Background Knowledge And Content
For the modern Freedom School project to be effective, students first need a basic understanding of the major events leading to the 1964 Freedom Summer. Students will need to be able to connect the idea of race as a social construct, the long history of legal fights against racial discrimination, and the effects of segregation on African Americans to the work of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). From there, we will zoom in on Mississippi, where the Freedom Summer happened, and Virginia, where we will look for the roots of major issues in our own city.
The story of segregation must begin in 1619 with the first documented case of Africans being brought to what would become Virginia. Soon after those “20 and odd Negroes” landed at Point Comfort,5 Europeans began outlining the social and legal mechanics of race and racial stratification for the purpose of delineating labor roles in the colony. “Race” became a tool used specifically to outline differences between the quickly growing populations of forced and coerced workers, especially indentured servants, who were contracted laborers that worked for a set period of time as punishment for a crime or to pay off a debt, and enslaved people, who were kidnapped laborers that worked for the rest of their lives.
The case of mixed-race laborer Elizabeth Key was essential in establishing legal definitions of race in the early Virginia colony. Key was the daughter of an African woman who had been impregnated by an English planter who claimed ownership of both women. Ownership of Key was transferred to another planter in 1636 with an agreement stating that she would work for nine years, and then be freed. When Key’s father died, the agreement was disregarded and she ended up working for a total of twenty years. In 1656, Key attempted to sue for her freedom under two English common law principles: 1) Englishmen could not enslave fellow Christians, and 2) the doctrine of partus sequitur patem, which established that a child’s status was determined by that of the father.6 Since Key had been baptized in the Church of England and her father was a free Englishman, her case should have been an easy slam dunk victory.
Key was successful in arguing for her freedom, but the long-term result ultimately led to new laws around who could and could not claim whiteness and eventually the codification of racial slavery. Christianity was removed as a route to freedom and in 1662, the Virginia General Assembly passed a new law establishing the doctrine of partus sequitur ventrem, which tied the status of newborn children to that of the mother.7 This effectively laid the foundation for the system of chattel slavery that would be the cornerstone of the economy of the American South until the end of the Civil War and the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865.
In 1890, decades after the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery (except as punishment for a crime) and the Fourteenth Amendment guaranteed equal protection under the law, the state of Louisiana enacted the Separate Car Act. The Separate Car Act required racially segregated accommodations on railways. The Committee of Citizens, a Black activist group in New Orleans created a plan to legally challenge the statute in 1892. The group chose Homer Plessy, a man who was only one-eighth Black but was considered Definitely Not White according to the One Drop Rule, to test the bounds of the law by sitting in the Whites Only train car. Plessy was arrested, and his case was eventually brought to the Supreme Court.8
The decision in Plessy vs. Ferguson (1894) led to a phrase that would define the next 60 years of American society, “separate but equal.” More specifically, the Court’s majority opinion upheld Louisiana's law that permitted "equal but separate accommodations for the white and colored races."9 This is the verdict that allowed for racial segregation in all public accommodations including but not limited to trains and buses, hospitals, parks, beaches, restaurants, theaters, water fountains, and most relevant to this project, schools.
The Plessy ruling stood strong until the 1950s, when the NAACP legal team put into action a plan that was decades in the making. In 1952, the NAACP brought 5 separate cases about school segregation from different parts of the nation: South Carolina, Virginia, Kansas, Delaware, and the District of Columbia. A year later, all those lawsuits were combined in the case of Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas.
When Oliver Brown, a Black man who lived in an integrated neighborhood in Topeka, Kansas, attempted to enroll his daughter, Linda Brown, in the local school, he was denied. Brown was told that Black students were not allowed in the school and that segregation was permitted according to state law. Rather than attending the school that was in her neighborhood, Brown had to commute 2 hours to a Black school. The lawyers from the NAACP took on Brown’s case, and he became the lead plaintiff in the case along with 12 other parents of children who were denied entry to school on the grounds of race.10
On May 17, 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled that public school segregation was a violation of the Equal Protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. This ruling effectively overturned the Plessy decision of 1896. Naturally, the ruling was met with resistance from states, especially in the South, that had considered racial segregation as a cornerstone of their society. Little more than a year later, in a case now known as Brown II, the Supreme Court doubled down on its previous opinion and added that states must enact desegregation plans “with all deliberate speed.”
