Content uploaded by Derek H. Alderman
Author content
All content in this area was uploaded by Derek H. Alderman on Jun 25, 2023
Content may be subject to copyright.
Content uploaded by Derek H. Alderman
Author content
All content in this area was uploaded by Derek H. Alderman on Jun 13, 2022
Content may be subject to copyright.
Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at
https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=cjgh20
Journal of Geography in Higher Education
ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cjgh20
The 1964 freedom schools as neglected chapter in
Geography education
Derek H. Alderman, Bethany Craig, Joshua Inwood & Shaundra Cunningham
To cite this article: Derek H. Alderman, Bethany Craig, Joshua Inwood & Shaundra
Cunningham (2023) The 1964 freedom schools as neglected chapter in Geography
education, Journal of Geography in Higher Education, 47:3, 411-431, DOI:
10.1080/03098265.2022.2087056
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/03098265.2022.2087056
Published online: 13 Jun 2022.
Submit your article to this journal
Article views: 109
View related articles
View Crossmark data
RESEARCH ARTICLE
The 1964 freedom schools as neglected chapter in Geography
education
Derek H. Alderman
a
, Bethany Craig
a
, Joshua Inwood
b
and Shaundra Cunningham
a
a
Department of Geography, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Tennessee, USA;
b
Department of Geography,
University Park, Penn State, USA
ABSTRACT
Our paper revisits a neglected chapter in the history of geographic
education–the civil rights organization SNCC and the Freedom
Schools it helped establish in 1964. An alternative to Mississippi’s
racially segregated public schools, Freedom Schools addressed
basic educational needs of Black children while also creating
a curriculum to empower them to become active citizens against
White supremacy. Emerging out of a history of Black fugitive learn-
ing, Freedom Schools produced a critical regional pedagogy to help
students identify the geographic conditions and power structures
behind their oppression in the South and use regional comparisons
to raise their political consciousness and expand their relational
sense of place. Freedom Schools have important implications for
higher educators, especially as contemporary conservative leaders
seek to rid critical discussions of race from classrooms. They oer an
evocative case study of the spatial imagination of the Black
Freedom Struggle while pushing us to interrogate the inherent
contradictions, if not antagonisms, between public higher educa-
tion and emancipatory teaching and learning. Freedom Schools
prompt a rethinking and expansion of what counts as geographic
learning, whose lives matter in our curriculum, where and for whom
we teach, and what social work should pedagogy accomplish.
ARTICLE HISTORY
Received 31 October 2021
Accepted 14 April 2022
KEYWORDS
Black geographies; racism;
civil rights movement;
freedom schools; regional
geography; fugitive learning
Introduction
“Education should enable children to possess their own lives instead of living at the
mercy of others.”— Charles Cobb, Jr., Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
(SNCC) activist
As part of their grassroots civil rights organizing in the deep southeastern United
States (also called the Deep South), the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
(SNCC) established a series of Mississippi Freedom Schools in the summer of 1964.
These schools served as volunteer sites for anti-racist learning for Black elementary and
secondary students as well as some adults. The Freedom Schools were developed as part
of the broader “Freedom Summer Project,” an impressive array of voter registration,
community development, and education campaigns sponsored by SNCC and other
major civil rights organizations – constituting what historian J. Hale (2014, para 1)
CONTACT Derek H. Alderman dalderma@utk.edu Derek Alderman Department of Geography, University of
Tennessee 1000 Philip Fuller Way 305 Burchfiel Geography Building, Knoxville, Tennessee, 37996-0925, USA
JOURNAL OF GEOGRAPHY IN HIGHER EDUCATION
2023, VOL. 47, NO. 3, 411–431
https://doi.org/10.1080/03098265.2022.2087056
© 2022 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
calls “the most significant demonstration of . . . [Black] political strength in the Civil
Rights Movement.” As radical sites of learning, Freedom Schools operated independent
of state control and sought to compensate for the racially segregated and woefully under-
funded public schools that miseducated Black young people (Sturkey, 2010). A major
goal was to counter what SNCC organizer Bob Moses called the “sharecropper educa-
tion” that so heavily damaged the self-image, critical consciousness, and civil rights of
Black school aged children (Moses & Cobb, 2001). Nearly 2,500 Black students ultimately
enrolled in 41 Freedom Schools, doubling SNCC’s original estimates and hopes (Etienne,
2013).
