Freedom Teaching

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Freedom Songs

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Engage with the Sources: Bernice Robinson Oral History Interview

Bernice Robinson Interview

SCLC Citizenship Education Program (Mississippi), circa early 1964

Discuss these questions:

• According to Robinson, why was she recruited to be the teacher? How did she approach teaching? What do you think made Robinson and the schools successful?
• According to the [1964] summary of the Citizenship Education Program in Mississippi, what kinds of activities were they doing in classrooms and their communities? What stands out to you about this summary?
• How do the Citizenship Schools reflect the kind of Freedom Teaching SNCC prioritized? How did this approach emerge from their early history?

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Engage with the Sources: Bob Moses interview by Charles Payne

After reading the interview, discuss these questions:

• What does Moses say the Movement did to provide people with a form of credentials or the belief that they had the skills to act? What does he say about the importance of people in the Movement being exposed to people from outside their community?
• What does Moses say about the way SNCC developed a movement culture that supported and reflected Freedom Teaching?
• In some sections of this interview, Moses talks about the importance of organizing, which was closely related to Freedom Teaching. How does he describe Ms. Baker’s role with SNCC and the Movement? What does Moses say about the role of personal connections and family in the Movement?

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Engage with the Sources: Stokley Speech Class, Notes by Jane Stembridge, Waveland Work-Study 1965

Read Stokely’s class and consider these questions:

• How does Carmichael help the students consider and rethink assumptions about language and what is “proper”?
• What does this class suggest about SNCC’s approach to freedom teaching compared with traditional academic teaching?

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Engage with the Sources: Charlie Cobb’s Prospectus on Freedom Schools

Read Cobb’s “Prospectus” and answer the following questions:

• Why did Cobb argue that SNCC should develop Freedom Schools? What did he think the schools should look like?
• How did he think the schools would benefit the students? How would they strengthen the Movement?
• If you were going to create a Freedom School today, how would you set it up? What and how would you teach?

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Engage with the Sources: Meridian Freedom Schools’ Platform

Read the platform and consider the following questions:

• What issues did the Freedom School students focus on in Meridian
• How many of these issues remain relevant today? If you were updating their work, what would you change or add?

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Engage with the SNCC Digital Gateway: Learning from Experience

Maria Varela, who initially worked with SNCC to develop an underground literacy project in Selma, Alabama, began creating what her SNCC colleague Worth Long called “freedom handbooks” to document and share local knowledge. (See Art & Culture toolkit) In Something of Our Own, Varela used the words of Batesville, Mississippi, farmers to describe their work building an okra co-op. She made filmstrips about Mexican-American farm workers organizing a union in Delano, California, to support SNCC staffers who were building a union in the Delta. The Delta sharecroppers and the Delano farmworkers learned from their overlapping experiences as both organized to challenge low wages, inadequate housing, and limited education for their children.

To learn about Varela’s work and its evolution, explore Our Voices, Learning from Experience. In Part 1: Learning Curve, Varela reflects on what she learned from the Selma Literacy Project. In Part 2: By the People For the People, she discusses her shift to developing materials based on local knowledge. In Part 3: Something of Our Own, she describes her work with the Batesville farmers. In Part 4: Filmstrips: The Pros & Cons, you can read about and watch Varela’s filmstrip, The Farm Workers Strike. Part 5: Black Pride, features Varela’s work with Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer, one of SNCC’s most important homegrown leaders, to document her life. With help from SNCC’s Julius Lester, they created Mrs. Hamer’s memoir, To Praise Our Bridges, which you can read on the website.

After exploring Learning from Experience and watching The Farm Workers Strike, consider the following questions:

• What challenges did Maria Varela encounter when she began working on literacy in Selma? How did she adapt her approach and learn from her experiences?
• How did Varela work with the local African-American community and build on their knowledge?
• What is the significance of The Farm Workers Strike filmstrip (Part 4)? What did you learn from reading Mrs. Hamer’s memoir, To Paise Our Bridges (Part 5)?

