Freedom Summer/ Mississippi Summer Project:
How activists are trained and activism fostered
Lauren McMillin
EDUPL 834
5/29/12
Dr. Beverly Gordon
In this unit, we explore how activists are trained. Over the course of history, social
activists have played an influential role but there is not much information on how these
activists were trained. While some may have had exposure to community organizing in their
families during childhood, it is critical to understand how beliefs are translated in action. This
unit focuses on the development of Civil Rights activists that took part in the Mississippi
Summer Project. Mississippi was chosen as the target for the effort because of its low voter
registration rate. In 1962, only 7% of the eligible black population in Mississippi was registered
to vote. The Mississippi Summer Project was an effort to mobilize and register black voters
these voters in 1964.
Building from the groundwork laid in 1963 Freedom Vote, groups such as the Congress
on Racial Equality (CORE) and the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)
coordinated efforts to expand black voting in the South. The 1963 project was run by the local
Council of Federated Organizations (COFO). Volunteers, primarily college students, were invited
a larger, scaled up effort to mobilize black Mississippi voters. Trainings were done at the
Western College for Women, now part of Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. There were two
trainings, each lasting one week. The original week of training was designed to ‘train the
trainer,’ that is to say those who took part in the Oxford trainings were then prepared to help
set up Freedom Schools in Mississippi that served black communities in Mississippi. These
Freedom Schools, set up in churches, community centers and other fixtures of black
communities, gave communities ownership for the education of their youth. The goal of these
schools was to empower students to be active politically in their communities, and focused on
leadership development as well as the academic skills that were not prioritized in state
sponsored schools for black students. Enrollment in the Freedom Schools was not mandatory
like the current requirement to stay enrolled to a certain age, so those who were trained in the
Ohio sessions were instructed in recruitment strategies to enroll student in the Freedom
Schools in Mississippi.
What kind of instruction did these social activists receive? Since the Freedom Schools
were not state sponsored, they do not have to follow the same guidelines as the lessons that
other school must follow. The Radical Teacher is a resource used to understand what the
original Ohio trainees were taught. Trainees were encouraged to develop the curriculum for
their Freedom Schools based on the needs of the community. For example, urban students and
rural students have lives that look very different in their after school hours; these individual
community needs drive the need for the Freedom Schools. The schools were to be relevant to
students’ lives outside the school setting, even though the school setting may not be a
traditional one; teachers did not know what their classrooms would look like and would need to
adapt their curriculum to the setting and available resources that varied from site to site.
Teachers were trained to stimulate individual learning, and a students’ responsibility for their
own education. A related goal of the Freedom Schools curriculum is its tie to the Mississippi
Freedom Democratic Party; students engaging in Freedom School Curriculum, would, the
organizers hoped, result in the MSDP functioning as a sort of PTA for the schools.
Inquisition is a critical component of the Freedom Schools curriculum. Teachers are
trained to teach their students to question, to question the reasons behind the social structure,
the motivations for learning specific topics. In order to become the agents of change the
Freedom School organizers needed, students must have the skills to develop their own vision of
the society they were working toward. Teachers are taught to deconstruct notions of power
and race, practices of deception and guilt in order to allow them to transmit to their students
that the injustice they see is a product of societal influences and not a predetermined reality
that confines black citizens of Mississippi.
It is important to understand the nonviolent nature of the Mississippi Freedom Project.
The Freedom School Curriculum explains this approach by saying there will always be those
with bigger guns and more bullets, and as the Negros are a minority they would be unable to
win with guns. The organizers saw guns as replacing one aspect of a broken society with
another. Guns foster a mentality of fear, a mentality that the Freedom Summer was trying to
dispel. The belief was that guns separate people, that the mentality of fear keeps people even
further apart, and the goal of the Freedom Summer was to create a more equal set of
opportunities for all members of a community. Violent tactics may shift the balance of power
temporarily, but do not accomplish long term integration goals that the organizers of the
Freedom Summer have set forth. The focus of the training was on Direct Action: this is defined
as “putting your body in the way of evil – placing your whole self on the very pot where the
injustice is.” Consider the contrasts of Direct Action tactics and recent social movements such
as the viral social media action surrounding the Lord Resistance Army’s leader Joseph Kony.