Freedom Schools, although receiving far less attention than other activism during the
Movement, revolutionized how students learned to be critical and politically active
citizens in their own right, even as the community faced intimidation, retaliation, and
violence from White supremacists (J. Hale, 2011). Freedom Schools focused on basic
remedial education, literacy, and mathematical skills while also introducing students to
Black history and literature. Perhaps most significantly, the curriculum empowered Black
students to question and challenge the social and geographical forces behind their
oppression (Etienne, 2013). Well before the rise of what we call “critical pedagogy”
(Giroux, 1988), Freedom Schools recognized the power-laden nature of education,
encouraged students to be dialogic agents in their own learning, and sought to catalyze
civic engagement among young people. SNCC long focused on cultivating grassroots
leadership and these schools were an important tool to advance this goal. Creating
a supportive environment in which students could express themselves creatively, freely
interrogate racist ideologies and discuss their own often ignored needs and experiences,
Freedom School students honed skills in non-violent protest. Many participated in the
struggle to integrate public spaces and businesses, organized demonstrations and boy-
cotts, and canvassed communities to convince folks to register to vote (J. Hale, 2011;
Sturkey, 2010).
Although lasting only six weeks, Freedom Schools proved transformative for
a number of young Black Mississippians who later assumed leadership positions in
their communities and developed a passion for education and activism (Etienne, 2013).
SNCC’s efforts inspired future Freedom Schools (most notably the Children’s Defense
Fund) to counteract detrimental aspects of traditional schooling and expand the socio-
political possibilities of Black youth (Davis et al., 2021). Most recently, Pulitzer Prize-
winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones has launched the 1619 Freedom School, a free,
after school literacy program in her hometown of Waterloo, Iowa to provide low-income
students “liberating instruction centered on Black American history” (S. Taylor, 2021,
para 3). In the over sixty years since their establishment, Freedom Schools “provide a civil
rights model by which to evaluate the progress of educational reform initiatives imple-
mented to provide a quality education for all students” (Hale, 2016, p. 33).
Despite their political and educational importance, the 1964 Freedom Schools have
received scant attention from geographers and, in particular, geographic educators.
1
Meanwhile, educational historians have not fully acknowledged and discussed the role
of geographic education within the revolutionary curriculum of Mississippi Freedom
Schools. We seek to fill this void somewhat by arguing that Freedom Schools developed
and leveraged a “critical regional pedagogy,” although activists, teachers, and students at
the time did not (and would not have to) describe their praxis in these terms. This
412 D. H. ALDERMAN ET AL.
pedagogy departed from how many professional geographers studied regions at the time
and long predated the teaching of social theory and justice in many of today’s main-
stream Geography classrooms. Freedom Schools treated regional knowledge as not just as
a collection of facts, patterns, and interpretations, but as a tool in understanding and
challenging the power relations undergirding the building of the Deep South as a racially
oppressive region.
This regional pedagogy, like all Freedom School lessons, embraced ideas now founda-
tional to the intersection of critical pedagogy and ethnic studies, such as centering the
everyday struggles of students of color, providing curriculum that speak to those experi-
ences, and empowering students to build critical literacies necessary for naming institutional
racism and effecting social change (De Los Ríos et al., 2015). Freedom School curriculum
sought to help students to identify the regional conditions and structures behind their
oppression and use regional comparisons as a tool for raising political consciousness and
expanding a relational sense of place and political agency. In doing so, students developed
skills in interrogating the material landscapes of racial inequality and mapping the networks
of social actors and institutions and scales of power driving White supremacy.
The regional education enacted at Freedom Schools was part of the wider
geographical work and spatial imagination carried out by SNCC workers and
mobilized communities. SNCC deployed conventional and unorthodox cartography,
data collection and analysis, photography, theater, and the broader power of educa-
tion to remake places and institutions to respond to the oppression of poor Black
southerners (Inwood & Alderman, 2020, 2021). As part of its commitment to
participatory democracy and community-based, grassroots approaches to racial
equality, the civil rights organization was committed to understanding the Deep
South. Freedom Schools – along with a host of SNCC activities and initiatives –
stressed the production of a politically actionable Black geographic knowledge of
racism and its effects on everyday life. Important for context, despite the fact that
Freedom Schools were often staffed by White upper-middle class college student
volunteers, the curriculum drew from a longer history of oppositional spatial knowl-
edge making and fugitive learning central to Black southern life (Givens, 2021; Patel,
2016a). A tradition of educational resistance and self-determination in the face of
oppression has existed within Black communities since the days of enslavement
(Etienne, 2013).