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Learn Directly from SNCC Organizers: Being SNCCy! or How SNCC People Learned

SNCC people also learned by doing; they had a can-do attitude—because they had to. Zoharah Simmons never imagined she would be leading a project when Freedom Summer started. Just being in Mississippi terrified her. But when the Laurel project director was jailed and had to leave town, there was no one else, so she stepped up and learned on the job. When Jennifer Lawson realized that SNCC needed to communicate quickly and efficiently with new voters in Lowndes County, she figured out how to build and paint billboards, just like she and Courtland Cox learned on the fly when they created comics for political education. When Maria Varela kept asking SNCC’s Atlanta office to send her a photographer to help with her film and book projects, they suggested she learn to take photos herself. So she did!

Listen to several of the following SNCC veterans reflect on what it means to be “SNCCy” and consider the questions below:

• What stands out to you about these reflections? How do these experiences connect with Freedom Teaching and the ways SNCC staffers learned?
• How does knowing about these aspects of SNCC work change or reinforce your understanding of what it takes to organize a movement?

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Bibliography

Baker, Ella, & Anne Braden Organize Civil Liberties Workshop, SNCC Digital Gateway, SNCC Legacy Project and Duke University.

Bond, Julian, Foreword to The Making of Black Revolutionaries, xi-xiii. By James Forman. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997.

Carmichael, Stokely, with Ekwueme Michael Thelwell. Ready for Revolution: The Life and Times of Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture). New York: Scribner, 2003.

Cobb, Charles E. Introduction to Negroes in American History: Freedom Primer. By Bobbi Cieciorka and Frank Cieciorka. Atlanta: The Student Voice, 1965.

Cobb, Charles E. “Prospectus for Summer Freedom School Program in Mississippi,” Dec. 1963, Harry J. Bowie Papers, Wisconsin Historical Society. Accessed Aug. 17, 2024. https://content.wisconsinhistory.org/digital/collection/p15932coll2/id/3794.

Crosby, Emilye, ed. “’I Just Have a Fire!’ An Interview with Dorie Ann Ladner.” The Southern Quarterly 52, no. 1 (Fall 2014): 79-111.

Dittmer, John. Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi. Urbana. University of Illinois Press, 1994.

Forman, James. The Making of Black Revolutionaries. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997.

Freedom Schools, SNCC Digital Gateway, SNCC Legacy Project and Duke University.

Hall, Prathia. “Freedom Faith.” In Hands on the Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC. 172-80. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010.

Holland, Endesha Ida Mae. From the Mississippi Delta: A Memoir by Endesha Ida Mae Holland. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997.

Learning from Experience, Part 1, SNCC Digital Gateway, SNCC Legacy Project and Duke University.

McDew, Charles. In A Circle of Trust: Remembering SNCC. Ed. by Cheryl Lynn Greenberg. 34-36. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1998.

McDew, Charles, and Beryl Gilfix. Tell the Story: A Memoir of the Civil Rights Movement. Self-published, Beryl Gilfix, 2020.

Moses, Bob. In Voices of Freedom: An Oral History of the Civil Rights Movement from the 1950s through the 1980s. 94. New York: Bantam, 2011.

Moses, Bob. Interview by Charles Payne. In Debating the Civil Rights Movement, 1945-68. 170-87. By Steven F. Lawson and Charles Payne. Lanham, MD.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006.

Moses, Bob. Report to Voter Education Project. “Mississippi’ Voter Registration Project.”
Jan. 21, 1963. Civil Rights Movement Archive. Accessed Aug. 23, 2024. https://www.crmvet.org/lets/letshome.htm.

Payne, Charles M. I’ve Got the Right of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.

Richardson, Judy. SNCC Digital Gateway, SNCC Legacy Project and Duke University.

Rock Hill Sit-Ins and Jail No Bail, SNCC Digital Gateway, SNCC Legacy Project and Duke University.

Simmons, Gwendolyn Zoharah. “From Little Memphis Girl to Mississippi Amazon.” In Hands on the Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC. 9-32. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010.

Sojourner, Sue [Lorenzi] and Cheryl Reitan. Thunder of Freedom: Black Leadership and the Transformation of 1960s Mississippi. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2013.

Sutherland, Elizabeth, ed. Letters from Mississippi. New York: Signet, McGraw-Hill, 1966.

Visser-Maessen, Laura. Robert Parris Moses: A Life in Civil Rights and Leadership at the Grassroots. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016.

White, Annette Jones. “Finding Form for the Expression of My Discontent.” In Hands on the Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC. 100-19. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010.