Quality Education by Local Demand: Contesting Moderate Educational Reform through the Mississippi Freedom Schools, 1954-1965

“There were generations of conversations about the situation that we were in, about the absence of political rights, about the absence of economic opportunity, there were passed from generation

to generation and it was not actually until people were able to actually do something that these transcripts became public.”

- Homer Hill, a Freedom School student in Clarksdale, Mississippi

Students like Homer Hill were too young to celebrate the Brown v. Board of Education

(1954) decision when the Supreme Court struck down the constitutionality of racial segregation.

When Homer Hill and his contemporaries decided to enroll in a Freedom Schools ten years after

the Brown decision during the summer of 1964, they still attended segregated schools. Yet, like

Hill, students observed the curious nuances of attending school in the wake of the decision.

Homer Hill and other students recollected the foundational knowledge they learned to challenge

inequality such as “the absence of political rights,” and “the absences of economic opportunity,”

from teachers within black segregated schools. These seeds of knowledge constituted a notion of

educational reform that was not necessarily on par with the integrationist stance put forth in the

Brown decision. When the Freedom Schools opened their doors ten years later during the summer

of 1964, these students were still living the “troubled legacy” of this monumental ruling on a daily

basis. In the process of experiencing both the adverse conditions of underfunded segregated

facilities and learning about the artful forms of resistance, the schooling experiences of African

American youth in Mississippi represent a broad spectrum that encapsulates competing ideologies

about how educational reform during the Civil Rights Movement should be defined. Competing

ideologies laid the groundwork for the educational initiatives of the Black Power Movement

because the development of the Mississippi Freedom Schools challenged the nature of educational

reform that pushed solely for the desegregation of American public schools across the country

during the Brown v. Board of Education (1954) era.

Civil Rights activists organized a network of Freedom Schools that offered a competing

and alternative reform model to desegregating schools. The most visible moments of the Civil

Rights Movement in the wake of the Brown decision focused on desegregating public spaces and

services -- the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott, the 1957 desegregation of Little Rock High

School, the 1960 desegregation of lunch counters, the 1961 desegregation of the bus terminals,

and the 1962 desegregation of the University of Mississippi, among many other heroic feats of

entering segregated spaces across the country. These events collectively defined the primary

objective of the Civil Rights Movement: desegregation. Yet the intellectual genesis of the

Freedom Schools was grounded in a narrative focused on providing a quality education, in

segregated schools or otherwise. This certainly connected to desegregating schools, as many

believed equality education could only be achieved through entering the white schools that

benefitted from many more resources. But an important part of reform also included improving

the quality of education and policy within existing segregated schools as well. These ideas

encompassed reform for quality education, not necessarily desegregation, which played on ideas

passed down for generations. Ten years after the Supreme Court declared segregated schooling

unconstitutional; the public schools that students attended were still segregated. Activists, activist

educators, and students challenged this by building an alternative system to the currently unjust

one, a bold predecessor to the Black Power Liberation Schools of the late 1960s, and an ironic

counterpart to the all white private academies that sprang up across Mississippi and across the

country to avoid desegregation. By developing the Freedom Schools and implementing Freedom

School pedagogy, Civil Rights activists built schools and enacted educational policy that

challenged the dominant integrationist paradigm associated with the Brown decision.

This paper explores the Brown v. Board of Education (1954) decision as the dominant

paradigm of the Civil Rights Movement, but strongly contests the notion that desegregation

captured the essence of educational reform between 1954 and 1964. The history of the

Mississippi Freedom Schools illustrates the fluid and tenuous nature of educational reform during

the Civil Rights Movement. The Freedom Schools embody the tensions, contradictions, nuances

and competing ideologies that existed during the movement. In 1964, the landscape of public

education in the United States was changing. Though still segregated from their white peers,

Homer Hill benefitted from new school facilities, enlarged campuses, and more money spent on

black education since the creation of a racially segregated system of education in 1890. At the

same time, students understood the premise for a separate education and the discriminatory

funding structure that denied resources essential to a quality education. It was also in 1964 that

students and their families were beginning to make the choice of whether or not to attend public

schools that the state of Mississippi was desegregating for the first time. Moreover, students were

also acting upon long traditions of education for resistance. Students experienced, then, a form of

educational reform not wholly determined by the Supreme Court and fierce white resistance to

desegregation. Black students and their families struggled and organized for a quality education,

which consisted of integration but it also equally called for a separate education, an activist-

oriented curriculum and education for citizenship.

Interpreting the Freedom Schools in light of the Brown v. Board of Education (1954) Decision

The history of the Mississippi Freedom Schools necessarily connects to the Brown v.

Board of Education (1954) decision, which carries important implications in the historiography of

the Civil Rights Movement.i In reference to the Brown decision, Richard Kluger wrote, “the

outcome of the case… would change American profoundly. The injustice it sought to end has

persisted since the settlement of the New World.”ii James Patterson, in his historical analysis of

the decision regarded Brown as “the most eagerly awaited and dramatic judicial decision of

modern times.”iii As legal scholar Jack Balkin stated, “there is no doubt that [the Brown decision]

is the single most honored opinion in the Supreme Court’s corpus. The civil rights policy of the

United States in the last half century has been premised on the correctness of Brown.”iv Brown’s

significance has important implications in the popular understanding of the decision and its role in

the history of the Civil Rights movement. Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP began a wide legal

assault on the unequal funding of schools, which culminated in the historic decision. In this larger

interpretation, the laborious legal work, the scrupulous evidence collected to demonstrate the

negative effect of segregation on black schoolchildren, and the carefully constructed constitutional

argument advocating for desegregation essentially laid the foundations of the Civil Rights

movement. “The activism of Marshall and others who led legal campaigns for civil rights,”

historian James Patterson asserted, was one of the “three most powerful forces behind changes in

American relations at the time.”v The scholarly analysis is rightfully conducted and the

significance of the decision is justified in the analyses of legal scholars and movement historians.

The import assigned to the decision by observers at the time and scholars since then has

called for scrupulous examination of the merits of the Brown decision and the implementation of

its edict. This has led to an increasingly critical gaze cast upon the decision in the first half-

century after the ruling has generated productive discourse that recognizes the segregated nature of

schools today. James Anderson examined the legacy but also the cutting edge of desegregation.vi

The unprecedented number of teachers fired, the enduring harassment the first waves of students

to desegregate schools faced, and the widespread closure of premier and well-respected high

schools that benefitted from a committed community of scholars rightly raised critical questions

about the integrity of the aftermath of Brown and Brown II.

Still, at the same time, an overarching focus on the Brown decision, though rightfully

important, masks the multifarious nature of educational reform of the long Civil Rights

Movement. The Freedom Schools embodied notions of educational reform that did not focus on

desegregation as well as a general approach to improving the quality of education, in regards to

quality of teaching, the curriculum, and fairer treatment between the administration and students.

