Teaching History as an Act of Nonviolent Protest: SNCC’s Freedom Schools and History Curriculum

This article was written by Axell Boomer and was awarded the Civil Resistance Prize by the History Department in 2024. It was originally written for the Nonviolence Project.

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As systemic inequalities—which arrived from the institution of American slavery—manifested themselves into the classroom, Black students were left with less federal support than White students in the American South.^[1] Black students in Mississippi, despite comprising fifty-seven percent of “school-aged children,” received “only thirteen percent of state funds.”^[2] Organizations like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) trained volunteer teachers to challenge these conditions and ultimately “educate… a cadre of students to articulate their own visions of quality education and to make their voices heard.”^[3] Starting in the summer of 1964, several Mississippi “church basements, homes, [and] backyards” served as classrooms which taught an unprecedented curriculum rooted in self-advocacy.^[4]

In Using Past as Prologue, Jon N. Hale argues that “providing an education was an act of defiance due to fierce White resistance to the prospect of educating African Americans for equality.”^[5] Freedom Schools, in protest of the South’s treatment of Black Americans, offered a personalized education and urged teachers to stimulate student activity—asking students how topics made them feel, why they believed the topics impacted them, and how they felt about their classmates’ reactions.^[6] The Freedom School application also demonstrated this prioritization of a personalized education, as it asked what applicants “want[ed] to study.”^[7] Freedom Schools offered a space for Black students to learn about their fields of interest that were otherwise unexplored in the South’s underfunded institutions of public education for Black youth.

A guide introducing teachers to Freedom Schools reminded volunteers that the students of the region, by receiving poor education, “[had] been denied free expression and free thought,” and ultimately, “the right to question” their current conditions.^[8] The existing education available for Black students in the South, as explained by the guide, taught Black youth “to stay in [their] place.”^[9] Southern society notably maintained White hegemony through violence and racist rhetoric, but also through robbing Black citizens from enriching educational environments. Freedom Schools desired to challenge this inequality, providing Black students with lessons which taught methods of protesting systemic injustice. While Freedom Schools trained their students in a variety of subjects, including Civic Engagement, Mathematics, etc., this article explores the Black and American History curricula of Freedom Schools.

Freedom Schools designed their curriculum to demonstrate “the relevance of the past for understanding the present,” utilizing history to explain the conditions of the American South.^[11] Moreover, the curriculum aspired to supplement the parts of Black history that “[had] been ‘lost’ in the ‘mainstream’ of history.”^[12] The beginning of the history curriculum emphasized humanity’s commencement on the African continent. Teachers contrasted conceptions of Black inferiority and barbarism—which had been employed to justify the enslavement of Black people—by positing the African continent as “the place where man first received light.”^[13] Challenging notions of static primitivism attached to the African continent and people of African descent, Freedom School curriculum taught that “[b]efore the arrival of Europeans, Africa was… movement and splendor, conquests and innovations, trade and art.”^[14] Discussion questions within the lesson plan contested myths like the “white man’s burden,” implicitly demonstrating that Whites could not have civilized the “savage” African if Africa was already home to great civilizations.^[15] Freedom School curricula self-consciously worked to challenge the “distorted view” of history “Americans had been brought up on,” instructing teachers—and in-turn, students—to “understand what really happened.”^[16] In teaching omitted aspects of Black history, Freedom Schools worked to challenge myths which placed their Black students as inferior to White people.

Teachers went beyond interrogating myths regarding the African continent, and also critically analyzed the teaching of American history. After discrediting the myth that “the slave was happy and contented” with his condition, Freedom School curriculum explored Black participation in the Civil War, highlighting that for a period, Black soldiers were underpaid in comparison to their White counterparts.^[17] The conclusion of the “The Civil War” unit posed a question to students: “Would it be more accurate to say that ‘Lincoln gave the slaves their freedom’ in the Emancipation Proclamation or that the Civil War was ‘an armed slave insurrection under the auspices of the American flag?’”^[18] Here, Freedom Schools underscored examples of self-advocacy—which had been rewritten with narratives of White saviorism—to demonstrate how enslaved Black Americans worked to free themselves; these lessons of self-advocacy could be translated to the students’ present condition and their fight for equal treatment in the Jim Crow South.

