John Hale's book about the Freedom Schools during the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer Project and Crystal Sanders's work on the largest Head Start program run by the Child Development Group of Mississippi (CDGM) from 1965 to 1968 sit at the end of a long line of histories of the black freedom struggle's mass movement years in Mississippi. Mississippi civil rights histories form well-trodden ground, from trailblazers John Dittmer and Charles Payne and nearly twenty-five years of subsequent scholarship and research supported by the building of new archives, to oral histories collected around the recent movement milestone anniversaries and reunions. There is always room for more accounts and fresh vantage points, given the nature of mass movements simultaneously orchestrated on multiple levels and in multiple locales, each with its own nuance and host of characters. Each book illustrates the cacophony of stories, voices, opinions, conflicts, political scuffles, and sacrifices that constitute a mass of movements with many routes to vaguely defined (and not always agreed upon) goals. As I have said elsewhere, full stories are messy and complicated, reflecting the reality of life. Recognizing these activist pasts becomes more relevant with the new phase of mass protest in the persistent struggle for black freedom, particularly around the global and domestic Black Lives Matter movement.
Young people and women are the backbone of most social protests, and the mass movements for civil rights reflected large numbers of these populations on the local frontlines. The battles for access to sufficient education threads through the timeline of the longer black freedom struggle, and it is at this intersection, within a particular historical moment, where both authors rest. Strategies and tools for freedom shifted over time as situations evolved, and these narratives are part of a long, earlier set of histories and became part of the foundation of current movement building focused on education and youth. Neither would argue that this specific moment signifies new struggles; rather, this moment presents unique opportunities in the context of larger multi-issue demands for justice. Many have made the case that education played (and still plays) a key role in controlling access to freedoms. The empowerment of children, and the communities that served them, has many models in history, and both authors dedicate their first chapters summarizing some of the histories. As such, both authors rightly situate their histories in this longer timeline, replete with templates for the activities, albeit with different actors and historical situations. In this nexus of time, place, and circumstance they both expose rich evidence and heroic models of black agency and real action for self-determination.
Scholars in earlier work have made clear that political consciousness did not reside only with the educated and wealthier classes, but in fact poorer working classes also understood their positionality and exercised agency and resistance where and when they could to edify their oftentimes oppressive lives. From this lens forged in African American histories, both Hale and Sanders reveal the sustenance of a black working class epistemology around education that clearly governed actions during key moments in the mass movements when so much occurred at the grassroots, state, and national levels. Both authors dispel the myth that black struggles for better schools and education revolved around integrating with white institutions. Rather, local people sought education that would unshackle young minds from a pervasive plantation mentality of inferiority and fear, and ingrain alternative epistemologies of self-pride through critical analytical tools based in community enrichment.
Both authors acknowledge the obvious links between the 1964 Freedom Schools and what would become Head Start the following year. Indeed, Hale notes in his introduction that the rise of Head Start and other agencies truncated the Freedom Schools’ longevity, performing the same roles with better funding (oftentimes federal or nonprofit). Yet the activities of both entities existed outside of the public school structure, catering to holistic community and family care by supporting young people disadvantaged by primarily racialized poverty. This intentional multilayered approach to education sets the parameters of the fight to control education and by extension, ideology. It makes clear continuing institutional racism in the political fight to control education between white supremacists and those who understand education as freedom. Today, the struggle has shifted to textbook content—who controls what gets taught to our children—and the dismantling of public schools altogether.
After meandering through the histories of black struggles in education since the seventeenth century through all the attendant secondary sources, Jon Hale argues that the Freedom Schools organized primarily during the 1964 Mississippi Summer Project (Freedom Summer), run by Council of Federated Organizations (COFO), enabled thousands more to enter the mass movement. He broadens the definition of movement building to encompass those too young to vote and those who chose not to march, sign petitions, or raise their hands within (an oftentimes literal) firing range, while acknowledging that similar templates already existed. Liberatory adult education, through citizenship schools spearheaded by Martin Luther King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference, had existed before Freedom Schools focused on youngsters. Nevertheless, Hale claims a statewide effect of the Freedom Schools, yet primarily focuses only on those who continued activism afterward, a small fraction of the participants, by narrating the stories of seven students in Jackson, Clarksdale, Tchula, McComb, Meridian, Holly Springs, and Hattiesburg. It is important to note that in these sites relatively strong NAACP Youth Councils were already organized, calling into question the extent to which COFO's blueprint actually sought to maximize (though some preferred to say “co-opt”) existing local movement building and groundwork. More work to understand the complexities of local movement politics in each of these locales would add another layer that minimizes the distillation of movement activities to one organization or another. It is messier and more complicated.