An integrationist approach by no means represented a consensus for reform among the African

American community. Ideological differences played a role as well, suggesting the NAACP and

the push for integration was not the only mouthpiece of educational reform among disenfranchised

African Americans. As mentioned above, the teachers union, the NAACP, spearheaded the

equalization campaign and the plaintiff was Gladys Noel Bates. Many of these cases were filed

and worked through with the support of Edward Bishop, a key participant in the Mississippi

Teachers Association (the state’s black teacher union), and the principal of the black high school

in Corinth, MS.vii For the parents of the Freedom School students, those who attended school in

1954, the new schools presented a new opportunity to continue education beyond the level they

completed. The battle forged through the equalization campaigns was an early form of activism.

On May 17, 1954 the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education decision deemed

segregation in public education unconstitutional. It overturned the “separate but equal” clause

established in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). As the decision not only ruled against segregation in

education but all of Jim Crow policy in the South, the decision was nothing short of a crisis for

white Mississippians. As one editorial in Jackson stated, “May 17, 1954, may be recorded by

future historians as a black day of tragedy for the South.”viii The Jackson Clarion-Ledger

published the opinion that “the ruling of the Supreme Court will go down in history as the most

unwise, unnecessary, unfair and ineffective decision that the Supreme Court has ever made.”ix

Senator James Eastland warned that, “any attempt to integrate our schools would cause great strife

and turmoil…we will take whatever steps necessary to retain segregation in our schools.”x These

outright hostile responses were tempered by the relatively calm response given by Governor Hugh

White. Governor White told citizens that this was a “time for all citizens to use their heads and not

their mouths.” He said that state officials were “going to proceed very cautiously and slowly, and

try to work out the problems that face us.” xi Mississippians expected a more violent reaction, but

in reality the initial reaction was more of a subdued calm, almost a shock. White Mississippians

eventually commended Governor White for “taking the Supreme Court edict calmly and

withholding comment until the full impact can be digested and some means found to follow a safe

and sound course.”xii The reaction was not as violent as one would expect, but a steadfast

resistance to integration was universal: no elected or appointed official in Mississippi agreed with

the Supreme Court decision. Moreover, state officials deliberately took a slow approach in

dealing with the decision. The day after the reading, the mayor of Jackson, the Mississippi

attorney general, and the state superintendent stated they needed to read and study the decision in

detail. The attorney general refused to file a segregation brief in the school segregation cases

because he saw it like “being summoned to assist in writing a death warrant when you were not a

party to the trial which resulted in the death penalty.”xiii The state superintendent echoed the

common perception that “mutual understanding between leaders of the races in this state will

result in continuation of a dual system of education.”xiv The white-controlled Mississippi press

diluted the violent reactions the decision stirred. The decision was controversial in liberal parts in

the country but in the south it was an act of treason.

The young African American students that led the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s, the

decision often translated into hope were of school age and they were in school to appreciate the

significance and potential of this historic decision. As John Lewis, SNCC president during the

Freedom Summer Campaign of 1964, recalled: “As I began my sophomore year in the fall of 1954

by climbing onto the same beat-up school bus and making the same twenty-mile trip to the same

segregated high school I’d attend the year before. Brown v. The Board of Education

notwithstanding, nothing in my life had changed.”xv As Lewis and others came to appreciate, the

Brown v. Board of Education (1954) decision, they realized both the long struggle that lay ahead

but also the long history upon which their actions rested.

Freedom through Education: A Long History of Educational Reform and Access

The original push for quality education, the historic movement that reached a major

milestone in 1954 can be traced back to the eighteenth century when slavery was still legal and

served as the economic background of the Southern United States. The struggle for a quality

education has deep roots in a long history extending back to the era of slavery, when white slave

owners and the architects of antebellum Southern governments denied African Americans any

form of education and literacy. Frederick Douglass, the great abolitionist of the nineteenth

century, attached great significance to the words his owner used to describe the education

Douglass received. “Education,” his owner reasoned, would “unfit him to be a slave.” Douglass

remembered in his autobiography that:

These words sank deep into my heart, stirred up sentiments within that lay slumbering, and called into existence an entirely new train of thought. It was a new and special revelation, explaining dark and mysterious things, with which my youthful understanding had struggled, but struggled in vain. I now understood what had been to me an almost

perplexing difficulty-to wit, the white man’s power to enslave the black man. It was a grand achievement, and I prized it highly. From that moment, I understood the pathway from slavery to freedom.xvi

Frederick Douglass was one of the thousands of enslaved people who struggled to learn to read

and write by any means necessary under the threat of strict corporeal punishment, or worse.

Douglass epitomized the struggle to secure literacy in a society owned by whites and he

articulated the meaning of education to those oppressed by the chains of slavery. Frederick

Douglass, the African American community and other progressive educators consistently and

universally viewed education as the means to freedom, liberation, and full equality. African

Americans in Mississippi followed similar patterns across the South. Over one hundred years

prior to the Civil Rights Movement, freed slaves organized grassroots schools during and after the

Civil War. Indeed, the first schools for blacks were those established in the territory occupied by

the Union Army. In Northern Mississippi, in Holly Springs, Natchez, Vicksburg and other towns

on the river, freed slaves established the very first schools in the South, in conjunction with the

northern army and beneficiary societies. Freed people established these first schools in the state of

Mississippi with a desire to learn and the collective recognition that education would lead to

freedom.xvii Ida B. Wells, born in Holly Springs, Mississippi in 1862, and John R. Lynch, a black

Reconstruction-era black politician and the first black speaker of the House in Mississippi later

elected to the United States House of Representatives during the 1860s, served as the first

stalwarts and defenders of public and universal education in Mississippi. Ida B. Wells and John

R. Lynch were the first civil rights leaders in the state of Mississippi and their commitment to

providing an education served as the foundation upon which rested the Civil Rights Movement of

the 1960s.xviii

The Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) decision, which stated that separate facilities were

constitutional as long as they were equal, marked the end of the nineteenth century and the

beginning of the Jim Crow era. The “separate but equal” doctrine determined the contours of

economic, political, social and educational conditions under the age of Jim Crow. Despite the

legal barriers of segregation, African Americans in Mississippi, and across the south, attached

great meaning to education and worked feverishly to provide any education possible to children.

With the self-help initiatives that had strong roots in the freed peoples community, blacks

furnished schools, teachers and curricular materials to provide even a rudimentary education to as

many children as possible. Many of the debates in regards to the purpose of the curriculum, for

instance a vocational emphasis advocated by Booker T. Washington or a liberal arts college

preparatory curriculum advocated by W.E.B. Dubois, signify the ideologically rich discourse that

surrounded black education during the first half of the twentieth century.xix What remained

constant throughout the history of African American education is the fact that the schoolhouse

represented an institution, an ideology, and a collective space through which to achieve full

political, economic and social rights. Through education, generations of activists reasoned,

students of color could gain full entry into the American social.xx The ideological debates about

what form education should take created a rich discourse within the African American community

and the first and primary objective remained to provide a quality education as the means to

freedom – not necessarily desegregation.