Much of the activism pertaining to the Kony campaign was confined to online activities, and
required no actions from supporters. With the anonymity of the Internet age, supporters do not
even need to concern themselves with publicly associating their names with a social cause and
can still contribute to the number of supporters a cause can claim.
Most importantly, the Freedom School curriculum encouraged creativity. The student
centered approach encouraged connection to the happenings of a student’s life. Additionally,
the inquisition based learning focuses on developing the skills students need to create a vision
they can believe in and work towards. The creativity needed to sustain a movement with
changing social dynamics is a product of these two curricular foci. In encouraging students to
take multiple approaches to nonviolent action, it ensures that their movement will not lose
focus and their cause will continue to see opportunities for progress.
In training agents of social change using the Freedom School curriculum, teachers must
construct their activities around the follow questions:
Basic Set of Questions:
Why are we (teachers and students) in Freedom Schools?
What is the Freedom Movement?
What alternatives does the Freedom Movement offer us?
Secondary Set of Questions:
What does the majority culture have that we want?
What does the majority culture have that we don't want?
What do we have that we want to keep?
Activities
•
Students will compile a list of the resources used in their everyday education
(notebooks, chairs, chalk/white board, computer, books, busses, library, etc) and in
small groups choose one or two of these resources for their focus. Small groups will
discuss how their daily school activities would be impacted without the specific resource
and identify 5-10 differences that would be seen. The small groups will gather as a class
and present their discussion findings to the large group.
•
Students will, as a homework assignment, construct a picture of what their ideal school
day would look like. What would they like to learn, and in what setting would they like
to learn it? Students will bring their assignments to class and work in pairs or small
groups to combine their visions into what their alternative schools may look like.
•
In comparison to the tools available to organize the Freedom Summer, students will, as
a class, develop a list of the tools currently available to organize around social issues. For
example, politically active youth engage in social media now in order to organize
trainings. Without social media, how would capacity for organizing be affected? How do
the agents of change communicate and recruit without the high profile of social media
and news coverage?
•
Students will conduct seminars similar to the 7 Units covered in the Freedom School
trainings. Using the questioning techniques highlighted in the curriculum, students will
conduct the 7 seminars, keeping the primary and secondary question lists in mind as
they explore the concepts embedded in the units.
Resources:
Books:
Mississippi Freedom Schools Curriculum - 1964. The Radical Teacher, No. 40 (Fall 1991), pp. 634.
Randall, Herbert, and Bobs M. Tusa. Faces of Freedom Summer. Tuscaloosa: University of
Alabama Press, 2001.
Payne, Charles M, and Carol S. Strickland. Teach Freedom: Education for Liberation in the
African-American Tradition. New York: Teachers College Press, 2008.
Emery, Kathy, Linda R. Gold, and Sylvia Braselmann. Lessons from Freedom Summer: Ordinary
People Building Extraordinary Movements. Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 2008.
Kent, D. Cornerstones of freedom: The freedom riders. Chicago: Children’s Press.
Arsenault, Raymond. Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2006.
Websites
History Channel. “Freedom Summer.” < http://www.history.com/topics/freedom-summer> (22 May
2012).
Miami University. “Finding Freedom Summer.”
http://westernarchives.lib.muohio.edu/freedomsummer/about.html (13 May. 2012).
Miami University. “Honoring Freedom Summer”. http://www.lib.muohio.edu/node/1370 (13
May. 2012).
Jewish Women's Archive. "Living the Legacy - Lesson: Community Organizing I: Freedom
Summer." <http://jwa.org/teach/livingthelegacy/civilrights/community-organizing-i-freedomsummer> (May 20, 2012).
Videos
Freedom Summer Classroom Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_81kkJDvrUQ