The third chapter contains most of the original research as Hale describes the methodology, curriculum, and organizing of the Summer Project and the Freedom Schools. With the goal of building new institutions separate from existing inadequate ones, organizers rejected the master's house and tools for their own (to quote theorist Audre Lorde), forging spaces that engaged all ages and generations. In this way, studies about Freedom Summer reveal carefully thought-through planning—an important contribution to a broad understanding of the black freedom struggle as deliberate and organized rather than ad hoc and constantly reactionary. Nevertheless, the structure and leadership of the Summer Project allowed for a nimbleness to adjust strategies and execute contingency plans as situations arose.
Hale posits the children as actors and activists in their own right, not passive minors coerced by those in their circles. Exposed to radical pedagogy to encourage critical thinking and active citizenship, and an Africana epistemology centering black experiences, knowledge creation, and global contributions, these youngsters understood their situation and now had tools to empower and embolden their steps forward. They knew to ask why the state refused to teach certain knowledge to them, raising a political and social consciousness that then took root in homes.
Moving from the blueprints for and the execution of the project to the legacy, Hale presents an interracial portrait of the encounters, the organizational structure, gendered dynamics, and legacies. He spends considerable time with those teaching in Freedom Schools—mostly white volunteers trained in Oxford, Ohio—alongside Summer Project recruits working on other assignments. These volunteers, relatively insulated by their white privilege and the ability to leave when desired, also received an education. Experiential learning produces a level of empathy and enlightenment not achievable in classrooms or in books, and Freedom Schools, albeit educating a relatively small number given the need, provided a space for frank interracial dialogue—unique experiences for both black and white participants that encouraged reflective reciprocal learning at a social level. Teachers witnessed the profound effects of poverty and had to learn how to improvise and instruct without the resources they had enjoyed, while fostering trust among children and families. Teachers left with new skills and knowledge—part of the reason itself for the Summer Project. Many would become involved in other social and political movements that roiled the sixties, and many would choose professions steeped in public service (from teachers and social workers to civil rights lawyers, leftist politicians, journalists, and physicians).
Many black children shed much of the fear ingrained in them for survival, replacing fright with resolve and courage. In these positive mentoring spaces, children unaccustomed to freedom from the stresses of Jim Crow outside of the home imagined alternative possibilities. Trained for the frontlines of the battle for civil rights and armed with knowledge and youthful optimism, these youngsters organized attempts to desegregate their schools and accelerated other desegregation campaigns. They pushed their voting-age kinfolk to seize opportunities to register to vote while they took other risks family breadwinners could not. Yet it is important to note that this was not a new phenomenon in 1964, and there is a risk of emphasizing one aspect of the movement over earlier local actions involving different groups (notably the NAACP and youth councils) who may not have participated in Freedom Summer in the same capacity as COFO volunteers. In short, many of these children had prior exposure to a decade of resistance in places like Clarksdale.
While not necessarily groundbreaking in its observations or research, Hale illustrates how the Freedom Schools engaged people possibly not involved in voter registration, widening the movement's reach and creating momentum for future programs (like the Algebra Project and summer enrichment programming). It is perhaps a slight overstatement to claim that the civil rights movement declined after Freedom Summer as local people's activism remained multipronged. For instance, Homer Hill in Clarksdale did not want to pay the “costly emotional and psychological price” for volunteering to desegregate Clarksdale High School (p. 159), but another Freedom School participant, Elnora Fondren, did take on the task and suffered immeasurably. As a result, some of the generalizations weaken Hale's study. He loses experiential variety by only tracing those who continued activist lives, it is easier to locate veterans and those plugged in to activist circles. Understanding his methodology for selection might prove useful here. Moreover, his narrative rests rather narrowly on the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) generation, the high school and college-age students whose more direct action and voter registration campaigns attracted publicity. This excludes more local people and histories already written that demonstrate how the focus may have shifted due to the new federal legislation tackling school desegregation, poverty, and economics. Indeed, Crystal Sanders demonstrates how the spirit of Freedom Summer continued in other forms.