Communities in Mississippi had long utilized education as a means to freedom. Black

communities since Reconstruction established independent systems of education in the state of

Mississippi that would meet their needs and desires better than the schools provided by state

governments, missionaries, benefactors, and various agencies, which often employed a curriculum

designed to maintain an oppressive status quo. Working under a dual system of segregated

education, black communities consistently pooled meager resources to provide a more liberal

education than offered by the state. Since communities had a history of developing and

maintaining their own schools, they were in a position to better control the direction of the schools

and to develop programs that met the needs of the community as they changed. These educational

initiatives followed in the grassroots organizing tradition of strong black leadership that produced

the most revered teachers of the movement and mentor of student activists of the 1960s, such as

Septima Clark and Ella Baker.xxi

Providing the best education possible with the sparse resources provided by the state

translated into a national equalization campaign spearheaded by the NAACP, whose lawyers were

building the case for Brown well before the decision was reached in 1954. Beginning with the

careful selection and training of an elite legal team from Howard University, Charles Hamilton

Houston and his protégée Thurgood Marshall mounted the legal assault that resulted in

overturning the Plessy decision. One of the first plans of the NAACP, which backed the legal

team, was to bankrupt the segregated system by challenging the “equal” portion of the “separate

but equal” doctrine. The NAACP aggressively pursued education cases to challenge Jim Crow in

the courts. By the mid-1940s the Supreme Court was beginning to rule in favor of desegregation in

universities in Oklahoma and Texas.xxii Additionally, federal judges in the Deep South began to

require that states begin equalizing funding of black schools in order to fulfill “separate but equal”

requirements.xxiii In a clandestine meeting in Mississippi, educators and other NAACP members

met and invited Thurgood Marshall to discuss the possibility of filing an equalization suit. Gladys

Noel Bates, a teacher at Brinkley High School in Jackson, Mississippi, served as the plaintiff in

the case that sued the state of Mississippi for pay equal to that of the white teachers in Jackson in

1948.xxiv Like other black educators that stood up for equal pay, the white school board did not

renew her contract.

The Mississippi state legislature eventually acquiesced to equalization. In a move that was

reflected across the South, the Mississippi legislature made weak gestures toward an equalization

plan for its segregated public schools. With desegregation on the horizon, the Mississippi state

legislature manipulated the state system of education to improve schools provided to African

American students. In an effort to keep both the local black community and the federal level

complacent, the state legislature adopted equalization plans in a “good faith” effort to live up to

the Plessy edict than fulfill the impending order to desegregate. The very prospect of

desegregation prompted speaker of the House Walter Sillers to state in 1953, “if a non-segregated

system of school were established the white race would be mongrelized.” In order to maintain it,

he was quoted as saying that he would “gladly give up my property and my life if necessary to

preserve the integrity of segregation. But it isn’t necessary; we can do it by law.”xxv Sillers and

others were conscious of the fact that the state constitution was subject to federal oversight,

however. When Mississippi legislators perceived in 1953 that a federal order to desegregate was

on the horizon, they swiftly acted to maintain segregation by legal means other than a

constitutional amendment. As politicians viewed desegregation as challenging the very essence of

the Southern way of life, the Mississippi legislation consented to equalization as the lesser of two

evils, though more in principle than actual financial spending.

To avoid desegregation in the early 1950s Mississippi legislators manipulated state laws in

three ways. The first option was to pass an equalization plan. Equalizing education was a lesser

of two evils for Mississippi and they began to do so in good faith, hoping to demonstrate that

desegregation would not be needed in the Magnolia State. The equalization plan consisted of

equalizing funding in ways such as teacher salaries and facility construction and renovation. But

at the same time, legislators explored two other options that could be used in the event of court

ordered desegregation if equalization plans were not enough to maintain segregation. The second

option after equalization was to grant the state legislature the authority to abolish the public school

system if they chose to do so in the event of court ordered desegregation. The state House and

Senate passed the resolution three times in order to make the act of abolishing public schools

constitutional. This option initially included a provision to sell school property and appropriate

the funds to establish a private school system. The third option was to establish a private school

system. The latter option came to fruition in 1964 when the federal courts ordered to Mississippi

districts to desegregate. However, in 1953 state policymakers ultimately choose the first option of

equalization and they began to consider a $45 million program to equalize the state educational

system. Though an equalization plan was adopted it was never fully funded. The state legislature

waited until the Court decision was handed down until they actually began to fund the equalization

plan.xxvi But it was largely an empty rhetorical gesture. It was never funded properly since full

equalization would have bankrupted the state.

Educational funding followed the patterns of discrimination demonstrated in the political

and economic conditions of Mississippi blacks. Existing state law dictated that public schools

funds were to be distributed equally “in proportion to the number of educable children in

each.”xxvii But local white officials were free to divert tax money technically designated to black

schools and openly spend it on white schools. Just like the registrars, local officials in charge of

local funds were free to spend as they wished. Black students attending segregated schools

between 1954 and 1965 comprised fifty-seven percent of school-age students throughout the state

of Mississippi. These students, however, received only thirteen percent of state funds.xxviii By

1955, educational funding had continued to increase, but was far from equal to white funding.

Local officials in Hattiesburg, for instance, appropriated $536,341, yet distributed $157,632 or

approximately twenty-nine percent of the total fund for black education.xxix Per county spending

on a dual system of education in similarly disparaging. North Pike County spent $30.89 for each

white student, and $.79 for each black student. In South Pike County, white students were

provided $59.55, whereas black students were appropriated on average $1.35. In the city of

Hattiesburg, the $61.69 spent for each black student surpasses those of white rural students, yet

pales in comparison to the $115.96 city white children were receiving.xxx Black teachers similarly

suffered in terms of state funding. The average salary of a white teacher the year of the Brown

decision was $2,177, while the average salary for a black teacher was $1,244. Ten years later in

1964 when state legislators were “equalizing” education to avoid integration, white teachers

averaged $4,321, while black educators only earned $3,566.xxxi

To compound this financial disparity still further, one assumption behind Jim Crow was

that blacks should pay for their own education. Whites subscribed to the false assumption that

white tax dollars paid for black education, which in the majority opinion was a useless endeavor.

