The Legacy of a Freedom School

By Sandra E. Adickes

Book Overview

In 1964, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee decided to establish Freedom Schools as part of its Freedom Summer campaign in Mississippi. With a curriculum developed by dedicated educators, SNCC workers, and an equally dedicated staff of teachers and student volunteers, the schools provided a learning experience and teaching style that revealed to students who had known only the "stay in your place" experience of segregated education what schools should, and could, be. The achievements of the students involved in Freedom Summer lifted the expectations of students who followed them and hastened the end of segregated schools in Mississippi. In Legacy of a Freedom School, Sandra E. Adickes recalls her experiences working with the SNCC, reminding us all of the powerful Freedom Summer.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1403972133
• ISBN13: 9781403972132
• Release Date: November 2005
• Publisher: Palgrave MacMillan
• Length: 218 Pages
• Weight: 0.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.7" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

Understanding SNCC and Freedom Summer

This is a valuable specialized book for understanding what it was like to be part of the SNCC/COFO volunteers (especially the northern white Freedom School teachers) and the people of Mississippi with whom they lived and worked in the summer of 1964. It gives a rich sense of who those people were then and what they became in later years. It also gives a good feel for what was and wasn't changed by that famous summer project. It's also a good book for anyone who's thinking about creating a politically inclined grass roots school from scratch. It's honest, well observed, practical in many ways. A good historical reading for anyone interested in grass roots community work in general. Also a good reflection piece for people who want to think about what education's all about. If you have a personal connection to that summer project that you still cherish, I'm pretty sure you'll enjoy this book.

essential reading

This is a great book. It's essential reading for anyone who cares about the historic, and still unfinished, struggle for racial justice in America, but it's also a fascinating personal story and a powerful wake-up call about the state of our public education system. The center of the book is the author's account of her own experiences as a white teacher in a Freedom School for black students in the segregated Mississippi of 1964, but she frames that experience in an informative description of the historical context in which it took place. These historical sections are documented with footnotes that contain useful references for further reading, and there's also a helpful index of well- and not-so-well known names that played their parts in that history. Thurgood Marshall and Lyndon Johnson and the Congress of Racial Equality are here, but so are Jimella Stokes and Staughton Lynd and the Congress of Federated Organizations. I wish everyone who is involved with the making of educational policy--and that includes parents, school boards, and legislators as well as the teachers and administrators in our schools--would read this book. Adickes's descriptions of her own experiences as a teacher in good and bad schools, both in Mississippi and in New York City and her description of the disastrous consequences of the No Child Left Behind Act could serve as a great beginning for finally giving the next generation of Americans the decent education they deserve and our country desperately needs to have them receive.