Mississippi Freedom Schools: A Project from the Past Suggests a Lesson for the Future

Reading by David Levine

Staughton Lynd speaks with Freedom School teachers in Oxford, Ohio, 1964. © Herbert Randall.

Her classmates responded with angry silence, finally broken by voices denying Black inferiority. A student insisted, “We’re not Black slaves!” But another retorted, “She’s right. We certainly are. Can your poppa vote? Can mine? Can our folks eat anywhere they want to?” Soon the class plunged into animated discussion, trying to puzzle out what it meant to be young and Black at a time when the first big cracks were appearing in the segregated society they had known all their lives.

This episode captures much of the spirit of the Mississippi Freedom Schools: an informal setting, an idealistic college student with no teaching experience, an animated group of Black adolescents, a pedagogy that nurtured student voices, and a discussion through which literature sparked consideration of daily oppression. 

The heart of the Freedom School endeavor, the source of its vivid and creative energy, was the insistence of its planners and teachers that learning could (and should) be shaped to serve a liberation struggle. In the late 1990s, educational goals are more likely to focus on how students can best be turned into “human capital;” what modes of control steer children clear of sex, drugs, and violence; and whether the dismantling of a common education through vouchers is the best way to salvage education. Schooling is thus reduced to a privatized journey toward personal prosperity and prestige. The 1964 Mississippi Freedom Schools offer a compelling countervision that suggests that while personal success is a valid goal of education, our schools are enriched when they also engage young people in collaborative quests for social justice. I believe that the Freedom Schools demonstrated that education can both help transform society and inspire young people to attack intellectual tasks with a vigor and emotional intensity that deepens learning.