In a pro-segregationist pamphlet, the Jefferson County Citizens’ Council wrote in the wake of the

Brown decision that, “the response of our colored friends has been disheartening. We hear no

acknowledgment of the millions that have been spent for them…if a gift made annually is treated

with contempt, it should be discontinued…Who pays for education here? Answer: The White

People of our State pay for it.”xxxii Whites assumed that whites paid most of the taxes since two-

thirds of taxes were derived from property taxes and blacks generally did not own land. However,

to offset their own tax payments, whites often utilized “tax shifting,” the process by which

planters, landowners and business owners could shift or “share” the initial tax responsibility to

others (mostly blacks) in alternative taxation methods such as excise taxes, poll taxes, sales taxes,

civil fines, etc. In addition, the entire Southern economy was based upon black labor.xxxiii Black

Mississippians, then, paid a disproportionate share of state appropriated taxes, yet received

significantly less than they contributed. Blacks not only paid for the majority of white-only

schools, they were left with little financial assistance for their own schools. This precarious

situation forced blacks to utilize a method of “double taxation.” African Americans were thus

resigned to elicit private contributions, in essence another tax, to pay for their own schools.

Double taxation was often required as private, missionary, and Northern contributions often

demanded black communities match their own contributions. xxxiv Considering the divergence of

black taxes and the subscription of private contributions within black communities, W.E.B. Du

Bois was certainly justifiable in postulating that blacks paid for 113 percent of their own

education.xxxv

While state officials were deliberately slow in dealing with the decision, behind closed

doors legislators immediately looked for ways to legally circumvent the decision. Whether hostile

or calm, most whites agreed that the decision was blasphemous to the Southern way of life and

segregationists were united in their refusal to integrate. Just what path of refusal the state would

take was a matter left to the legislature. The first step by the state was to create the Mississippi

Legal Education Advisory Committee, a twenty five-person board given the task to come up with

the legal means to sidestep the integration court order. It was headed by Governor Hugh White

and made up of leading legislators.xxxvi Since legislators were dealing with the prospect of

desegregation well before the Brown decision, the same three options developed by the state in the

early 1950s – abolishing public schools, creating an alternative private school system or

equalizing school funding – were still available. Schools were not integrated that fall as the South

waited to hear how the court would enforce integration. When the Court ruled in the second

Brown decision on May 31, 1955, that school districts were to begin desegregation with “all

deliberate speed,” and at the hands of local courts, Mississippi chose to continue its equalization

plans.xxxvii

In the meantime, the Brown decision was a euphoric occasion for many blacks in

Mississippi, at least for the NAACP. The NAACP, the organization that brought the Brown case

to the Supreme Court, read the “all deliberate speed” decision as a time to implement the Court’s

decision to desegregate. But white retaliation would reveal that whites were not about to integrate

and any attempts to do so were dealt with swiftly by the Citizen’s Council, whose very purpose

was to prevent integration without violence, if possible. In August of 1954, a delegation from the

Walthall County NAACP branch filed the first desegregation suits in the state. The petitioners

very soon after faced grand jury subpoenas on trumped-up charges. Though the charges were

dropped, no desegregation suits were filed until after the 1955 implementation decision.xxxviii

Within weeks of the 1955 decision that ordered districts to integrate with all deliberate speed, the

NAACP instructed its branches to take immediate steps to integrate. Black parents filed

desegregation petitions in Clarksdale, Jackson, Natchez, Vicksburg and Yazoo City, only to be

countered with fierce Citizens’ Council resistance. In Yazoo City, the Citizens Council published

the names and addresses of the petitioners. Whites fired the petitioners who worked for them and

independent businessmen lost business to boycotts. More than a dozen were forced to leave the

area in order to find work. The Council also published the names of petitioners in Vicksburg and

Jackson, which was enough to end the desegregation suits there.xxxix The Citizens Council went

further than intimidating the parents who filed desegregation suits. When Mississippi was ordered

to begin token integration in 1964, the Citizens’ Council members were some of the first to open a

private academy in Jackson.xl

But not all blacks agreed with the decision necessarily and most black families did not

apply to desegregate all-white schools. Divisions in the black community over integration or

establishing separate schools shaped and divided freedom movement participants in important

ways throughout the 1960s and into today. Percy Greene, the conservative and controversial

editor of the Jackson Advocate congratulated the governor in his reaction to Brown and argued for

more black-white cooperation. In the 1950s, when he was on the payroll of the State Sovereignty

Commission, Greene denounced the Brown decision, the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the

integration of Little Rock. Though he lost all credibility in the black community in the 1950s, he

represented one segment of the black community that was afraid to lose their jobs due to

desegregation.xli The Brown decision received lukewarm reception by Mississippi teachers as

well. Adam Fairclough estimated that there was no clear consensus among black educators in the

South about the decision. Many teachers cited that inequality would exist either way, that black

teachers would not be afforded respect during integration or, most importantly, integration would

trigger an unprecedented loss of jobs. Despite such fears, the NAACP tried to reassure teachers.

They viewed that any pain incurred during the desegregation process was necessary if society was

to progress.xlii

By the spring of 1964 Mississippi was the last state to begin any integration of public

schools. Federal action finally took place in 1964, when U.S. District Judge Sidney Mize ordered

school officials in Jackson, Biloxi and Leake County to submit desegregation plans that would

integrate the public schools by July 15, 1964.xliii The requirements were that public schools

would integrate at least one grade per year, a strategy known as a “stair-step” plan. As schools

were ordered to segregate at least one grade at a time, full integration was avoided. By this time it

was clear to school administrators that the equalization program would not work as the legal

means to avoid integration – indeed, it had never been fully implemented beyond a good faith

effort since the state never appropriated the required amount. But this was not to say the courts

and law would not be used to try to sidestep integration. Jackson and Biloxi immediately appealed

the decision but the order to integrate was upheld, reluctantly, in early July 1964.xliv Mississippi

legislators made arrangements to lay the groundwork for a private system of education to offer

whites a way to avoid attending school with black children.

One obvious result of this history of segregation policy and an under-funded dual system

of education was a lack of educational attainment. Between 1954 and 1965, sixty-six percent of

white students entering first grade completed high school. Only thirty-one percent of black

students entering the first grade would actually complete high school.xlv But the intersection of

educational attainment, race and economic standing throughout Mississippi is especially

devastating, particularly in predominantly black counties. In Belzoni, Humphreys County and

seventy percent black, thirty-two percent of the county completed four years of high school or

more, there was a ten percent unemployment rate, and sixty-two percent earned under $3000 per

year. In Hollandale, Washington County and fifty-five percent black, twenty-six percent of the

county completed four years or more of high school, there was a six percent unemployment rate,

and sixty-one percent earned under $3000. In Leland County, thirty percent completed four years

of high school or more, there was a nine percent unemployment rate, and forty-nine percent earned

under $3000 per year. When these rates are compared to the wealthiest counties in the state, the

differences are drastic. In Clinton, in one of the wealthiest counties in the state and only forty

percent black, seventy-four percent of the residents completed four years of high school or more,

there was a three percent unemployment rate, and only thirty percent earned under $3000 per

year.xlvi Public black educators were still the recipient of vastly different and unequal distribution

of resources, which to generations of scholars necessarily translated into inferior or a deficient

education. Like other “outsiders,” the white teachers who moved to Mississippi to teach in the

Freedom Schools during the summer of 1964 commonly used adjectives like impoverished,

inadequate, and inferior to describe the black school experience. In other words, grossly

underfunded black schools were not a place for places termed democratic equality – a perennial

goal that education could and should be used to transmit the responsibilities and knowledge to

participate in a democratic society.