In examining American Reconstruction, Freedom Schools lectured on the systemic efforts enforced by the “Southern white ruling clique” to curtail Black suffrage, as well as the South’s Black Codes, vagrancy laws, poll taxes, and literacy tests which codified Black Americans as second class citizens.^[19] The curriculum teaches that these were not barriers installed—as people had claimed—to resist imposed “inefficient” governments organized by Black Americans, but instead conscious efforts to place Black Americans as inferior to White Americans. Subsequent chapters in the curriculum summarized potential solutions and protest organizations which fought against racial inequality, measuring their different virtues and limits.^[20] Freedom Schools’ curriculum utilized history to refute historical narratives which rationalized the maltreatment of Black Amerians. As teachers revealed the racist structures that perpetuated these myths, they taught methods of challenging these structures.

The Freedom Summer curriculum “Nazi Germany” offered further analysis of systemic racism, evaluating the “features in the South both historically and at present” alongside the conditions of Nazi Germany, with the objective of “help[ing]… student[s] overcome [their] own partial beliefs in the old myths.”^[21] Teachers marked how both Nazi Germany and the American South maintained power by treating prisoners/enslaved people like children, denying their individuality, and destroying solidarity.^[22] By deconstructing the power structures in the American South through the lens of Nazi Germany, Freedom School teachers believed students could overcome cultural messages of inferiority. Moreover, as articulated in the curriculum, Freedom Schools believed that in “‘learning from the past’… [students] should be able to prescribe areas of action whereby [they] [could] successfully overcome [systems of oppression].”^[23] Through a series of parallels to a historical atrocity, Freedom School curriculum highlighted how racist attitudes in the South were maintained and perpetuated by those in power, and emphasized the importance of self-advocacy and unity in fighting against such systems of oppression.

While the curriculum does not employ the phrase “systemic racism,” the lesson uses the concept of a “closed system,” which refers to an “authoritarian society in which all citizens [are] forced to behave as the power structure dictate[s].”^[24] According to the Freedom School lesson, “a chief characteristic of the [closed] system [is] institutionalized persecution in the form of restrictive laws.”^[25] The curriculum maintains that the conditions of Nazi Germany were “more extreme” than the Jim Crow South, explaining that “LEGALLY the [United States’] government is not a closed system.”^[26] However, the lesson plan also illustrates how Southern politicians ruled beyond law, through fear, outcasting dissenters of the “Southern tradition” as “Communists” and “left-wingers.”^[29] This embracement of the “Southern tradition”—celebrating the “grand exploits of the Confederate army” and admiring Plantation Houses—allowed Whites to identify with the Southern power structure that exploited Black Americans.^[28] In this way, through Southern culture, politicians sustained racist attitudes towards Black Americans.

A series of corresponding letters between Freedom School teacher, Richard Lord, and his wife, Mary Jean Lord, reveal how the learning of Black History shaped Freedom School teachers and their families. At the onset of his time teaching in Mississippi, Lord wrote to his family about one of the Black history books SNCC utilized to organize and supplement lessons, Before the Mayflower; Lord urged his son to secure a copy for himself, stating “[Black history] is an important part of American history but it’s left out of most history books.”^[30] Several days later, Lord’s son wrote back that he had “read part of the book,” demonstrating the novelty of the Freedom School’s Black history curriculum, as Lord went outside the classroom to share the enriching history with his family.^[31] Mary Jean Lord, inspired by her husband’s letter, began reading Before the Mayflower and—like the students in the Freedom School—employed the book to conceptualize the historic moment of the Civil Rights Movement.^[32] After learning of the erasure of Black resistance and fighting during the Civil War, Mary Jean Lord asked her husband if he believed “THAT WHITES [would] TAKE CREDIT FOR [the Civil Rights Movement] TOO?”^[33] The correspondence of the Lord family underscores how learning history helps all Americans understand their current conditions, teachers and students alike—young and old. Moreover, Before the Mayflower moved Mary Jean Lord to historicize the circumstances of herself and her husband, moving her to analyze the racial relations of her era and question whether future generations would learn the truth of the Civil Rights Movement.

