Mississippi’s new constitution included a redefined public school law that mandated racially segregated schools, but left out any discussion of equality. It also outlined several new voting laws, including one that required citizens to pay a poll tax in order to register. Of particular significance to black Mississippians was Article XII, Section 244 of the new Mississippi Constitution. It stated that all voters “be able to read any section of the constitution of this State” and “be able to understand the same when read to him, or give a reasonable interpretation thereof.” This “understanding clause” was written into the Mississippi Constitution of 1890 specifically to control African American political activity. Without any sort of standardized measurement of one’s ability to “understand” or “interpret” the new constitution, individual registrars were given the power to decide who could qualify to vote. And by 1890, nearly every single registrar in the state of Mississippi was a white Democrat. This new measure did not remove all African Americans from the voter rolls, but it did lay the groundwork for individual registrars to deny any black person the right to vote if that person did not properly interpret a section of the state constitution or if for whatever reason the white registrar simply did not want a particular individual to vote. The disfranchisement methods were extremely effective, and over the course of seventy years, millions of black Mississippians were excluded from the promises of American democracy.17
Sixty years after the Constitutional Convention of 1890, Mississippi’s black public schools remained tragically neglected. Because white Democrats prohibited African Americans from voting and thus electing sympathetic legislators and school administrators, black Mississippians had virtually no influence over the state’s educational resources. Most white Mississippi legislators cared little about African American education and set aside very few resources for black public schools. As historian Leon Litwack has observed, “[N]o state gave less to black education between 1890 and World War II.”18
Through the 1940s and 1950s, black Mississippi schools were among the worst public institutions in America. They were often run-down, overcrowded, and always inferior, even to the state’s poor white schools which had problems of their own. Black Mississippi students had older books, substandard facilities, fewer supplies, and smaller playgrounds than their white counterparts. Some districts did not even offer classes beyond the eighth grade, forcing African Americans to either drop out or move away from their families to complete high school. Other districts conformed their school calendars to the cotton harvest schedule, ensuring the availability of African American youths to work in cotton fields of rich, white planters. (This arrangement also helped some impoverished black families that desperately needed income.) Even after World War II, when the rest of America stood on the cusp of its most prosperous era, many black Mississippi students attended schools in unheated, crumbling wooden shacks. Among the poorest populations in America, black Mississippi students also had the fewest opportunities because they had been born in a state that gave them so little.19
But of course Mississippi did not exist in a vacuum. Through much of the twentieth century, powerful forces of change were gathering across America. In the 1930s and 1940s, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) began a full-scale legal campaign against racially based educational inequalities in American public schools. These early efforts included battles to equalize teacher salaries, gain access to state-funded law schools, and equal treatment for African Americans attending public institutions of higher learning. Gladys Noel Bates, a black science teacher in Jackson, sued the local school district to equalize her salary.20 White school officials terminated her teaching contract, which sent a powerful message to those who wished to challenge Jim Crow. But activists were undeterred. In a series of Supreme Court decisions, the NAACP and its talented team of lawyers began peeling back the legality of racially segregated schools by proving that segregation was inherently unequal, a fact black Mississippians knew all too well. Culminating with the famous 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling, these Supreme Court cases directly threatened the South’s racially segregated public school systems.21
Because the United States Supreme Court ordered that school desegregation be conducted at “all deliberate speed,” many white Mississippi officials believed they could avoid integration by allocating more resources to black schools. In a last-ditch effort to prove that the old adage of “separate but equal” could work, legislators earmarked millions of dollars to build and improve black schools. Yet, even these efforts were limited by racial discrimination. Some city and county officials, succumbing to longstanding prejudices and local political pressure, simply refused to distribute funds equally. Therefore, despite some cosmetic improvements, the quality of African American schools never approached that of the white ones. As late as 1962, many Mississippi counties were still spending far more money on white students. For example, the Amite County district spent an average of $70.45 and $2.24 on white and black students, respectively. In Tunica County the average per-pupil school expenditure was $172.80 for white pupils and a mere $5.99 for African Americans. Mississippi’s black and white schools never approached equalization. African American students remained severely disadvantaged.22
Meanwhile, as white politicians scrambled to avoid school integration, a growing mass of black Mississippi leaders were organizing for change. These men and women, coming together in the face of intense physical, economic, and emotional threats, were focused primarily on securing the right to vote. They knew that the power of the ballot could fundamentally alter their lives. Beyond the sheer appeal of participating in the American democracy, gaining the vote could allow black communities to elect officials who would help provide more resources for their neighborhoods, better access to health care, and, of course, better schools for their children. By the mid-1950s, hundreds of these like-minded individuals were organized into a grassroots localized network led by Medgar Wiley Evers, Mississippi’s first NAACP field secretary. After fighting in World War II, Evers spent nearly a decade of his life organizing small groups of brave black Mississippians who resolved to fight for voting rights despite the potentially severe consequences of challenging Jim Crow. Their gains were small but encouraging.23