The Freedom School students recalled the popular narrative that black schools and confirm

the deleterious effects of attending all-black schools in Mississippi in the wake of the Brown

decision, which, by their very segregated nature, were in fact inferior. The segregated schools in

Jackson were underfunded and lent themselves to unpleasant experiences, if not worse. Hezekiah

Watkins, a Freedom Rider who at the age of fourteen was arrested in the milieu surrounding the

Freedom Rides, attended Rowan Middle School, just north of downtown Jackson, where all

schools in walking distance from black neighborhood – no bus for city school in predominantly

white, going to school in the rain, in the cold, white kids hurling racial explicates turned into what

Watkins referred to as “a daily chore but a courageous act to put themselves through school.”xlvii

Homer Hill remembered walking to Higgins High School in the city of Clarksdale and similarly

being passed by white students on the way to school. Hill also experienced the frustration when

the band, one of the extracurricular activities offered at Higgins, was at the mercy on the

unpredictable availability of school bus from a local white school.xlviii Students endured insults,

underfunded facilities and a vastly different and separate system of education that students still

attended until the Freedom Schools opened in 1964.

Working Within and Outside the Schools

Outside of this history of Brown v. Board of Education (1954) decision, educational reform

occurred in different ways, both complementary and alternative to the integrationist stance of the

NAACP. As the Civil Rights Movement gained momentum in the late 1950s, educational reform

also complemented the struggle for the right to vote and to desegregate public spaces. Education

was the lynchpin used both by whites to maintain a carefully constructed political economic

system of hegemony and by African Americans to gain access to and improve the quality of life

across the country. Indeed, access to education and better educational resources were always a top

priority of the freedom movement. Alternative programs that filled a void in the regular education

system or supplanted the system existed alongside a system that was conducive to the movement.

The Citizenship Schools, a small adult literacy program from John’s Island, South Carolina,

illustrates the point well. Black activists established Citizenship Schools across the South to teach

adults the skills and knowledge needed to read and write in order to vote. In 1955, Esau Jenkins

and Septima Clark developed the idea of Citizenship Schools while attending a workshop at

Highlander Folk School, a liberal adult education center and program established by Myles

Horton, a white liberal with roots in eastern Tennessee. Jenkins, a South Carolina native from

Johns Island was a farmer who supplemented his income by providing transportation for islanders

who worked on the mainland. Inspired to improve the standard of living for the island’s

financially impoverished blacks, Jenkins was acutely aware of the correlation between illiteracy

and a lack of political power on the island. He used his bus to begin to teach the tools of literacy.

After various sessions at Highlander, Jenkins returned home with a plan to open an education

center to teach locals how to read and write.xlix The advent of the Citizenship Schools is further

evidence of not only a full commitment to education, but also how black activists created schools

to serve explicitly political purposes. The schools were segregated by nature, but only because

whites – outside of the small committed cadre of white activists – would not voluntarily attended

schools owned by African Americans. Through the use of Citizenship Schools and other

alternative schools (like the Freedom Schools), educator activists utilized educational reform

models to further the objectives of the Civil Rights Movement.

Though programs like the Citizenship Schools were a major success, African Americans in

Mississippi and across the South never abandoned the public school model. Oral histories from

the Freedom School students reveal that their parents attended school at a time when seventy

percent of African Americans over twenty-five years of age had less than a seventh-grade

education; less than five percent finished high school.l The children of student activists did not

receive an education past the sixth or seventh grade and left school either to assist economically

with the family or because of a lack of opportunity to attend high school. Education, in other

words, was a highly desired goal, but one that would not always be achieved. Still, based on

experiences in both segregated schools and on-going civil rights efforts, students educated during

the highly racialized interwar period - those who became the parents of the Civil Rights generation

- pushed their children to attend schools like the Freedom Schools or other schools that advanced

the education of their children and community. Though denied the opportunity to attend schools

themselves, these parents pushed their children to attend schools that presented a genuine

opportunity to improve their communities.

Local communities across the state enrolled in the new schools and filled whatever space

local school boards and government created in their feeble attempt to equalize funding to the black

system of education. During this time period just before Brown but well into the 1960s, southern

states like Mississippi began to build more schools for the black community, expand or remodel

the black schools that already existed, and made other gestures, such as equalizing teachers

salaries. The Civil Rights students benefitted from this struggle and campaign. The parents of the

students’ activism took the form of mobilizing to take full advantage of the increased resources

made available in the 1950s through legislation initiated in the equalization campaigns. Homer

Hill received the opportunity to attend Higgins High School, a new black school in the city of

Clarksdale. Without this town school, it is likely he would have had to attended Coahoma County

Agricultural School – six miles outside town, the school is mother had to attend. Eddie James

Carthan’s schooling experiences illustrate the trajectory of the equalization campaigns of the

1950s and 1960s as well. His mother first attended a private school in a local church, which was,

to his knowledge, the only available education to blacks in Tchula. His mother graduated in

Tchula’s first school, which was actually the first school in Mississippi with a gymnasium, and

also had the opportunity to attend a new school, Tchula Attendance Center, which replaced the

former school. For students in Jackson, the local school board expanded Jim Hill High School –

the physical facility was enlarged, which created the opportunity for more classes (though they

were mostly industrial in nature), a new library, science labs, and expanded with tennis and

volleyball courts. Students attending Lanier High School also attended a new school less than six

months after the Brown v. Board of Education decision.li As black districts across the state

accepted slightly higher funding benefits generated by the equalization campaign, they created

opportunities for the Freedom School generation to attend new schools, thereby increasing the

number of years the students could attend, and also lived out the aspirations of parents across the

state who wanted to provide their children with more education than they received.

Moreover, educators across the south consistently sought to improve education offered

within the segregated schools. Vanessa Siddle Walker, Scott Baker, and David Cecelski have

examined the high quality of black education in the South as early as the 1920s in various

institutional histories. In Mississippi, Hortense Powdermaker observed in 1939: “Many of the

larger colored schools… have special periods devoted to the accomplishments of outstanding”

African Americans… “during which race consciousness and race pride come to the fore.”lii This

sense of racial pride, accomplishment, and duty was passed down generation to generation by what

Homer Hill referred to as a “hidden transcript.” This hidden transcript of resistance, both at the

middle school and high school, reinforces other themes established by Baker, Cecelski, and Siddle

Walker, who discuss the ideas of teachers in segregated black schools were certainly not universal

places of inferior resources and teaching. Participants notably preface their teachers’ support in

clandestine terms and frequently recall the stiff penalties faced if openly supporting the

movement, any activity was student led.