Would Americans be able to employ this curriculum today—a curriculum which analyzes institutionalized racial persecution, legacies of slavery, and productive methods of activism—to understand their current condition? It depends on the state the American resides in. Florida’s Department of Education has banned such a curriculum—the AP African American Studies course—from the states’ classrooms.^[34] While the present conditions of the United States are different than when the Freedom School curriculum was taught, systemic inequalities persist. Today, curriculum which discusses institutional and systemic racism is assailed by Conservative politicians as faulty and invalid—according to them, it is un-American and inaccurate to describe the United States as a systemically racist nation.

Lawmakers argue that the teaching of systemic racism instructs White students to feel guilt on account of their race. Following this logic, anti-Critical Race Theory laws have been passed. While many of these laws do not explicitly outlaw the teaching of Critical Race Theory, the rhetoric surrounding these bills vilifies the teaching of history which engages with systemic racism. Politicians argue that modern Americans are dislocated and therefore irresponsible for the faults of America’s past.^[35] Of course, modern Americans did not make history uncomfortable—but why does that allow them to pretend it was comfortable?

When lawmakers obstruct you from seeing how historic events occurred in the past, lawmakers obstruct you from seeing how historic events impact the present. Many Conservative politicians insist that systemic racism does not exist in the United States of America.^[36] Americans who sympathize with former President Donald Trump’s “1776 Project,” which calls to “restor[e] a patriotic education” and views the United States’ History “with reverence and love,” must remember who a “patriotic education” served in Mississippi.^[37] A restored “patriotic education” is a re-embracement of the myths that have historically been perpetuated across the United States of America—myths which have reinforced White supremacy and have sought to rationalize Black submission and inferiority.^[38] When historians prioritize—or are called to prioritize—the installation of “a profound love of [the United States]” into their audiences, history goes untaught.^[39] Freedom School curricula did not ask students, “How did this History lesson teach you to love America?”

Taking the time to understand the United States’ relationship with race is not a reverential or comfortable experience, but it is an essential one. Systemic issues can only begin to be solved once we are allowed to reckon with them; if Americans continue to falsely believe that a recognition of truth is a confession of guilt, those who benefit from the myths of a “patriotic education” will continue to do so. In a political climate where teaching and learning history is framed as un-American, the very act itself becomes a form of protest.

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^[1] Educational inequity is not unique to the American South—as a consequence of redlining, communities in the American North have similarly segregated districts. Nationally, schools that predominantly serve communities of color have historically been underfunded.

^[2] Jon N. Hale, “‘We Declare Independence from the Unjust Laws of Mississippi’: The Freedom Schools, Head Start and the Reconstruction of Education during the Civil Rights Movement,” in Using Past as Prologue: Contemporary Perspectives on African American Educational History, eds. Dionne Danns, Michelle A. Purdy, Christopher M. Span, (Charlotte: Information Age Publishing, Inc, 2015), 171.

^[3] Ibid., 183.

^[4] Council of Federated Organizations Panola County Office –Freedom Schools – Lessons and Study Materials (Council of Federated Organizations Panola County Office records, 1963-1965; Archives Main Stacks, Mss 521, Box 1, Folder 7, 2; Jon N. Hale, The Freedom Schools: Student Activists in the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement, (New York: Columbia University Press), 93.

^[5] Hale, “We Declare Independence,” 170.

^[6] Council of Federated Organizations Panola County Office records, 1963-1965; Archives Main Stacks, Mss 521, Box 1, Folder 7, 5.

^[7] Council of Federated Organizations Panola County Office –Freedom Schools – Memos and Staff Documents, 1964 (Council of Federated Organizations Panola County Office records, 1963-1965; Archives Main Stacks, Mss 521, Box 1, Folder 8), 107.