In the early 1960s, Mississippi’s courageous black freedom fighters received an injection of energy when waves of young activists from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) arrived in the state to help organize local people to pursue the right to vote. This coalition of freedom fighters fanned out across the state, holding mass meetings and demonstrations in black communities where they encouraged everyday African Americans to try and register to vote. There were successes and inspiring moments, but activists were also met with an intense resistance from white segregationists.24
White supremacists organized at all levels—from the governor to the Ku Klux Klan—to resist any form of racial integration or equality. Local black activists and SNCC workers were arrested, beaten, and sometimes even killed. Civil rights organizers constantly appealed to the federal government for help, but the Kennedy administration, distracted by the Cold War and concerned about maintaining the allegiance of southern Democrats, offered only empty calculated gestures that did little to protect black Mississippians who were fighting for their basic constitutional rights. Activists working in Mississippi knew they had to do something drastic to attract more national attention and federal protection that would help lift the veil of fear preventing most black Mississippians from joining the movement. As SNCC staff member Charles Cobb recalled, “You had to bring the country’s attention to the state, and the obvious way to do that is to bring the country’s children down there. You make Mississippi a big campaign—you nationalize Mississippi, essentially, by bringing America’s children to Mississippi. Nobody can ignore the state then.”25
During the winter and spring of 1963 and 1964, SNCC workers spread across the country to recruit “America’s children”
to Mississippi for an ambitious campaign they initially called the “Summer Project.” Grizzled from years of struggling against America’s most severe form of white supremacy, veteran activists arrived on campuses of universities such as Yale, Stanford, and Princeton to recruit mostly white college students to spend a summer fighting for black rights in Mississippi. Many of the students were liberal, ambitious, and gifted. Most were also privileged. They had come of age during the most prosperous era in American history and enjoyed advantages unimaginable to most black Mississippians. But these young people were also idealistic and conscientious. Over the preceding years, they had seen the Civil Rights Movement expose ugly truths about the limitations of America for southern African Americans. Virtually all of the white students had seen dozens of disturbing images from the South. On newsstands and television sets, they saw scenes from Oxford, Mississippi, in 1962 when the enrollment of African American student James Meredith incited a riot at the University of Mississippi. In 1963, they had seen terrifying images of fire hoses spraying young children in the streets of Birmingham, Alabama. And just weeks later, they had also seen the devastatingly sad LIFE magazine cover photograph of Medgar Evers’s widow, Myrlie, comforting her teary-eyed son at her assassinated husband’s funeral. With the South wrapped in racial chaos, many of those bright-eyed college students genuinely wanted to help make America a better place.26
Most veteran Mississippi activists held reservations about bringing “sympathetic” outsiders to help organize local African Americans, especially if those outsiders were white. Many stressed that black Mississippians needed to lead the protests if the movement were to have a long-term impact. After all, it was Mississippi’s local black residents who would remain in the state and carry on the freedom struggle long after the outsiders left. But by the spring of 1964, most of those concerns were cast aside in lieu of the importance of drawing federal protection for civil rights workers in Mississippi. In January of 1964, yet another black freedom fighter named Louis Allen had been murdered, and activists knew that the federal government would go to greater lengths to protect privileged white college students than it had ever done to help black Mississippians. The students were going to come, and they were indeed going to bring much of America’s attention with them. Mississippi’s numerous civil rights groups organized under an umbrella organization called the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) to conduct the campaign.27
As they planned Freedom Summer, several veteran civil rights activists began thinking of ways to expand and supplement voter registration efforts. From years of living, working, and struggling in Mississippi, SNCC workers had been exposed to the severe limitations of the state’s black public school system. Many were stunned at the lack of education among black Mississippians. When SNCC first arrived in Mississippi, only 4.2 percent of the state’s African American population over the age of twenty-five held high school diplomas.28 Many adults did not know how to read. Others did not know basic facts such as how many states composed the United States of America. Even ten years after Brown v. Board of Education, some black Mississippians had never even heard of the famous Supreme Court decision that had supposedly integrated America’s schools. The educational disadvantages afflicting most black Mississippians were both heartbreaking and obvious. Although SNCC was primarily focused on voter registration, politics and education were clearly connected, just as they had always been in Mississippi. Those educational inequalities were a direct result of the systematic racial disfranchisement that had taken place nearly a century prior.29