Generally, the literature and interview participants recognize a white power structure that

terminated swiftly any open support of the Civil Rights Movement.liii White school boards fired

teachers for speaking out against the movement. However, it becomes very clear that implicit

support among an important contingent of black teachers existed. Due to the overtly oppressive

school governance structure, a network of organic intellectuals was embedded deep within a white

bureaucracy, but it was still visible to those active in the movement. It was within these schools

(and the schools that existed long before the equalization campaign) that the experiences of soon-

to-be civil rights activists acquired a different form of education that challenged the impression

that segregated schoolhouses were places with some type of impoverished education.

Hezekiah Watkins, Homer Hill, and Eddie James Carthan – middle and high students

during the Civil Rights Movement - all remember the schools as a safe haven from the hostile

environments created by white segregationists. Teachers reflected institutional care, manifest in

stern discipline, personal investment in the students, including personal visits to homes and in

some cases living with the teacher in the community, and close proximity to their teachers.

African American segregated schools in Mississippi did cultivate an atmosphere conducive to

democratic participation and equality. The curriculum reflected this in many ways as well.

Attending school at Higgins High School in Clarksdale, Homer Hill recalled black history classes

that reflected cultural pride and reinforced the important contributions of African Americans

throughout American history. “Teachers would bring into the room,” Hill recalled, “a Carter

Woodson influence on Negro History.” Though they were “disappointed they could not vote or

enjoy privileges that came with training teachers, [they] remind us that we were American

citizens, and the teacher was adamant that they understood that we were citizens and should have.”

As he described, him and other students “understood they had little power but could have the

power [so that] people were prepared when the time came.” Moreover, Hill recalls most of his

teachers at Higgins High School to have a master’s degree, which coincides with Siddle-Walkers

observations at Caswell County Training School that sixty-four percent of the seventeen high

school teachers were involved with gradate training beyond state requirements.liv As Hezekiah

Watkins recalled of the teachers at Lanier High School in Jackson, “they wanted to be on the front

lines” but couldn’t.”lv Though Eddie James Carthan recognized that teachers in Tchula, MS were

largely not part of the movement, there was a small group of teachers that emerged: Jessie Banks

and Christine Whittake, elementary teachers, Laphase Polk, a social science teacher, Bernice

Montgomery, Eddie Logan, chemistry teacher and Clarence Johnson, the high school principal.lvi

To Eddie James Carthan, these were the teachers that attended and spoke out in the key meetings

that organized his part of Holmes County. But Carthan’s comments do point toward a small, yet

critically vocal group among Mississippi educators. Perhaps one of the most vocal teachers of the

movement occurred in Jackson. Very similar to Siddle-Walker’s Principal Dillard, students

attending Lanier High School benefited from the tutelage of I.S. Sanders, a principal until 1956

who helped form the Jackson Urban League and later the Citizens Committee for Human Rights.

Moreover, Gladys Noel Bates, a teacher at Lanier High Schools (under the leadership of I.S.

Sanders), stepped forward to initiate the lawsuit that prodded the Mississippi state legislature to at

least marginally address the growing need for reform through the equalization campaigns.lvii With

public figures like I.S. Sanders and Gladys Noel Bates, or an implicit network of the schools

existing in the schools, a universal support network did not exist and, much like the Civil Rights

Movement that was developing across the state, the level of support that each school could afford

depended upon local conditions.

A major avenue of resistance – integration by court decree - moved at a glacial pace.

Though the Brown (1954) decision was a momentous federal decision, its merits proved to be

more rhetorical than tangible in Mississippi. For the brave parents that filed desegregation suits in

Mississippi immediately after the Brown decision in the mid to late-1950s, the names of the

plaintiffs were published by the local press and they were subject to harassment, economic reprisal

and worse. As a result of such resistance, Mississippi K-12 public education remained segregated

until the fall of 1964, the last state in the country to begin to desegregate its schools.

Up until this point in 1964, however, the schools were still segregated and they were

funded as such. The attitude of Governor James K. Vardaman at the turn of the century seemed to

still be guiding policy when he said that black education “only spoils a good field hand and makes

a shyster lawyer or a fourth-rate teacher. It is money thrown away.”lviii Though this comment was

made half a century before the Brown decision, this attitude seems to have influenced educational

policy well into the 1960s. During the first week of August in 1964, just weeks before white

school boards desegregated its schools for the first time in the history of Mississippi, Freedom

School students assembled and drafted a student platform for the Mississippi Freedom Democratic

Party (MFDP). The Freedom School students included education as a major piece of their

platform, which read:

In an age where machines are rapidly replacing manual labor, job opportunities and economic security increasingly require higher levels of education. We therefore demand: 1. Better facilities in all schools. These would include textbooks, laboratories, air

conditioning, heating, recreation, and lunchrooms. 2. A broader curriculum including vocational subjects and foreign languages, 3. Low-fee adult classes for better jobs, 4. That the school year consist of nine (9) consecutive months, 5. Exchange programs and public kindergartens, 6. Better-qualified teachers with salaries according to qualification, 7. Forced retirement (women at 62, men at 65), 8. Special schools for mentally retarded and treatment and care of cerebral palsy victims, 9. That taxpayers’ money not be used to provide private schools, 10. That all schools be integrated and equal throughout the country 11. Academic freedom for teachers and students, 12. That teachers be able to join any political organization to fight for Civil Rights without

fear of being fired, 13. That teacher brutality be eliminated.lix

Integration occupied a relatively low position among the student activists and their work,

illustrates the complexity of the educational reform movement of the 1960s.

Young Students and the Civil Rights Movement

What is known about student activism in Civil Rights historiography and the national

collective memory of the Civil Rights Movement is mostly limited to the role of college students.

Although the Civil Rights historiography and mainstream media attention focus on the Sit-Ins of

1960, the Freedom Rides in 1961, the integration of the University of Mississippi in 1962, and the

Freedom Summer Campaign of 1964, these crucial events were significant in that they shaped a

political consciousness in other levels of black communities such as high schools. The college

students behind these protests attended segregated and all-black high schools, where they learned

the skills that later framed the more visible aspects of the movement. Education at all levels,

including high school and college, provided key grounds for political socialization. High school

students, not college students or local adults, occupied the segregated lunch counter seats.