^[8] Council of Federated Organizations Panola County Office –Freedom Schools – Lessons and Study Materials (Council of Federated Organizations Panola County Office records, 1963-1965; Archives Main Stacks, Mss 521, Box 1, Folder 7, 1.

^[9] Ibid., 2.

^[10] Staughton Lynd, Freedom School, 1964.

^[11] Ibid., 7.

^[12] Ibid., 9.

^[13] Ibid., 10.

^[14] Ibid., 14.

^[15] Ibid., 16.

^[16] Ibid., 24.

^[17] Ibid., 17, 22.

^[18] Ibid., 23.

^[19] Ibid., 24-25.

^[20] Ibid., 27-35.

^[21] Robinson–Miscellaneous, 1964-1965 (Jo Ann Ooiman Robinson papers, 1960-1966; Archives Main Stacks, Mss 191, Box 1, Folder 9), 122.

^[22] Ibid., 128-130.

^[23] Ibid., 145.

^[24] Ibid., 124.

^[25] Ibid.

^[26] Ibid., 122, 141.

^[27] Ibid., 141.

^[28] Ibid., 144; Freedom Summer curriculum also emphasizes that the Southern power structure exploited poor Whites, “directing [them] away from normal economic self-interest by directing his attention toward controlling [Black Americans].”

^[29] Staughton Lynd, Freedom School Class, 1964.

^[30] Richard Lord, Richard Lord to Mary Jean Lord, July 6, 1965, letter, from Wisconsin Historical Society Archives, Richard and Mary Jean Lord papers, 1965, 2016, M2016-080 Letters from Richard “Dick” Lord to Mary Jean Lord, 1965 File 4; Richard Lord, Richard Lord to Mary Jean Lord and Lord Family, July 12, 1965, letter, from Wisconsin Historical Society Archives, Richard and Mary Jean Lord papers, 1965, 2016, M2016-080 Letters from Richard “Dick” Lord to Mary Jean Lord, 1965 File 4.

^[31] Dave Lord, Dave Lord to Richard Lord, July 16, 1965, letter, from Wisconsin Historical Society Archives, Richard and Mary Jean Lord papers, 1965, 2016, M2016-080 Letters from Mary Jean Lord to Richard “Dick” Lord 1965 File 5.

^[32] Mary Jane Lord, May Jane Lord to Richard Lord, July 8, 1965, letter, from Wisconsin Historical Society Archives, Richard and Mary Jean Lord papers, 1965, 2016, M2016-080 Letters from Mary Jean Lord to Richard “Dick” Lord 1965 File 5; Mary Jane Lord, May Jane Lord to Richard Lord, July 10, 1965, letter, from Wisconsin Historical Society Archives, Richard and Mary Jean Lord papers, 1965, 2016, M2016-080 Letters from Mary Jean Lord to Richard “Dick” Lord 1965 File 5.

^[33] Mary Jane Lord, Mary Jane Lord to Richard Lord, July 10, 1965, letter, from Wisconsin Historical Society Archives, Richard and Mary Jean Lord papers, 1965, 2016, M2016-080 Letters from Mary Jean Lord to Richard “Dick” Lord 1965 File 5.

^[34] Eesha Pendharkar, “Florida’s Ban on AP African American Studies, Explained,” EducationWeek, January 24, 2023.

^[35] Matt Papayick, Forrest Saunders, “Florida’s governor signs controversial bill banning critical race theory in schools,” WPTV, April 22, 2022.

^[36] Lindsey Ellefson, “Florida Governor Ron DeSantis Dismisses Systemic Racism: ‘It’s a Bunch of Horse Manure’ (Video),” The Wrap, April 30, 2021.

^[37] The President’s Advisory 1776 Commission, “The 1776 Report,” January 2021, 16.

^[38] The history that Freedom Schools challenged in the South painted a reverential portrait of the United States—myths instructed that Black Americans were racially inclined to servitude, and that enslaved people were comfortable with plantation life, ignoring the reality of American slavery. Moreover, these historical narratives justified racist violence and intimidation as natural reactions to supposedly “inferior” modes of government.

^[39] Ibid., 17.