In November of 1963, Charles Cobb sent a memo describing the vast educational and intellectual poverty infecting thousands of black Mississippians. To offer a remedy for some, Cobb proposed a system of “Freedom Schools” to be conducted across the state during the upcoming Summer Project. Rooted in well-established organizing traditions, the schools would provide an opportunity to use white student volunteers’ prestigious educational pedigrees to teach young black Mississippians. Several organizers also envisioned Freedom Schools as a way to stymie the historical stream of African Americans who left Mississippi for better opportunities elsewhere. In order to combat a “brain drain” effect in local communities, Freedom Summer activists planned to focus on “tenth- and eleventh-grade high school students,” many of whom were considering whether to stay or leave the Magnolia State for good. Cobb also saw these independent schools as pathways for young people into the movement. Freedom Schools, he argued, could “supplement what they aren’t learning in high schools,” “give them a broad intellectual and academic experience,” and “form the basis for statewide student action.” And thus the Freedom School idea was born.30
The ambitious Freedom School idea must be considered within the broader context of the historic freedom struggle of black Mississippians, especially considering the long-term connection between politics and education. Since the Revolution of 1875, Mississippi’s white supremacist leaders had robbed black students of educational resources and opportunities. The Freedom Schools of 1964 represented not just an innovative new movement strategy, but also symbolized the recovery of a lost promise made to a people nearly one hundred years before. Whether the activists, students, or teachers knew it or not, they were reviving a dream that had been deferred for nearly a century. Those who volunteered to teach in the Mississippi Freedom Schools during the 1964 Freedom Summer were joining an explosive social movement, but the young black students who arrived for those classes were part of a much deeper struggle.
Education and the Civil Rights Movement
Education and social activism were always connected. The Freedom School idea itself was particularly rooted in longstanding traditions of American liberalism, especially through the political, economic, and social education model pioneered by Highlander Folk School founder Myles Horton during the Great Depression. Horton, a progressive white liberal from eastern Tennessee, founded Highlander in the foothills of the Tennessee Smokey Mountains after spending years studying with Progressive-era educational reformers such as John Dewey, Jane Addams, George Counts, and Reinhold Niebuhr. Deeply committed to social justice and civic equality, Horton based his school’s educational philosophy on participatory democracy ideologies. Students were to participate in developing their own educational experience and play active roles in shaping classroom curriculums to meet their varying political and economic needs. In essence, Highlander’s flexible pedagogy helped allow marginalized people to facilitate their own paths to liberation.31
Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, Highlander Folk School served as a crucial training ground for labor and social justice activists. In the postwar era, Highlander became more involved with America’s increasingly explosive racial issue. African American activists, many of whom had direct connections with labor organizers, were mobilizing across the country to protest various forms of discrimination. The alliance of race and labor drew Horton’s school into a burgeoning movement. Highlander’s first, and perhaps most important, contribution to the Civil Rights Movement was the development of Citizenship Schools.32
The idea for Citizenship Schools originated during a 1955 Highlander workshop on the United Nations. Among this workshop’s attendees were Esau Jenkins and Septima Poinsette Clark. Jenkins was a small landowner from John’s Island, South Carolina, who regularly supplemented his income by transporting working-class black islanders to and from the mainland. Through years of living among and working with illiterate and impoverished black workers who held no political power, Jenkins became acutely aware of the problems facing his neighbors and began thinking of ways to help them improve their lives. During these trips, he began discussing, reading, and writing passages drawn from the state constitution with some of his passengers, effectively gauging their knowledge and eventually providing some with basic literacy tools. But Jenkins wanted to do even more to help. He wanted to reach the masses of poor people he saw struggling in the South, and so he arrived at Highlander to share his challenges and
gain ideas. Septima Clark, an educator from Charleston who had previously taught on John’s Island, was already active in the Civil Rights Movement. As a member of the South Carolina NAACP, she was actively involved in the organization’s fight to equalize teacher salaries in black and white schools. Clark lost her teaching job because of her commitment to the movement, but found a like-minded ally in Esau Jenkins. When the pair went to Tennessee, the story of their experiences quickly drew the interest of Myles Horton and others at the Highlander Folk School.33
Jenkins returned home with a plan to open an education center where locals could learn to read, write, and register to vote. Clark returned to John’s Island to help establish a location, find a teacher, and recruit students. The first school was established in the back of a recently purchased grocery store. It was taught by Clark’s niece, Bernice Robinson, a local black beautician who opened the first day of class with just fourteen students, some pencils and paper, and a copy of the United Nation’s Declaration of Human Rights.34 Those humble beginnings were the start of something much bigger to come. The power of education for liberation drew widespread interest, and word of the first Citizenship School at John’s Island gradually spread through other southern black communities. People interested in starting their own Citizenship Schools were invited to the Highlander Folk School for training. These new teachers then trained others.
To Write in the Light of Freedom Page 2