Scholars of the Civil Rights Movement acknowledge the existence of middle and high school

activism, but historians, sociologists, and political scientists provide more attention to college-

based projects.lx The educational history of the era references the boycotts more frequently, but

still only in connection to college students at local institutions, such as Tougaloo College in

Jackson, Mississippi or, in other instances across the south, the protests are told of as part of the

larger national story that centers upon the NAACP.lxi

The high school student political socialization and organization was already significant by

1960, which began a decade of dissent and protest. However, high school student protests like

that emerged in cities and towns across the country, are generally recognized as a mid to late

sixties phenomenon. “In 1964, high school unknowingly rested on a historical fulcrum,” historian

Gael Graham wrote, “a moment of suspenseful equilibrium before the wider society slowly, but

with gathering momentum, tilted.”lxii The “students rights movement” that emerged from this

milieu included, among other things, a legal struggle to secure the first amendment right to a

freedom of speech, as demonstrated in the struggle to censor the underground newspaper and due

process for disciplinary action in schools. It also included the assertion of cultural expressions of

long hair for boys and pants for girls, for instance.lxiii Whether politically vocal or culturally

assertive, the prominence of the Vietnam War, complemented by the Black Power and Feminist

movements, places the most visible form of activism as early as 1964. While helpful in

recognizing the significance of student dissent of the late 1960s and early 1970s, this meta-

narrative overlooks the important role of networks of educational resistance that focused upon

black schools in the Civil Rights Movement. Student activism in the Mississippi Civil Rights

Movement reconceptualizes the role of students in segregated schools in the 1960s and the larger

Civil Rights Movement.

i See: Richard Kluger, Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black American’s Struggle for Equality (New York: Vintage Books, 2004); James Patterson, Brown v. Board of Education: A Civil Rights Milestone and Its Troubled Legacy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), Jack M. Balkin, ed., What Brown v. Board of Education Should Have Said: The Nation’s Top Legal Experts Rewrite America’s Landmark Civil Rights Decision (New York: New York University Press, 2001); Alfred Kelly, “The School Desegregation Case,” in Alfred Kelley, ed, Quarrels That Have Shaped the Constitution (New York: Harper & Row, 1987); Mark Tushnet, Making Civil Rights Law: Thurgood Marshall and the Supreme Court, 1936-1961 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); Lucas A. Power Jr., The Warren Court and American Politics (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2000). ii Kluger, Simple Justice, 25. iii Patterson, Brown v. Board of Education, xxvii. iv Balkin, ed., What Brown v. Board of Education Should Have Said, 4. v Patterson, Brown v. Board of Education, 2. vi James D. Anderson, “A tale of two Browns: Constitutional Equality and Unequal Education,” in Arnetha F. Ball, ed., With More Deliberate Speed: Achieving Equity and Excellence in Education: Realizing the Full Potential of Brown v. Board of Education (Chicago : National Society for the Study of Education, 2006. vii Mr. Edward S. Bishop, Sr., interview with Charles Bolton, February 27. 1991. viii “Segregation Crisis Faces Us,” The Clarion-Ledger, May 18, 1854. ix “Voice of the People,” The Clarion-Ledger, June 8, 1954. x “Hint Effective Date of Decree May be Delayed” The Clarion Ledger, May 18, 1954. xi “Segregation Study Group Meeting Set” Clarksdale Press Register, May 20, 1954; “Commendable Reaction to High Court’s Decision,” The Clarion-Ledger, May 19, 1954. xii “Anti-Segregation Edict of Court to be Discussed” The Clarion-Ledger ,May 21, 1954. xiii “Coleman Won’t File Segregation Brief” The Clarion Ledger, May 21, 1954. xiv “School Superintendents Study Their Function In Program” The Clarion-Ledger, May 19, 1954. xv John Lewis with Michael D’Orse, Walking with the Wing: A Memoir of the Movement (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998), 55-56. xvi Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (2003; reprinted, Boston: Anti-Slavery Office, 1845): 40-44. xvii See: Christopher M. Span, “Liberation through Literacy,” From Cotton Field to Schoolhouse: African American Education in Mississippi, 1862-1875 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 23-48.

xviii Ibid., 23-26, 125-126. xix For an outstanding description of the ideologically rich debates that move far beyond the DuBois-Washington dichotomy, see: Derrick P. Alridge, “African American Educators, Emancipatory Education, and Social Reconstruction,” in The Educational Thought of W.E.B. Du Bois: An Intellectual History (New York: Teachers College Press, 2008), 86-100. xx The history of self-determination and agency in black education is well known and has been established with great detail and eloquence, see: James Anderson, Education of Blacks in the South, 1860-1935 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988); Vanessa Siddle Walker, Their Highest Potential: an African American Community in the Segregated South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); Christopher M. Span, “Alternative Pedagogy: The Rise of the Private Black Academy in Early Postbellum Mississippi, 1862-1870” in Chartered Schools: Two Hundred Years of Independent Academies in the United States, 1727-1925. Edited by Nancy Beadie and Kim Tolley, eds. (New York: RoutledgeFalmer, 2002); Span, “I Must Learn Now Or Not At All: Social and Cultural Capital in the Educational Initiatives of Formerly Enslaved African Americans in Mississippi, 1862-1869.” The Journal of African American History 87 (Spring 2002): 196-205; Span, From Cotton Field to Schoolhouse; Heather Williams, Self-Taught: African American Education in Slavery and Freedom (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005); Constance Curry, Silver Rights (Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 1995). xxi Barbara Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003); Katherine Mellen Charron, Freedom's Teacher: the Life of Septima Clark (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009). See also: Constance Curry, Silver Rights (Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 1995); Walker, Their Highest Potential. xxii Peter Irons, Jim Crow’s Children: The Broken Promise of the Brown Decision (New York: Penguin Books, 2002), 55-61. xxiii Irons, Jim Crow’s Children, 51; Richard Kluger, Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black American’s Struggle for Equality (New York: Vintage Books, 2004), 346-367. xxiv Gladys Noel Bates, interview with Catherine Jannik, December 23, 1996, The University of Southern Mississippi Center for Oral History and Cultural Heritage; see also: Gladys Noel Bates Papers, Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Jackson, MS. xxv “Private School System Setup is Considered” Vicksburg Evening Post December 9, 1953, in “Education 1950-1956” subject file, Mississippi Department of Archives and History. xxvi Charles Bolton, The Hardest Deal of All: The Battle Over School Integration in Mississippi, 1870-1980 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005), 33-60; Neil R. McMillen, “Development of Civil Rights, 1956-1970,” 154-157; “Amendment Gains Nod of Approval in Tuesday’s Vote; Pearl Rive County Votes Against Proposal,” Weekly Democrat, December 23, 1954; “Private School System Setup is Considered” Vicksburg Evening Post December 9, 1953, in “Education 1950-1956” subject file, Mississippi Department of Archives and History. xxvii Ibid., 76. xxviii Ibid., 73. xxix Division of Administration and Finance, Biennial Report and Recommendations of the State Superintendent of Public Education, scholastic years 1953-1954 and 1954-1955, 130. xxx Holt, The Summer That Didn’t End (New York: Marrow, 1965), 102. xxxi Mississippi Statistical Abstract 1971, 184-185. xxxii “The Public Schools of Mississippi,” In “Education 1950-1956” subject file, Mississippi Department of Archives and History. xxxiii McMillen, Dark Journey, 78. xxxiv Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South, 156; McMillen, Dark Journey, 79. xxxv McMillen, Dark Journey, 79.

