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Contesting Moderate Educational Reform Through the Mississippi Freedom Schools, 1954-1965

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Contesting Moderate Educational Reform Through the Mississippi Freedom Schools, 1954-1965 Quality Education by Local Demand: Contesting Moderate Educational Reform through the Mississippi Freedom Schools, 1954-1965 “There were generations of conversations about the situation that we were in, about the absence of political rights, about the absence of economic opportunity, there were passed from generation to generation and it was not actually until people were able to actually do something that these transcripts became public.” - Homer Hill, a Freedom School student in Clarksdale, Mississippi Students like Homer Hill were too young to celebrate the Brown v. Board of Education (1954) decision when the Supreme Court struck down the constitutionality of racial segregation. When Homer Hill and his contemporaries decided to enroll in a Freedom Schools ten years after the Brown decision during the summer of 1964, they still attended segregated schools. Yet, like Hill, students observed the curious nuances of attending school in the wake of the decision. Homer Hill and other students recollected the foundational knowledge they learned to challenge inequality such as “the absence of political rights,” and “the absences of economic opportunity,” from teachers within black segregated schools. These seeds of knowledge constituted a notion of educational reform that was not necessarily on par with the integrationist stance put forth in the Brown decision. When the Freedom Schools opened their doors ten years later during the summer of 1964, these students were still living the “troubled legacy” of this monumental ruling on a daily basis. In the process of experiencing both the adverse conditions of underfunded segregated facilities and learning about the artful forms of resistance, the schooling experiences of African American youth in Mississippi represent a broad spectrum that encapsulates competing ideologies about how educational reform during the Civil Rights Movement should be defined. Competing ideologies laid the groundwork for the educational initiatives of the Black Power Movement because the development of the Mississippi Freedom Schools challenged the nature of educational reform that pushed solely for the desegregation of American public schools across the country during the Brown v. Board of Education (1954) era. Civil Rights activists organized a network of Freedom Schools that offered a competing and alternative reform model to desegregating schools. The most visible moments of the Civil Rights Movement in the wake of the Brown decision focused on desegregating public spaces and services -- the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott, the 1957 desegregation of Little Rock High School, the 1960 desegregation of lunch counters, the 1961 desegregation of the bus terminals, and the 1962 desegregation of the University of Mississippi, among many other heroic feats of entering segregated spaces across the country. These events collectively defined the primary objective of the Civil Rights Movement: desegregation. Yet the intellectual genesis of the Freedom Schools was grounded in a narrative focused on providing a quality education, in segregated schools or otherwise. This certainly connected to desegregating schools, as many believed equality education could only be achieved through entering the white schools that benefitted from many more resources. But an important part of reform also included improving the quality of education and policy within existing segregated schools as well. These ideas encompassed reform for quality education, not necessarily desegregation, which played on ideas passed down for generations. Ten years after the Supreme Court declared segregated schooling unconstitutional; the public schools that students attended were still segregated. Activists, activist educators, and students challenged this by building an alternative system to the currently unjust one, a bold predecessor to the Black Power Liberation Schools of the late 1960s, and an ironic counterpart to the all white private academies that sprang up across Mississippi and across the country to avoid desegregation. By developing the Freedom Schools and implementing Freedom School pedagogy, Civil Rights activists built schools and enacted educational policy that challenged the dominant integrationist paradigm associated with the Brown decision. This paper explores the Brown v. Board of Education (1954) decision as the dominant paradigm of the Civil Rights Movement, but strongly contests the notion that desegregation captured the essence of educational reform between 1954 and 1964. The history of the Mississippi Freedom Schools illustrates the fluid and tenuous nature of educational reform during the Civil Rights Movement. The Freedom Schools embody the tensions, contradictions, nuances and competing ideologies that existed during the movement. In 1964, the landscape of public education in the United States was changing. Though still segregated from their white peers, Homer Hill benefitted from new school facilities, enlarged campuses, and more money spent on black education since the creation of a racially segregated system of education in 1890. At the same time, students understood the premise for a separate education and the discriminatory funding structure that denied resources essential to a quality education. It was also in 1964 that students and their families were beginning to make the choice of whether or not to attend public schools that the state of Mississippi was desegregating for the first time. Moreover, students were also acting upon long traditions of education for resistance. Students experienced, then, a form of educational reform not wholly determined by the Supreme Court and fierce white resistance to desegregation. Black students and their families struggled and organized for a quality education, which consisted of integration but it also equally called for a separate education, an activist- oriented curriculum and education for citizenship. Interpreting the Freedom Schools in light of the Brown v. Board of Education (1954) Decision The history of the Mississippi Freedom Schools necessarily connects to the Brown v. Board of Education (1954) decision, which carries important implications in the historiography of the Civil Rights Movement.i In reference to the Brown decision, Richard Kluger wrote, “the outcome of the case… would change American profoundly. The injustice it sought to end has persisted since the settlement of the New World.”ii James Patterson, in his historical analysis of the decision regarded Brown as “the most eagerly awaited and dramatic judicial decision of modern times.”iii As legal scholar Jack Balkin stated, “there is no doubt that [the Brown decision] is the single most honored opinion in the Supreme Court’s corpus. The civil rights policy of the United States in the last half century has been premised on the correctness of Brown.”iv Brown’s significance has important implications in the popular understanding of the decision and its role in the history of the Civil Rights movement. Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP began a wide legal assault on the unequal funding of schools, which culminated in the historic decision. In this larger interpretation, the laborious legal work, the scrupulous evidence collected to demonstrate the negative effect of segregation on black schoolchildren, and the carefully constructed constitutional argument advocating for desegregation essentially laid the foundations of the Civil Rights movement. “The activism of Marshall and others who led legal campaigns for civil rights,” historian James Patterson asserted, was one of the “three most powerful forces behind changes in American relations at the time.”v The scholarly analysis is rightfully conducted and the significance of the decision is justified in the analyses of legal scholars and movement historians. The import assigned to the decision by observers at the time and scholars since then has called for scrupulous examination of the merits of the Brown decision and the implementation of its edict. This has led to an increasingly critical gaze cast upon the decision in the first half- century after the ruling has generated productive discourse that recognizes the segregated nature of schools today. James Anderson examined the legacy but also the cutting edge of desegregation.vi The unprecedented number of teachers fired, the enduring harassment the first waves of students to desegregate schools faced, and the widespread closure of premier and well-respected high schools that benefitted from a committed community of scholars rightly raised critical questions about the integrity of the aftermath of Brown and Brown II. Still, at the same time, an overarching focus on the Brown decision, though rightfully important, masks the multifarious nature of educational reform of the long Civil Rights Movement. The Freedom Schools embodied notions of educational reform that did not focus on desegregation as well as a general approach to improving the quality of education, in regards to quality of teaching, the curriculum, and fairer treatment between the administration and students. An integrationist approach by no means represented a consensus for reform among the African American community. Ideological differences played a role as well, suggesting the NAACP and the push for integration was not the only mouthpiece of educational reform among disenfranchised African Americans. As mentioned above, the teachers union, the NAACP, spearheaded the equalization campaign and the plaintiff was Gladys Noel Bates. Many of these cases were filed
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