The Kids are not the Threat

CONTENTS OF CURRICULUM UNIT 26.01.05

  1. Unit Guide
  1. Introduction And Rationale
  2. School Profile
  3. Background Knowledge And Content
  4. Teaching Strategies
  5. Classroom Activities
  6. Appendix On Implementing State Standards
  7. Annotated Bibliography
  8. Notes

Learning from the Past, Creating Our Future: Imagining a Modern Freedom School

Erik Harris

Published September 2026

Tools for this Unit:

Notes

  1. “The Boulevard Historic District,” The Virginia Department of Historic Resources, updated November 28, 2024. https://www.dhr.virginia.gov/historic-registers/127-0398/.
  2. “History,” Maggie L. Walker Governor’s School, accessed July 11, 2026. https://mlwgs.com/about/history/.
  3. “Virginia Union University’s Richmond 34 Honored with Historical Marker,” Virginia Union University, August 24, 2016, https://www.vuu.edu/news/virginia-union-universitys-richmond-34-honored-with-historical-marker.
  4. “Shockoe Bottom African Burial Ground,” Visit Richmond VA, accessed July 11, 2026, https://www.visitrichmondva.com/listing/shockoe-bottom-african-burial-ground/5069/.
  5. “The First Africans,” Jamestown Rediscovery, Historic Jamestowne, accessed July 11, 2026, https://historicjamestowne.org/history/the-first-africans/.
  6. Brent Tarter, “Elizabeth Key (Fl. 1655–1660),” Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia, 2019, https://old.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.asp?b=Key_Elizabeth_fl_1655-1660.
  7. General Assembly, “‘Negro Womens Children to Serve According to the Condition of the Mother’ (1662),” Encyclopedia Virginia, December 7, 2020, https://encyclopediavirginia.org/primary-documents/negro-womens-children-to-serve-according-to-the-condition-of-the-mother-1662/.
  8. Clint Smith, “Plessy v Ferguson and Segregation: Crash Course Black American History #21,” YouTube, October 15, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nbZUQGPMTjk.
  9. Plessy v. Ferguson, National Archives (U.S. Supreme Court 1896).
  10. Clint Smith, “School Segregation and Brown v Board: Crash Course Black American History #33,” YouTube, February 11, 2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NBlqcAEv4nk.
  11. Jon N. Hale, The Freedom Schools: Student Activists in the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), 29-30.
  12. Freedom Summer: Mississippi 1964. Video. United States: PBS Distribution, 2014.
  13. Doug McAdam, Freedom Summer (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988),
  14. Linda Beatrice Brown, Belles of Liberty: Gender, Bennett College, and the Civil Rights Movement (Scuppernong Editions: 2013), 77.
  15. Howard Zinn, SNCC: The New Abolitionists (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), 33.
  16. Zinn, 64
  17. Freedom Summer: Mississippi 1964.
  18. Kathy Emery, Sylvia Brasselman, and Linda Gold (eds.), Freedom School Curriculum, 7-8
  19. Emery, 37.
  20. P. Franklin, The Young Crusaders: The Untold Story of the Children and Teenagers Who Galvanized the Civil Rights Movement, (Boston, Massachusetts: Beacon Press, 2021), 127.
  21. Franklin, 163.
  22. Franklin, 164.
  23. Robert A. Pratt, The Color of Their Skin: Education and Race in Richmond, Virginia, 1954-89 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992), 13.
  24. Pratt, 21.
  25. Pratt, 30-31, 36.
  26. “Redlining Richmond,” Digital Scholarship Lab, University of Richmond, accessed July 12, 2026, https://dsl.richmond.edu/redliningrichmond/
  27. “Redlining Richmond”
  28. S. Congress, Fair Housing Act, 1968.
  29. Pratt, 14.
  30. “Redlining Richmond”
  31. “Richmond City Public Schools - Virginia School Quality Profiles,” Virginia Department of Education School Quality Profiles, accessed July 12, 2026. https://schoolquality.virginia.gov/divisions/richmond-city-public-schools.
  32. Pratt, 15.
  33. Pratt, 27.
  34. Pratt, 44.
  35. “Primary Source: Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education,” Library of North Carolina, accessed July 12, 2026, https://www.ncanchor.org/anchor/primary-source-swann-v.
  36. Pratt, 50-54.
  37. Pratt, 71-72.
  38. Pratt, 90-93.
  39. Barbara S. Fuhrmann, “Richmond Community High School: A Successful Experiment in Public Education” (2012), 3.
  40. Fuhrmann, 19.
  41. Fuhrmann, 20.
  42. “Richmond City Public Schools - Virginia School Quality Profiles”
  43. Robert Parris Moses and Charles E. Cobb, Radical Equations: Math Literacy and Civil Rights (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001), 18.
  44. “Getting Started with Primary Sources,” Library of Congress, accessed July 27, 2026, https://www.loc.gov/static/programs/teachers/getting-started-with-primary-sources/
  45. Marvin Sykes, "A&T Students Launch 'Sit-Down' Demand For Service At Downtown Lunch Counter: Woolworth Made Target For Demonstration Here," Greensboro Record, February 2, 1960, from the Library of North Carolina.
  46. Fannie Lou Hamer, “Testimony Before the Credentials Committee” (speech, Atlantic City, NJ, August 22, 1964), American Public Media, http://americanradioworks.publicradio.org/features/sayitplain/flhamer.html.
  47. Freedom School Curriculum, 123.
  48. , 215-225.
  49. PBS American Experience, “Freedom Schools, ‘Freedom Summer’ clip 14,” YouTube, June 23, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I792Qeyur5Q.
  50. Jacquelyn Reed Cockfield, Zellie Rainey Orr, and Emily Rembery, “Remembrances of Freedom School Students,” The Civil Rights Movement Archive, https://www.crmvet.org/info/fstudent.htm#stu-reed.
  51. WTVR CBS 6, “The Richmond 34,” YouTube, February 20, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_9j3A8m2_8.

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