“Say What you Really Believe”1: Freedom Schools, Youth Empowerment, and Black Power in 1960s Milwaukee

2020 ◽  
Vol 122 (7) ◽  
pp. 1-33
Author(s):  
Katerina Suchor
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Black Power ◽  
School Desegregation ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
School Curriculum ◽  
Youth Empowerment ◽  
Black Liberation ◽  
Freedom Schools ◽  
Core Components

Background The historical literature on the civil rights movement has tended to underemphasize the movement's educational activities, while literature on the civil rights and Black Power movements has overemphasized ideological and tactical differences between these chapters in the struggle for Black liberation. A few studies have examined Freedom Schools—educational projects established as part of larger civil rights campaigns—but these studies have focused almost exclusively on Freedom Schools in the Southern context. Purpose Focusing on Freedom Schools organized as part of a school desegregation campaign in Milwaukee during the mid-1960s, this article explores the pedagogical purpose and philosophy of the Freedom Schools, as distinct from other protest activities undertaken as part of the campaign, as well as the legacy of the Freedom Schools after the campaign's conclusion. Research Design This historical analysis examines materials such as lesson plans, flyers, and correspondence from the archives of the Milwaukee United School Integration Committee (MUSIC), the organization responsible for the school desegregation campaign. Findings This article shows that core components of the Freedom School curriculum, which sought to challenge deficit-oriented policies and empower youth to create social change, foreshadowed key tenets of Black Power ideology. Conclusions These findings suggest that the Freedom Schools, as important sites of ideological development, highlight continuity between the civil rights and Black Power movements and situate the Freedom Schools as part of a longer tradition of education for liberation and self-determination.

Curriculum of Social Movements

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Ayers ◽  
Rick Ayers ◽  
Joel Westheimer
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
21St Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
School Curriculum ◽  
Late 20Th Century ◽  
Freedom Schools ◽  
Black Neighborhoods ◽  
The World

Social movements change the world. Thus, they shape curriculum. Participation in movements educates the public by altering viewpoints and actions. Likewise, participants learn through participation in social movements; therefore, social movements can be considered curricula. The experiences of social movements are curricula that exist in and out of schools. Examples of the myriad connections among school curriculum, nonschool curriculum, and social movements interact in dynamic fluidity. Curriculum is much more than a course syllabus, set of plans, or the indoctrinations or liberations intended by schools. Curriculum includes all experiences of schooling and contexts that influence schooling: intended, taught, tested, hidden, excluded, outside, peer-driven, and more. It encompasses knowledge, relationships, and interpretations that students bring to school or anywhere else. These multiple dimensions of curriculum also exist in the diverse experiences, institutions, and gatherings of everyday life. Alternative forms of curriculum have been envisioned and enacted over the centuries to overcome the dominance of autocratic forms of education. Social movements educate and are therefore curricular. A noteworthy example of curricula of social movements is the Civil Rights Movement, particularly the Mississippi Freedom Schools in the United States. Another example is the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, founded by Myles Horton and based on the Danish model of folk schools, which was a center of inspiration and praxis for participants in the Civil Rights Movement. Emancipatory educational movements are exemplified in the problem-posing work of Paulo Freire, initially in Brazil, evolving to counter the oppressiveness of “banking” forms of education in many parts of the world. Freire has shown how oppressed persons could be major creators of their own education, by learning to name, write, and read the world to compose a more just world. In the second decade of the 21st century, young climate activists, such as Xiye Bastida and Greta Thunberg, have advocated ecological renewal; this has grown into a worldwide movement, captured in the title “Fridays for Future.” Local examples include the insightful stories in The Journal of Ordinary Thought, inspired and evoked by Hal Adams and authored by the parents of students in some of Chicago’s most impoverished Black neighborhoods in the late 20th century. Global movements include Black Lives Matter, which has manifested itself as an act of solidarity in the second decade of the 21st century. Social movements, of which the contributions of Martin Luther King, Jr. are an emblematic example, teach the power of learning and the learning of power. They help raise the deepest and most worthwhile questions: What does it mean to be human? Who am I in relation to others? What kind of a society do we want to create? How can schools and other public spaces become generative sites of contention and authentic engagement? That is where a curriculum of social movements comes to life. What lessons might educators learn from the examples of a curriculum of social movements? How should we live? How will we live? What will you do about it?

Introduction

Prison Power ◽  
2016 ◽  
pp. 3-20
Author(s):  
Lisa M. Corrigan
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Black Power ◽  
Rhetorical Analysis ◽  
State Repression ◽  
Black Liberation ◽  
Black Freedom Movement ◽  
Black Freedom ◽  
Contested Terrain ◽  
Freedom Movement

This introduction discusses the beginnings of the “jail, no bail” strategy in the southern civil rights movement, introduces the Black Power vernacular as a critical optic of the book, and charts the ways in which jailing and imprisonment were central features of the black freedom movement from Greensboro to Black Power. This chapter also introduces the writings of Rap Brown (Jamil Al-Amin), Mumia Abu-Jamal, and Assata Shakur as the central texts for this rhetorical analysis. Finally, the chapter suggests that these extremely popular, though understudied, writings are useful spaces to understand how imprisonment occupied a contested terrain, used simultaneously for black liberation and for state repression.

