The Freedom Schools by Jon N. Hale

Author:Jon N. Hale
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HIS036060, History/United States/20th Century, SOC001000, Social Science/Ethnic Studies/African American Studies
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2016-06-07T00:00:00+00:00

We Negroes in Benton County have nothing EXCEPT our organized strength. With this strength we must stand together and show the nation that we refuse to cooperate with the Southern way of life, to be lied to, to be tricked, to be cheated, and to be told that we have no voice in our children’s education. The only thing left for us is to keep our children out of school as a way protesting their inferior education.42

Local high school students established Freedom Schools during the school boycott, much like other boycotters in Mississippi. In this case, the Freedom School students worked in conjunction with Rust College students.43 Within two months, the Benton County activists reported that the boycott was 90 percent effective and achieved a degree of success in that the district hired a “new principal who is favorable to civil rights.”44

Students who organized boycotts across the state of Mississippi reflected the organizing ethos of the movement. In Benton County, for instance, the students worked with a countywide organization to facilitate the walkout. The students in Amite County petitioned the school board in close consultation with local parents. Freedom School students in Jackson illustrate how student-led organization spawned other local community organizing projects. Former Freedom School students and local movement staff collaborated to form the Jackson Youth Movement during the spring of 1965. By March meetings maintained an average attendance of fifty students. Young people were planning to circulate a petition against brutality in Jackson high schools. Other students were both recruiting more students to join the NAACP and protesting the “red tape” at NAACP meetings.45 The nascent organization demonstrates the depth of organizing that former Freedom School students engaged in less than one year after the summer campaign of 1964 and the influence they had in radicalizing local movements.

The student-led protests after the summer of 1965 challenge the notion that the civil rights movement “stalled” after the Freedom Summer campaign of 1964, and they demonstrate that young people demanded equity and a distribution of power and resources that ran deeper than desegregation. Participating in boycotts challenged other students not part of the Freedom Schools to question institutional discrimination impacting their own schools. As a result, organized activism continued to grow into a statewide student movement. The boycotts generated a greater awareness and consciousness that the Freedom Schools initially intended to cultivate. While school walkouts and boycotts existed prior to the fall of 1964, most notably in McComb and Jackson, the sharp increase in size, scope, and student demands suggested a new form of protest that foreshadowed the larger walkouts of the later 1960s and early 1970s.46 Student organization and increasing demands also provided pretext to what would be defined as the black power movement.

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