Because there had been numerous other similar cases tried in lower-level courts, the Brown decision was highly anticipated by both legislators and laypeople. Whichever way the Court went, the effects on American society would be monumental. In anticipation of the end of federal protections for segregation, Mississippi policymakers pushed for the practice of “equalization,” as in “separate but equal” accommodations.11 However, segregated schools in Mississippi were certainly not equal. Despite the mandates passed down in Brown and Brown II, Southern governments continued to find ways to maintain the segregation status quo. Tying voting rights to race and educational access became an important method of control in states like Mississippi.
The first step to becoming a voter in Mississippi was registering with the local board of elections, which required people to go into town and pass a literacy test that was administered by the local registrar. Because there was no oversight, the registrar of each town had the power to administer the test however they deemed appropriate, which often resulted in Black people being given ridiculously difficult questions. Black residents from Mississippi also describe intimidation tactics that were used such as having the sheriff present while they were taking the test or the registrar noting that their white employers would be upset to hear that they were trying to vote.12 Black people had to be willing to risk their livelihoods and their lives to exercise a right that was constitutionally protected by the Fifteenth Amendment. When Bob Moses and the Freedom Summer organizers came to town in 1964, ten years after Brown, one of their primary goals was to prepare students for the literacy test and get adults registered.13 The work of the Freedom Summer was part of a longer story of grassroots organizing that connected activists across generations and beyond state lines.
On February 1, 1960, after months of planning and coordinating with the women of Bennett College, four Black students from North Carolina Agricultural & Technical State University (NCA&T), a historically Black college in Greensboro, North Carolina implemented a nonviolent strategy that would change the course of American history and politics.14 They sat down, peacefully and respectfully, at the segregated lunch counter at Woolworth’s department store, and ultimately, started a movement. The sit-in strategy, which was successful not only in desegregating Woolworth’s lunch counter but also several other public accommodations in Greensboro, eventually spread across the nation. It became clear that there was a need for an organizational structure and some money to keep the work sustainable, so with the help of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) led by Dr. Martin Luther King and the support of veteran organizers like Ella Baker, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee was founded on the campus of Shaw University in April 1960.15
Bob Moses was a student from New York who joined SNCC after learning of the sit-ins, and in the summer of 1960, he went to Mississippi, where he discovered how dire the situation was for Black people in the state.16 While there was a large Black population in Mississippi, most of whom were poor sharecroppers and manual or domestic laborers, they held almost no political power because very few of them were registered voters. Black Mississippians were afraid to even express a desire to register because they knew that they or their families would likely become victims of violent resistance.17 Mississippi’s economy and social structure, like those of other Southern states, depended on maintaining a Black underclass that was poor, uneducated, and toiling for the benefit of white society. When Moses saw the reality of Black life in Mississippi, increasing voter registration became the goal at the center of his work with SNCC for the next several years.
After trying to register Black voters and being met with extreme backlash, Bob Moses and other civil rights organizers conceived of the Freedom Summer as a way to bring more attention to what was happening in Mississippi. The idea was that they would bring college students from around the country, many of whom were white, to Mississippi in the summer of 1964 as volunteers in the voter registration effort.18 Freedom Schools were a critical part of the Freedom Summer. Students in Freedom Schools would be trained to become local civil rights leaders and political organizers. The implementation of the alternative school model was especially radical at this time in Mississippi because the segregated schools were providing an entirely inadequate education to Black students. Further, many of those students had to find ways to balance school with their responsibilities to their families and the agricultural labor that was expected of them. The Freedom Schools organizers were detailed in their planning and considered the specific needs of those communities as they created something that could be practically implemented.19
The SNCC schools that were started in the Mississippi summer of 1964 were revolutionary because of the extreme context in which they were started, but the Freedom School model was not unique to that specific time and place. On June 17, 1963, part of the “Stay Out for Freedom Day” boycott, approximately 3500 students from Boston public schools chose to forgo their typical school classes and attend lessons in other public places in the community.20 These freedom schools were part of a wave of school boycotts throughout the 1960s that occurred in multiple other cities around the United States like Chicago and New York City. The experiences of students in these urban schools were very different from those of the students in Mississippi, but they all expressed a similar concern with the quality of education they received compared to their white counterparts. Richmond Public Schools also has its own set of unique characteristics, but because the city falls somewhere in between the size of large metropolitan areas like New York City and rural towns of Mississippi, it is helpful to consider the entire spectrum of tactics.