xxxvi McMillen, “Development of Civil Rights,” 154-157; “‘Go Slow’ Attitude Urged By Governor in Court Decision,” The Clarion Ledger, May 18, 1854; “White Delays Statement, Says Court Ruling is Disappointing,” Clarksdale Press Register, May 17, 1954. xxxvii McMillen, “Development of Civil Rights,” 155; “Education Board Moves to Carry on Segregation,” The Clarion-Ledger, June 9, 1954. xxxviii Dittmer, Local People, 46. xxxix Ibid., 49-51. xl Michael W. Fuquay, “Civil Rights and the Private School Movement in Mississippi, 1964-1971,” History of Education Quarterly, Vol. 42, No. 2 (Summer, 2002), pp. 159-180. xli Dittmer, Local People, 74; “Congratulations to Governor White” Jackson Advocate, May 29, 1954; “See Need For Meet of Southern Negro-White People” Jackson Advocate, May 29, 1954. xliiFairclough, A Class of Their Own, 357-361. xliii “Johnson May Speak Today” The Clarion-Ledger, June 6, 1964; “Legislature Coming Back” The Clarion-Ledger June 7, 1964; “Lawmakers Head Home; Will Return on June 17,” The Clarion Ledger, June 8, 1964. xliv “Appeal In School Case Won’t Stop Integration,” The Clarion Ledger, July 8, 1964; “Biloxi to Join Court Appeal,” The Clarion-Ledger, July 9, 1964. xlv Mississippi Statistical Abstract 1971, 171. xlvi Mississippi Statistical Abstract 1970, 80. xlvii Watkins Interview, 10/1/2011 xlviii Hill Interview, 9/25/2011 xlix Esau Jenkins and Septima Clark established the first school in the back of a recently purchased grocery store and its first teacher was Bernice Robinson, a black beautician from the island.xlix The first Citizenship School at John’s Island grew from fourteen to thirty four students with another school already established on a nearby island. By 1965, when Septima Clark issued a report addressing the program’s development, 897 schools were in operation, and over 50,000 voters were registered. Additionally, 1,600 volunteer teachers were trained to work in Citizenship Schools. Howard Zinn, an activist historian and SNCC advisor, described how the process worked in the heart of Jim Crow in the state of Mississippi. Sixteen African Americans registered to vote at the county seat in Magnolia County. Six passed the test. Word spread to neighboring counties and within days activists were making plans for at least two new schools, see: Myles Horton, The Long Haul: An Autobiography. Edited by Judith Kohl and Herbert Kohl, (New York: Doubleday, 1990), 99; Clark, Ready From Within, 42-50. The only teaching material at her disposal on the first day of class with fourteen students was pencils, paper and the United Nation’s Declaration of Human Rights. Clark, “Southern Christian Leadership Conference Citizenship Education Program,” Myles Horton file, Box 10, Folder 9, WHS.; Howard Zinn, SNCC: The New Abolitionists, (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), 66-67. l Williamson, p. 557; Census of the Population: 1950, Volume II, Part 24, Mississippi (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1952), 118 li The Green and Gold: Jim Hill Junior-Senior High School (Jackson, MS, 1953-1954), Jim Hill Subject File, MDAH; “950 Negro Students March From Old to New Lanier As Modern Schools Opened,” Jackson Daily News, 8 February, 1954. lii Hortense Powdermaker, After Freedom: A Cultural Study in the Deep South, P. 321 liii White school board’s reaction to teacher activism is exemplified in the case of Septima Clark. The Charleston County School District in South Carolina fired Septima Clark for participating in the equalization campaign of the 1950s.Clark, Septima Poinsette and Cynthia Stokes Brown. Ready from Within: Septima Clark and the Civil Rights Movement. Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 1990; Katherine Mellen Charron. Freedom's Teacher: the Life of Septima Clark (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009).

liv Homer Hill, interview with the author, 9/25/11, James Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance. Principal Dillard, from Siddle Walker’s Their Highest Potential, received his masters degree from the University of Michigan. A figure from Homer Hill’s emic perspective was Mrs. Oberlin Golden who received her masters degree from Oberlin College. Time and again, student recollections often point to a black teacher or black administrator that served as a community leader and spokesperson and was well-educated. lv Watkins interview, October 1 , 2011 and October 16, 2011. lvi Eddie James Carthan interview, October 17, 2011. lvii Charles Bolton, The Hardest Deal of All: The Battle Over School Integration in Mississippi, 1870-1980 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005).45-60. lviii McMillen, Dark Journey, 72. lix “Public Accommodations,” SNCC papers, Subgroup A, Series 15, box 101, folder, “MSP – Freedom Schools, Curriculum Materials.” lx John Dittmer, Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994, 143-155; Aldon D. Morris, The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Change (New York, NY: Free Press, 1984), 195-228; Charles Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: the Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996) 210-220. Canonical Civil Rights history primary refers to the Sit-In movement of 1960, the Freedom Rides of 1961, the integration of Ole Miss in 1962, and the Freedom Summer project of 1964, student activism writ large focuses on other college campuses, see, for instance: Julian Foster and Durward Long, Protest! Student Activism in America (New York: William Morrow & Company, 1970); Edward Sampson and Harold Korn, Student Activism and Protest: Alternatives for Social Change (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, Inc., 1970). lxi Joy Ann Williamson, “This Has Been Quite a Year for Heads Falling: Institutional Autonomy in the Civil Rights Era,” History of Education Quarterly 44, no. 4 (Winter, 2004): 559-560; Baker, Paradoxes of Desegregation, 108-121; Clarice T. Campbell and Oscar Allan Rogers, Mississippi: The View from Tougaloo (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1979), 35-61; William D. Smyth, “Segregation in Charleston in the 1950s: A Decade of Transition,” South Carolina Historical Magazine, 92, no. 2 (April, 1991): 99-123; for a top-down NAACP analysis, see also: Tomiko Brown-Nagin, Courage to Dissent: Atlanta and the Long History of the Civil Rights Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), lxii Graham, Young Activists, 17; Gael Graham, “Flaunting the Freak Flag: Karr v. Schmidt and the Great Hair Debate in American High Schools, 1965–1975,” The Journal of American History (2004) 91 (2): 522-543. lxiii Graham, Young Activists, 109-166.