In 1963 and 1964, organizers in Boston held Freedom Stay-Outs--one-day school boycotts-- to protest the neglect of predominantly Black schools from the Boston School Committee, the governing body of the Boston Public Schools. Boycotting students attended Freedom Schools, where they learned about Black history and discussed issues facing Black…

Continuing racial inequities and marginalization have led some communities to reject reliance on public schooling by forming their own programmes and/or schools, claiming sovereignty over the education of their children. We highlight Freedom Schools as one such ongoing but under-studied movement that precedes and contributes to recent,…

This article examines the history of the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Schools to illustrate how integrating the Civil Rights Movement into the social studies curriculum refocuses the aims of American education on participatory democracy. Teaching the Civil Rights Movement and employing the teaching strategies used in the Freedom Schools leads to the…

Self-consciously activist education has a long history among African-Americans; however, it is one of the least well-understood aspects of African American struggle. This paper addresses one chapter in that history, the Freedom Schools that operated in Mississippi during the summer of 1964 and for a while thereafter. The schools were the creation…