Despite major differences in local context and access to resources, freedom schools of the 1960s were united in their goals and outcomes. Across the board, freedom schools aimed to cultivate youth leadership and guide students to becoming agents for social change.21 The students who attended the schools were aware of the effort to keep them socially and politically ignorant through subpar education. They attended these schools with a thirst to learn and an eagerness to embrace the kinds of lessons that were being offered to them. For many of them, it was the first time they had been exposed to Black history or Black literature, and their time in the freedom schools fundamentally changed their perspectives of themselves and their place in world. It is not a surprise that many of the students who attended freedom schools ended up joining the freedom movement as adults.22
Richmond Specifics
Through a combination of “massive resistance” at the state level and “passive resistance” at the city level, segregation in Richmond public schools continued for at least a generation after Brown.23 In 1956, Virginia established the Pupil Placement Board with the purpose of determining where students would be assigned to attend school and where they would be allowed to transfer, which were responsibilities that were previously held at the local level.24 Richmond maintained a segregated school system long after federal desegregation by exploiting this loophole. While school systems were legally obligated to take steps toward integration, RPS operated under a policy of tokenism, in which a few Black students might be approved to attend white schools, which could then be called “integrated” in the eyes of the law. In reality, an RPS directory from 1963 still listed "White Schools" and "Negro Schools" separately nine years after Brown, and most Black children continued to attend inferior segregated schools throughout the 1960s, either because their applications to white schools were denied by the Pupil Placement Board or because they chose not to endure the psychological trauma of being one of the few to cross the color line.25 In fact, mortgage lenders as early as 1937 had drawn literal lines around the various neighborhoods on maps of Richmond that left deep scars of discrimination on the city and created an environment where school segregation could thrive.
During the Great Depression, President Franklin D. Roosevelt created the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) to prevent foreclosures by assessing the risk of lending in American cities.26 Neighborhoods that had predominantly Black, Jewish, or immigrant populations received the lowest grades and were “redlined”, which meant they were labeled risky for lenders.27 The practice of redlining continued until the Fair Housing Act was passed in 1968, but by then, the damage was done.28 As Richmond neighborhoods became more segregated and city planners continued to neglect the infrastructure needs of predominately Black areas, the few white people who already lived in those places started leave the city center for what they believed would be better opportunities in the suburbs in a process known as “white flight.”29 Today, areas that had been redlined nearly a century ago, such Richmond’s Southside and East End, have higher rates of asthma, lower life expectancy at birth, and less tree cover, which all contribute to a lower standard of living compared to other parts of the city.30 Three of the four lowest ranked middle schools in the district are in these areas: Lucille M. Brown and River City Middle Schools in Southside and Martin Luther King Middle School in the East End.31 It is difficult to be successful in school when you live in an area that is literally detrimental to your health.
The long history of discriminatory housing practices within the city of Richmond has been useful in perpetuating de facto segregation in the schools. Schools in inner city neighborhoods had less access to funding for facility maintenance, teacher salaries, and up-to-date materials, so the Black students who lived in those zones received a substandard education simply because of their address.32 However, the fact that even students of different races who lived next door to each other were assigned to different schools by the 1960s Pupil Placement Board shows that segregation in school ultimately boiled down to the issue of race.33 Even in neighborhoods in Black-white border areas, when previously all-white schools admitted Black students, they might become resegregated as white families chose to move their children from the newly integrated school to a different school altogether.34 By the end of the 60s, it had become clear that many Southern school systems, like that in Richmond, were going to continue looking for ways to slow down desegregation, so in the 70s, it was time to try a new strategy: busing.
