As summer draws to a close, we are also nearing the end of an extraordinary milestone – the 60th anniversary of the Civil Rights Movement’s Freedom Summer. As a brand new Yale Law School graduate in 1963, I was fortunate enough to receive one of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund (LDF)’s first two fellowships to help young attorneys seeking to practice in the South. After a year of intensive preparation at LDF’s New York City headquarters under the tutelage of an extraordinarily gifted and committed band of attorneys, I opened a law office in Jackson, Mississippi. God was headed south to Mississippi and Alabama and Georgia and I went along for the scariest, most exhilarating, most rewarding, and most challenging years any human being could hope for. I moved to Mississippi at an extraordinary moment – just in time to witness firsthand and assist the unfolding of the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer Project.
The Mississippi Freedom Summer Project engaged college students from around the country to work together with local Black community members to open up Mississippi’s closed society and demand basic human and civil rights for all Mississippians. Hundreds of White middle-class students brought visibility to the too long invisible and incredibly courageous struggles of Mississippi’s Black citizens for simple justice and the right to vote. While attending one of the training sessions at Western College for Women in Oxford, Ohio, designed to prepare the White students for Mississippi’s harsh realities, the horrible news reached us of the disappearance of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, who had left the Ohio training to return to Mississippi to investigate the burning of Mount Zion Methodist Church in Neshoba County. A huge pall and fear swept over all of us after hearing they were missing. Bob Moses urged everyone to think hard about the grave dangers involved in the summer project and whether they still wanted to participate. A very few went home. Most determined to continue in the movement that over the next few months laid the groundwork for transforming Mississippi and ultimately our nation.
One of the highlights of the summer project was the creation of freedom schools. Freedom schools were designed to keep Black children and youths out of harm’s way and give them a richer education experience than Mississippi public schools offered them. Some of the student Freedom Summer volunteers were trained to teach in these “schools,” held in church basements, on back porches, in parks, and even under trees. I remember visiting a freedom school under a tall old oak tree in Greenwood, Mississippi, and hearing Pete Seeger sing. Before the arson that led to the Freedom Summer murders, Mount Zion Methodist Church had been a planned freedom school site. Freedom schools provided reading instruction, a humanities curriculum including creative writing, a general mathematics and science curriculum, and even French. They also taught subjects the public schools did not, including Black history and constitutional rights, and covered the freedom movement in detail – encouraging students to be independent thinkers and problem solvers and become agents of social change in their own communities. More than 3,000 children, teens, and some adults attended the freedom schools that summer.
More than 30 years ago, Children’s Defense Fund began proudly drawing on the 1964 freedom schools tradition. This summer, more than 13,000 K-12 scholars in 29 states and 102 cities were enrolled in the CDF Freedom Schools® program. CDF Freedom Schools sites give scholars in grades K-12 safe spaces where they are taught by college-aged student mentors who often come from their own communities and look like them. It’s hard to be what you can’t see. In addition to being exposed to wonderful books all summer long, scholars are taught nonviolent conflict resolution and critical thinking skills and engage in community service and social action projects. They learn that they are not citizens in waiting, but can make a difference right now. All CDF Freedom Schools scholars are encouraged to dream big, set high expectations for themselves, and determine what they can do to help make their communities, nation, and world better – just as students of Mississippi’s 1964 freedom schools were with their courageous young leaders. Sixty years later, Children’s Defense Fund is proud to keep the legacy, hope, and promise of Freedom Summer alive for a new generation of young people.