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The Freedom Schools of the 1960s were part of a long line of efforts to liberate people from oppression using the tool of political and language literacy, including secret schools in the 18th and 19th centuries for enslaved Africans; labor schools during the early 20th century; and the Citizenship Schools formed by Septima Clark in the 1950s.
Freedom Schools were first developed by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) during the 1964 Freedom Summer in Mississippi. They were intended to counter the “sharecropper education” received by so many African Americans and poor whites. Through reading, writing, arithmetic, history, and civics, participants received a progressive curriculum during a six-week summer program that was designed to prepare disenfranchised African Americans to become active political actors on their own behalf (as voters, elected officials, organizers, etc.). Nearly 40 freedom schools were established serving close to 2500 students, including parents and grandparents.
Faces of Freedom Summer
By Bobs M. Tusa, Herbert Randall
Freedom Summer: The 1964 Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi
By Susan Goldman Rubin
Hands on the Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC
By Faith S. Holsaert (Editor), Martha Prescod Norman Noonan (Editor), Judy Richardson (Editor)
Lessons from Freedom Summer: Ordinary People Building Extraordinary Movements
By Kathy Emery, Linda Reid Gold, Sylvia Braselmann
Letters from Mississippi: Reports from Civil Rights Volunteers and Freedom School Poetry of the 1964 Freedom Summer
By Elizabeth Martinez (Editor), Julian Bond (Foreword by)
