Pathway to Liberation: A History of the Freedom Schools and the Long Struggle for Justice

• In Event: Still in the Struggle: Education for Liberation in Freedom Schools

Abstract

This paper explores the history of the Freedom Schools and the Freedom School Movement. Beginning with the articulation of freedom and education during the era of slavery, this manuscript provides a historic overview of how freedom and education developed as part the long Black freedom struggle since the 1800s through its integration into contemporary “urban education” programs today. The article traces the evolution of the idea as manifest in the Freedmen’s Bureau schools through the first identification of “Freedom Schools” as students sought to educate themselves while incarcerated for protesting systemic discrimination during the early 1960s, which led to the historic manifestation of the Mississippi Freedom Schools in 1964. This history critically informed the work and vision of civil rights leader Marian Wright Edelman, who is founder and president emerita of the Children’s Defense Fund organization. Freedom Schools have been part of the Children’s Defense Fund since 1995.

Author

• Jon Hale, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
  Presenting Author