“Students as a Force for Social Change”: A History of the Freedom Schools and Head Start in Mississippi, 1963-1970

• In Event: Lessons From Below: Reshaping Southern and U.S. Educational History

Abstract

Objectives
This paper examines the history of the Freedom Schools and Head Start programs in the state of Mississippi between 1963 and 1970. The history is reconstructed around issues of desegregation and educational equity in order to demonstrate the role of alternative grassroots programs that challenged overarching local, state, and federal token desegregation and freedom of choice policies.

Perspectives
This paper develops a local yet critical perspective to examine the history of the Freedom Schools and Head Start in Mississippi. Oral histories are utilized to provide a critical social historical framework that examines this history from the perspective of actors at the local level to complicate the desegregation narratives that focus on federal intervention primarily through desegregation efforts.



Methodology
The history of these programs is reconstructed through the use of oral and social history. The oral history is comprised of twenty-five interviews, which were analyzed for themes of integration, equality, political organization, and access. These sources are contextualized with archival data analyzed for similar themes.

Data Sources
Twenty-five interviews were conducted with Freedom School and Head Start teachers and students. Additional sources include the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), and the Child Development Group of Mississippi (CDGM) papers. This history is also built upon the work of scholars that provide historical analysis of grassroots organization in the South including Vanessa Siddle Walker, David Cecelski, Charles Bolton, R. Scott Baker, Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, Kevin Kruse, and Joseph Crespino.

Results
This study reveals that local people were organizing around issues of access to higher education, implementing federal court desegregation orders, and equalizing resources in existing schools. Freedom School students integrated schools and public spaces while demanding fairer treatment in the schools. The organizational model and the emancipatory content of the Freedom Schools and the larger Freedom Summer campaign of 1964 influenced the implementation of Head Start, a massive federally funded program that established over 250 programs for 21,000 children. This organization was met with massive and more nuanced forms of white resistance. The connection between federal funds and civil rights activities, in addition to accelerating the federal timetable for desegregation, fueled a burgeoning conservative movement that moderated key positions in the oversight of education and put forth race-neutral and exclusionary policies of choice and privatized education.

Scholarly Significance
While historiographical shifts have deconstructed the “exceptional” nature of massive resistance in the South, the contributions of ongoing educational reform efforts of the Civil Rights Movement have been marginalized. This research builds upon histories of changing federal policy and nuanced white reactions by examining the history of alternative institutions in Mississippi such as the Freedom Schools and Head Start that used education as conduit for equitable access and opportunity. While the Brown v. Board of Education (1954) decision determined the parameters of integration, African American organization continued to proffer multiple programs to achieve equity and thereby expanded the conception of education as a public good for all students.

Author

• Jon Hale