Both authors agree that Freedom School ideas (and in many places, personnel) became institutionalized under Head Start, particularly CDGM in 1965. As protest pedagogy incorporated holistic care, new federally funded initiatives sought to support families and communities by catering to the youngest members. In A Chance for Change, Sanders's focus on CDGM enables her to demonstrate black people's (especially women) politicized epistemology as they “took rights” (p. 1). Circling her beautifully written narrative around the biographies of key women, from Unita Blackwell and Winnie Hudson to Lillie Short Ayers and Minnie Lewis, Sanders concurs with Hale's conclusions that the Freedom Schools and the Summer Project politicized local black communities more than electoral politics. In fact, these “ordinary” people understood the implications of coalition building and interracial and multilayered alliances as they debated the benefits of federal funding bringing jobs, meals, and health care against the real threat that outside influences and pressures might undo earlier protest work. With this understanding, they embraced any opportunity to bring resources to their communities. Project Head Start had the potential of creating economic stability for families, coming out from under the thumb of white supremacist control. CDGM was not the only Head Start program in the state, and it lasted only three years, but it was the largest, and it tapped into movement constituencies most aggressively.
Borrowing the concept of activist mothering to describe black women cultivating communal benefits through their work with young children and families, Sanders makes clear the threat Project Head Start presented to white supremacists. With an even hand, she acknowledges the real problems and criticisms leveled at CDGM, in part due to lack of training in accounting practices and professional support, norms, and standards of governmental bureaucracy foreign to novices. Yet the venom directed against CDGM proves the revolutionary potential for change in local power relations—and how power trumped reason, distracting the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) in Washington, DC, that eventually choked CDGM of funding and support.
Sanders delivers a fine-grained, multilayered history, from the OEO offices to the one-room classrooms on the back roads of the Mississippi Delta. Sometimes overwhelming in detail and minutiae, Sanders's approach demonstrates the messiness of the movement and the many moving parts that defy generalization. When it looked like CDGM would collapse after facing enemies entrenched in federal, state, and local governments, workers rallied, first relying on donated time, food, and space, and then securing federal funds for the third and last time by October 1967. Determination, tenacity, and homegrown wisdom—tenets that define the black freedom struggle over the longue durée—refused to cower to hierarchy or power. A national restructuring of grant-giving finally knocked the financial foundation out from under CDGM, but no one could deny how local black women and men's resourcefulness and ambition built coalitions and conquered steep learning curves in the face of multidirectional obstacles and attacks. Individuals trained in this battlefield went on to other opportunities and training, fulfilling professional dreams to be teachers and social workers through the spaces they had opened to democratize education.
Both authors understand the investment of time necessary to yield deep rich histories from the principal actors. They work to build precious archives during a unique moment in history as these voices fade. Hopefully, future generations will be able to access these sources. These books argue for a deep analysis of success. While the organizational structures on which both books center did not survive, the singular axis of winners and losers elides nuance, contradiction, and debate. Rather, Hale and Sanders argue for the multifaceted levels of investigation and evaluation required to understand change, empowerment, and success. If these organizations empowered individuals and families by developing a political consciousness that benefited their communities, but that did not reduce systemic poverty or secure voting rights, does this belie arguments advocating failure? Both authors would agree. While Freedom Summer's success depends on who asks whom, Hale insists that Freedom Schools proved their critics wrong and carried out their intent to the letter. Indeed the gift of Hale's book is the stories that provide a plurality of experiences and personal investments.
These books present examples of how education should positively and profoundly affect children's lives, stressing the power of knowledge alongside supportive, loving, and nurturing environments that embrace the entire community (not just the nuclear family). They argue for a particular practice, not policy. Rather than throwing money to the wind, they show how investing in training and living wages for local teachers yields the best results for children and communities. Working with children—deemed women's work and, therefore, apolitical (as already written elsewhere)—becomes a site for control when the power of knowledge threatens the social order. The force of the resistance reveals the extent of the threat; practice and policymaking struggles around education continue to undermine communities and compromise futures.