Women’s Activism in the Modern Movement for Black Liberation

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aisha A. Upton ◽  
Joyce M. Bell
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Black Feminism ◽  
Direct Action ◽  
Black Power Movement ◽  
Women's Activism ◽  
Black Liberation ◽  
Women's Participation ◽  
Modern Movement

This chapter examines women’s activism in the modern movement for Black liberation. It examines women’s roles across three phases of mobilization. Starting with an exploration of women’s participation in the direct action phase of the U.S. civil rights movement (1954–1966), the chapter discusses the key roles that women played in the fight for legal equality for African Americans. Next it examines women’s central role in the Black Power movement of 1966–1974. The authors argue that Black women found new roles in new struggles during this period. The chapter ends with a look at the rise of radical Black feminism between 1974 and 1980, examining the codification of intersectional politics and discussing the continuation of issues of race, privilege, and diversity in contemporary feminism.

1968: End of The Civil Rights Movement?

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Tuck
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Black Power ◽  
Local Level ◽  
Martin Luther ◽  
Black Communities ◽  
Conservative Politics ◽  
Martin Luther King ◽  
New Phase

1968 is commonly seen as the end of the classic era of modern civil rights protest: a year when Martin Luther King Jr. was killed, when violence seemed endemic in urban black communities, when Black Power groups fractured and when candidates opposed to further civil rights legislation made giant strides at the ballot box. 1968 seemed to usher in a decade bereft of major civil rights activity, ahead of a resurgence of conservative politics. And yet a look behind the headlines tells a different story in the post-1968 years at the local level: of increasing civil rights protest, of major gains in the courts and politics and the workplace, of substantial victories by Black Power activists, and calls for new rights by African American groups hitherto unrecognised by civil rights leaders. This chapter argues that in many ways 1968 marked the beginning of a vibrant new phase of race-centred activism, rather than the end, of the modern civil rights movement.

From Absence to Flight

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Terrence T. Tucker
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Black Power ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Slave Narratives ◽  
Black Power Movement

This chapter explores radicalization of comic rage in Douglas Turner Ward’s Day of Absence and Ishmael Reed’s Flight to Canada. Emerging in the middle of the transition from the integrationist period of the civil rights movement to the nationalism of the Black Power movement, both works openly challenge fundamental concepts about race. In addition to targeting fundamental assumptions of Western superiority, these works also question simplistic counter-representations that African Americans present to combat racist stereotypes. Using forms increasingly important in African American literature, like drama and neo-slave narratives, these works enact comic rage as way to depict unique and powerful forms of resistance.

Their Rhetoric Is That of Revolution

2019 ◽  
pp. 200-236
Author(s):  
Jelani M. Favors
Keyword(s):  
North Carolina ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Black Power ◽  
National Guard ◽  
Student Activism ◽  
Black Power Movement ◽  
Predominantly Black ◽  
Black America ◽  
Local Law Enforcement

This chapter discusses Greensboro, North Carolina as the unofficial headquarters for the Black Power Movement in the south and the role that North Carolina A&T State University played in facilitating that development. Since the dawn of the turbulent 60s, A&T had been a force for change and an epicenter for student activism. With the dawning of the Black Power Movement, A&T students completely embraced the rhetoric of the era and followed it up with action. Those activists’ energies fed other Black Power initiatives across the state and soon led to the creation of a new national organization, as well as a powerful local organization that embodied the shifting agenda of the civil rights movement to address abject poverty throughout Black America. Those energies also attracted the attention of local law enforcement and the National Guard, which invaded the campus in May of 1969, shot and killed a student, and terrorized the predominantly black side of Greensboro. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the shifting landscape of HBCUs during the early 70s and the external and internal pressures that arrested the development of Black Power organizations during the decade.

Trouble in My Way

2019 ◽  
pp. 133-160
Author(s):  
Jelani M. Favors
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
University President ◽  
State University ◽  
Campus Environment ◽  
Black Liberation ◽  
Jackson State University ◽  
History Of

This chapter examines the strained history of Jackson State University during the aftermath of World War II and leading up to the modern civil rights movement. Located in the heart of Mississippi, Jackson State students carved out space to express their militancy as the war came to a close. However, they quickly felt that space collapse around them as segregationists tightened their grip on the Magnolia State as the burgeoning movement for black liberation challenged the oppressive traditions of the most socially and politically closed state in the country. Administrators such as Jackson State University president Jacob Reddix quickly fell in line with the expectations of his immediate supervisors and squared off against outspoken scholar-activists such as famed poet and novelist Margaret Walker. The standoff resulted in a campus environment fraught with tension yet still producing students and faculty determined to undermine Jim Crow.

A Chink in the Armor: The Black-Led Struggle for School Desegregation in Arlington, Virginia, and the End of Massive Resistance

2001 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 329-366 ◽  
Author(s):  
James McGrath Morris
Keyword(s):  
Public School ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Black Student ◽  
School Desegregation ◽  
School Integration ◽  
Board Of Education ◽  
Massive Resistance ◽  
Segregated Schools ◽  
White School

As it had for countless other children in Arlington, Virginia, the idyll days of summer had come to end for eleven-year-old Edward Leslie Hamm Jr. on the morning of 5 September 1957. After donning a pair of clean khaki pants and a freshly pressed, short-sleeved white shirt, Hamm was heading back to the classroom along with twenty-one thousand other students in this Northern Virginia community. That alone was enough to put a pit in any child's stomach. But for Hamm the day possessed an added dimension. Instead of riding a bus for forty-five minutes to the Negro school six miles across the county, his parents were dispatching him, along with two other black pupils, to challenge the continued exclusion of blacks from the all-white school, one mile from their isolated exclusively black neighborhood. A full three years after Brown v. Board of Education, not a single black student had yet attended a white public school in Virginia, seen by many observers as the frontline state of resistance to school integration. The three children were nervous and took no comfort in thinking of themselves among a vanguard of the civil rights movement. “I wasn't into an integration thing,” recalled George Tyrone Nelson, who was fourteen at the time and among the trio challenging the segregated schools that day.

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