Quality Education by Local Demand: Contesting Moderate ...
Transcript of Quality Education by Local Demand: Contesting Moderate ...
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.