Similar to RPS, the schools of Charlotte-Mecklenburg in North Carolina had remained racially segregated throughout the 60s as white flight and resegregation left the urban Charlotte schools predominantly Black and the suburban Mecklenburg County schools predominately white. In the landmark case Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education (1971), the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that busing, or using public transportation to ensure students could attend schools outside of their neighborhoods, was a viable method to enforce desegregation.35 Richmond District Court Judge Robert R. Merhige, Jr., had previously proposed a similar plan that involved merging Richmond city schools with those in the surrounding suburban counties of Henrico and Chesterfield and busing students to schools within those regions.36 Merhige received a lot of backlash, and the Supreme Court ultimately refused to uphold his decision leaving Richmond Public Schools effectively unchanged through the 70s.37 Busing was largely unsuccessful, but proponents of desegregation continued to experiment with new strategies to provide access to high quality education for all Richmond students.
Richmond Community High School was established in 1977 amidst a crisis in Richmond Public Schools when white flight led to loss of public revenue and a subsequent decline in the quality of education that city schools could reasonably provide. This led to not only white families, but also middle class and wealthy Black families relocating to private and suburban schools in the 1970s and 1980s, which further highlighted the problems within RPS schools in the such as disproportionate failure, dropout, and expulsion rates.38 Part of what made Community a success was its public-private funding model that was established at its founding when businessman Andrew Asch, educator Dr. Margaret Dabney, and superintendent Dr. Richard Hunter combined their powers and experience to form the school. From the beginning, Community was created as a place that would use its access to funds to "[focus] especially on minority students and those from low-income backgrounds."39 The founders recognized that there were plenty of talented students within those communities who would thrive if they were given the chance.
The idea of “community” was ingrained in the school from the beginning. When it was first established by the Richmond school board, the school was originally called the Secondary School Experiential Learning Community. It was the first class of students who decided on the name Richmond Community High School and chose the Pharaoh as the mascot and the pyramid as the logo because of the symbolic significance of the imagery.40 One other aspect of community that has endured the school’s fifty-year history is the minimester tradition, in which each class of students spends an extended period of time bonding and learning on an off-site field trip. The freshman minimester camping trip is a particularly important part of becoming a Pharaoh. During that trip students and teacher chaperones spend a week conducting ecological studies, exploring the history of the region, and camping in the rural Eastern Shore of Maryland. A critical modern aspect of the trip is that students are not allowed to bring electronic devices, especially cell phones. Students who took that trip many decades ago have described it as an important developmental moment for them since for many of them, it was their first time living outside of an urban environment and being away from their families for so long.41 I have personally seen the impact of that trip on my own students. It is one thing that makes Community unique.
Though Community was not called a “freedom school,” it was clearly an extension of that legacy. The vision that the founders of Community had in 1977 Richmond is similar to the one that Bob Moses had in 1964 Mississippi. Today, students are still affected by the legacy of segregation. A key outlier in this pattern is Richmond Community High School, which has a student body that is 55.9% Black and 40.3% “economically disadvantaged” yet is consistently ranked a top school not only in RPS but in the entire state of Virginia.42 Community has access to privilege that is not accessible to most public schools, so it is our responsibility to use that power for good. Yet, in my time as a teacher at Community, I have noticed increasing levels of apathy and disengagement among my students. In 2026, as we teach in an era of heightened political polarization, increased misinformation, and overt racism and xenophobia, it is important to draw on the lessons of those who came before us and continue to do the work.
Bob Moses continued working for equity in education through the end of his life. He said of the importance of student agency, “[Today’s youth], like Mrs. Hamer, Mrs. Devine, E.W. Steptoe, and others who changed the political face of Mississippi in the 1960s, have to demand what everyone says they don’t want.”43 The goal in my unit is to help students practice critical thinking and find meaningful ways to exercise their political power. By exposing students to the work of Freedom Summer volunteers, I hope to show students that they too have the power to change their future. I want them to take charge of their education and find concrete ways to express their wants and needs as budding leaders in the community. The student-centered Freedom School model, which relies on interdisciplinary studies, emotional awareness, and questioning the status quo, can help today’s youth discover their own power. My students deserve that kind of education, and I want them to demand it for themselves.
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