review that follow provide insight on what it means to be both a researcher and practitioner in the CDF Freedom Schools program. First, Black Lives Still Matter: Freedom Schools as an Embodiment of Critical Literacy through Reflection and Action argues that critical literacy is enacted through identity - mainly as difference, self, consciousness, narrative, and positionality. Further discussion connects the historical and contemporary relevance of Freedom Schools to the urgency of the Black Lives Matter Movement. Armed Love and Freedom Schools focuses on community cultural wealth theory (CCW) that centers social capital often found in non-dominant communities under pressure ¹ (Yosso, 2005). In particular, the authors theorize that armed love was 1) a context designed to prepare scholars for life in a racist society, 2) the embrace of a collective, supportive community, and 3) embodied in action-oriented relationships. Good Troublemakers: Freedom School Servant Leaders as Change Makers examines the impact of the teaching experiences of the CDF Freedom Schools program Servant Leader Interns (SLIs) on young educators themselves. The educators in this study participated in a CDF Freedom Schools program in South Los Angeles coordinated by the Community Coalition (COCO), a local nonprofit organization dedicated to leadership development and community organizing among Black and LatinX families. This study reveals how SLIs were transformed by the process of teaching in ways that influenced their sense of self-authorship, their career aspirations, and expectations of how education should be. The article A Pathway to Liberation: A History of the Freedom Schools and the Long Struggle for Justice Since 1865 traces the development of the Freedom Schools and examines the first historical antecedents that formed the foundation for the current program. This essay reminds us how the contemporary CDF Freedom Schools movement is but the most recent vanguard of a long struggle for freedom through quality education and genuine community empowerment that extends back to the nineteenth century. This edition concludes with The Freedom Schools Way: A Model for Intergenerational Research Training Partnerships Among Universities and Freedom Schools, where the authors describe a fruitful partnership between a university research training program and a Children's Defense Fund Freedom Schools site in north Florida. The training program, Partners United for Research Pathways Oriented to Social Justice in Education (PURPOSE), addresses the lack of diversity (e.g., by race, ethnicity, first-generation college status, and family experiences of economic hardship) among students earning doctoral degrees in education by training underrepresented university-student ‘Fellows’ to conduct social justice research.

Each of the articles contributes to a multidimensional story of Freedom Schools as a continuation of the human and civil rights movement for historically marginalized communities, particularly Black and Brown peoples, in the US. CDF Freedom Schools programs in Rochester, NY, Los Angeles, CA, and Tallahassee, FL are represented in the articles, cities that are facing challenges characteristic of urban education across the US and more globally: concentrations of poverty, being under-resourced by state and local governments, as well as challenges around “resources, qualification of teachers, and academic development of students” (Milner, 2012, p. 868). Critical to the stances the authors take in this collection of articles, asset-based pedagogies, and research are centered, demonstrating the strengths and resilience of their communities in the face of generations of miseducation.

The Children's Defense Fund is not naive as to the kind of America in which our children are forced to grow up. We reflect on the refrain of Langston Hughes's Poem Let America Be America Again. The refrain America never was America to me lauds patriotism, the great vision that America is the idea of America, the project that is America. It also names our nation as a work in progress. Many who are fighting to reclaim America, or to protect American democracy, ignore the assumption that for Black and Brown children, like the majority of children across America, like the ones who are enrolled in CDF Freedom Schools program across this country, America never was America to them. And so, what is the work that we are called to together at the Children's Defense Fund at this moment? It is not to reclaim democracy, that is not our work. It is not to restore or protect it; frankly, it is to raise it. Child well-being and racial justice and democracy are intertwined, mutually reinforcing, and codependent, because when majority rules, the fact that the majority of America's children are Black or Brown matters. We support young people in getting access to the resources that they need; and because racial justice is child well-being in a country where the majority of children are Black or Brown, these things work together. Raising children and changing conditions for them are both generational commitments.

As we stand on the eve of the 50^th anniversary of the Children's Defense Fund and the 30th anniversary of the CDF Freedom Schools program, we can say that our founder Marian Wright Edelman served two generations of America's children and transformed conditions for them. And we must ask, what will our work be for the next generation? For us at the Children's Defense Fund, we know that there is no place where we come closer to the vision for the American future than with each and every one of you in a CDF Freedom Schools classroom with a scholar and a servant leader doing the good work. CDF has made sure that we are listening to hear what these children and youth have to say, to make sure that we are leaning in with these parents to have them reform and reframe our policy agenda, and have them be the base of power that we want to build for America's future. The Children's Defense Fund is committed to building democracy and envisions a nation where marginalized children flourish, leaders prioritize their well-being, and communities wield the power to ensure they thrive. This special issue is an important part of living out our commitments as it illuminates specific ways that these CDF Freedom Schools programs continue the struggle, as well as the broader implications of this work for liberatory pedagogies that challenge business as usual in schools and communities.