“We’ve got it going on at the Freedom School,” a group of students from Boyd and Key Elementary Schools in Jackson, Miss., chanted outside the Two Mississippi Museums on Juneteenth. In an era of growing book bans, the students expressed their love for reading.
“We’re gonna have a lot of fun, ’cause reading is cool,” the children chanted while holding posters showing the covers of banned books and bearing messages like, “Protect the Freedom to Read.”
The CDF Summer Freedom Schools participated in a National Day of Social Action Project on Juneteenth. Students in the JPS program chanted waved signs and beat drums in support of denouncing book banning.
“This year’s National Day of Social Action is to bring awareness to the issue of book banning and book access in our community,” Sydney Rushing, a servant leader intern with the program, said from the podium. The theme for the day of action was “The Right to Read.”
Students read several books that have been banned in other school districts such as “The Watsons Go to Birmingham” by Christopher Paul Curtis and “Sulwe” by Lupita Nyong’o. They also took home books each week based on that week’s theme.
“This year we have highlighted (protecting) the right to read,” site coordinator Kimberly Archie said at the rally. “And what is so important about that is that it gives our children the idea of where they came from. If we don’t know where we came from, we’re destined to repeat history. It’s important that we protect their right to read.”
Book Bans in Mississippi and Nationwide
Book bans have been on the rise in the United States for years. PEN America, an organization that champions free expression for writers, reported 3,362 instances of individual books banned in the 2022-2023 school year—a more than 30% increase over the previous year. At least 33 states have participated in some form of book banning, the report says.
PEN reported no book bans in Mississippi during the 2022-2023 school year. However, in 2022, the mayor of Ridgeland, Miss., threatened to withhold library funding unless LGBTQ+ books were purged. That same month, Mississippi State Auditor Shad White called for banning anti-racist books from school libraries.
In 2023 the Mississippi Senate passed a bill to ban digital books defined as “sexually oriented” from public and school libraries, and Gov. Tate Reeves signed it into law. Later that year, the Columbia-Marion County Public Library made the “Heartstopper” graphic novels, which feature a romance between two high-school boys, unavailable after a group of residents demanded the books be removed.
Book bans across the nation have often focused on books by Black authors depicting historical inequities, systemic racism, police brutality, and political and cultural commentary. Several Mississippi authors have had their books banned in other parts of the country including Richard Wright’s “Native Son,” Angie Thomas’s “The Hate U Give,” Mildred Taylor’s “Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry,” Kiese Laymon’s “Heavy: An American Memoir” and Charlaine Harris’s “Dead Until Dark.”
“This year’s NDSA is to bring awareness to an issue that’s far too common,” Sydney Rushing said in a JPS press release. “No book should be banned because everyone deserves the right to read.”
‘To Reclaim Our Communities’
Children’s Defense Fund Freedom School Site Coordinator Christina Ashford said freedom schools provide a culturally responsive supplement to the regular nine-month education.
“I think freedom schools are necessary,” Ashford told the Mississippi Free Press on July 1. “We have a lot of stuff going on in our nation right now in regards to education and what kids are allowed to read or not allowed to read. I think that freedom schools may be the model that we have to look at to reclaim our communities and our children in our neighborhoods.”
The four-week-long program included more than 60 select JPS students. Participants read books aligned with each week’s theme and completed guided activities. Each morning, students practiced “Harambee,” a Swahili word meaning, “Let’s pull together.” During Harambee, students listen to a read-aloud, sing motivational songs, participate in cheers and chants, and have a moment of silence. The activity helps students get excited about the school day.
The district provided breakfast and lunch and students spent the afternoons in enrichment activities including field trips, STEM projects and science experiments. Students modeled many of the program’s cheers and chants during a cowboy-themed graduation ceremony on June 27 at Galloway Elementary School. Each student received an award and books to take home.
“In the summertime, we all want to kick back and relax,” Ashford said. “We wanted to acknowledge them for coming every day and being engaged and committed to doing the work or being a part of (the program) and participating.”
Freedom Summers: A Mississippi Legacy
CDF’s Freedom Schools are rooted in the Mississippi Freedom Summer Project of 1964. During Freedom Summer, more than 1,000 volunteers arrived in Mississippi to help bring attention to the state’s civil-rights movement. Increased racial violence without federal intervention placed the state on the radar of the Council of Federated Organizations, a coalition of the nation’s civil-rights organizations. Busses of volunteers arrived to help register Black voters, challenge the all-white delegation slated to attend the national Democratic Party Convention and teach in the newly-created Freedom Schools.
COFO organized Freedom Schools for young Black Mississippians using hundreds of volunteers, many of whom were college students. Freedom Schools were established to keep young people safe and supplement the state’s segregated Black public schools, which were wholly inferior to other schools in the South. A decade after Brown v. Board of Education, most Southern school districts remained segregated.
Segregation academies had sprung up all over Mississippi as white families refused to put their children in mixed-race schools. They left deteriorating buildings, out-of-date textbooks, and inadequate equipment in their wake. Mississippi History Now estimates that as of late 1960, “Mississippi was spending an average of approximately four times as much on White pupils as African American students” and “fewer than five percent of Black Mississippi adults held a high school diploma in 1964.”
Nearly 40 Freedom Schools served around 2,500 children during the summer of 1964. The curriculum, designed by a committee of educators from around the country, was broken up into two parts: the “Citizenship Curriculum” and the “Guide to Negro History.” Students read books and poetry by Black authors and listened to speeches by Black leaders. They also learned reading, writing, math and history during the six-week program. Their experience awakened the desire in many to join the Civil Rights Movement.
“College kids would go around into these rural communities in Mississippi and teach them about themselves and about voting rights when the Civil Rights Movement was going on,” Ashford said. “That keeps with the same vein of the freedom school today. The curriculum is enriched with history, culture and heritage while teaching kids about who they are and where they come from. They see books with images of people that look like them. They learn their stories and their history. It really teaches the heart, mind and soul of the child.”
Freedom Summer was marked with violence, including the murder of three civil-rights workers in Neshoba County: James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman. But it also led to a burst in civil-rights and voting-rights organizing. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee reported that more than 200 volunteers remained in Mississippi at the end of Freedom Summer with “some quitting their jobs or dropping out of school.”
“Freedom Schools played an integral part in raising these young people and getting them ready for the fight that they had to fight and that was sort of placed in their lap,” Ashford said.
Promoting a New Generation of Readers
The Children’s Defense Fund also grew out of the Civil Rights Movement. Founded in 1973, the organization focuses on child advocacy and aims to improve policies concerning public education and child welfare.
The organization opened the first two CDF Freedom School sites in 1995. There are now more than 100 CDF Freedom Schools across the country. The programs are designed to provide access to high-quality literacy programs during the summer. The CDF website lists one other site in Mississippi located in Greenville. Since its beginning, the program has served more than 190,000 children in Pre-K through 12th grade and trained more than 21,000 young adults and child advocates.
“I didn’t know what a freedom school was before this. I’d never heard of it,” Jackson Public Schools Communications Specialist Sharie Johnson told the Mississippi Free Press on July 1. “I applied for both my 5 and 8-year-old. Now we do the chants that they did at Freedom School at home. They’re excited about it”
Johnson is even more excited that her children finished the program with a passion for reading.
“My 5-year-old now has a library card, which I’m super excited about,” Johnson said. “They want to go. They want to find new books and they’re so excited about reading.”
Johnson said that as a mother she realizes the responsibility is now hers.
“I know my challenge as a mom is to keep this momentum going,” she said. “ But I’m excited with them.”
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