Freedom Schools

Education and Civil Rights

The 1954 Brown v. Board decision outlawed segregation in public schools, legally ending the “separate but equal” doctrine established decades prior in the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court ruling. The Brown decision set off a wave of negative reactions from citizens opposed to its aim of racially mixed public schools throughout the United States. Freedom Schools in places like Prince Edward County, Virginia, were set up after local public school officials closed all schools from 1959 to 1964 rather than desegregate. Elsewhere, activists in cities such as Boston utilized Freedom Schools to protest public school segregation as over 10,000 black and white students in Boston staged “stay-outs” of Boston public schools in 1963 and 1964 to attend 34 Freedom Schools that had been set up throughout the city.

Mississippi was already at the center of the civil rights movement because of a number of major events that occurred there before Freedom Summer. In 1955, Mississippi was the site of Emmett Till's murder, in which the 14-year-old was brutally maimed and killed while visiting his uncle in Money, Mississippi. In 1962, the Mississippi National Guard had to be federalized and brought into Oxford, Mississippi, to quell a full-blown riot when James Meredith, a black man, was personally escorted by U.S. Department of Justice marshals and attorneys in order to register as the first black student at the University of Mississippi. In 1963, the murder of National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Field Secretary Medgar Evers sent shock waves throughout the nation when he was gunned down by his boastful assassin, Byron de la Beckwith, as Evers arrived home to his family in Jackson, Mississippi, one June night.

All these events made Mississippi a focal point of the civil rights movement and the primary destination of organizers from the north who wanted to make a positive impact on racial progress. Organizations such as the NAACP, the Student [Page 914]Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) planned a major undertaking scheduled for the summer of 1964, known as the Mississippi Summer Project, or Freedom Summer, in an effort to register as many black voters as possible in Mississippi after decades of systematic exclusion from the political process. Freedom Schools would become an integral part of this daunting and dangerous effort.

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