This paper offers a geographic reading of the educational praxis at Mississippi
Freedom Schools and discusses its implications for Geography higher education.
Specifically, we analyze examples of the critical regional education found in its curricu-
lum. For teachers in the United States and beyond, Freedom Schools offer an evocative
case study of the Black geographic knowledge production behind the Civil Rights
Movement, responding to recent calls to diversify Geography education and center
Black lives and experiences. They also inspire us to make broader interventions in the
civic efficacy and responsiveness of Geography curriculum with regard to the life
struggles of historically marginalized students while pushing us to interrogate the
inherent contradictions, if not antagonisms, between public higher education and eman-
cipatory teaching and learning. Freedom Schools also offer an opportunity to address
Black geographies of education and in particular fugitive learning, which remains under-
developed in our field, and the leveraging of schools for civil rights, even as they have
JOURNAL OF GEOGRAPHY IN HIGHER EDUCATION 413
been used (and are still used) to maintain racist structures and practices. Many of the
Freedom Schools’ goals still elude Black and Brown students as segregation continues to
define many US educational systems (Hale, 2014; Jackson & Howard, 2014).
The Freedom Schools of 1964 Mississippi are crucial reminders of Bednarz’s (2019)
assertion that Geography education can and should play a greater role in citizenship
education – a timely lesson as many public and private schools in the USA have become
battlegrounds for debates about critical race theory. Yet, it is critical to recognize the kind
of citizenship education to which we refer. Recent actions of conservative leaders and
public groups have sought to rid critical discussions of race and civil rights from
America’s classrooms and thus produce a citizen able to ignore and deny the realities
of racism (Mervosh & Heyward, 2021). Numerous U.S. states have enacted legislation
that bans discussions, training, and/or academic material that forthrightly address dis-
crimination – exactly the kind of discussions that Freedom Schools were committed to
carrying out. Ray and Gibbons (2021) rightly see these laws as an obstacle to the kind of
citizenship education necessary for building an equitable democracy.
Situating Mississippi freedom schools
Diversity, antiracism, and civil rights education
A study of SNCC’s Mississippi Freedom Schools is of historical importance, provid-
ing an important grassroots counterpoint to conventional approaches to teaching
the Civil Rights Movement as a series of campaigns planned by just a few national
leaders.
2
For our purposes here, we situate the 1964 Freedom Schools movement
within a geographical literature increasingly concerned with issues of diversity and
social justice in the classroom. In a highly visible discussion, then-President of the
American Association of Geographers Domosh (2015) challenged the discipline to
consider “why the Geography curriculum is so white.” She asks us to recognize the
always incomplete, white-centric assumptions about geographic knowledge that
characterize much of our curricula. She also encouraged geographers to create
courses and teaching approaches “more relevant to today’s racially diverse society”
and to enhance the discipline’s commitment to anti-racism and equality. Joining
Domosh are growing calls for greater pedagogical engagement with historical and
contemporary civil rights struggles. Inwood (2017) notes the dearth of Geography
teaching focused upon the Black Freedom Struggle and the harm created by
excluding Black lives from our classrooms. He argues that taking civil rights
seriously not only enriches and diversifies our curriculum “but also . . . give[s] . . .
students the intellectual tools necessary to take on white supremacist realities,”
which has seen a recent, alarming resurgence (Inwood, 2017, p. 456). Revisiting
Freedom Schools allows us to explore the existence of an alternative Geography
curriculum written explicitly to resist oppression, by people engaged in life and
death struggles for equality. This provokes us to consider what a pedagogy looks like
if devoted to viewing and interpreting the world through liberatory struggle. To help
us unpack the implications of this struggle we turn to the field of Black geographies
to understand the broad implications of SNCC Freedom curriculum.
414 D. H. ALDERMAN ET AL.
Black geographies and fugitive learning
Black geographies is an important intellectual movement in the discipline, fueled by the
work of scholars such as McKittrick (2011), Hawthorne (2019), Bledsoe and Wright
(2019), Eaves (2020), Purifoy (2021), and Winston (2021). Proponents argue that by
centering Black lives, spatial practices, and ways of knowing within our understandings
of the foundation of society and space we can understand a deeper and more profound
set of spatial practices. Importantly, Black geographies recognize that people of color
have long engaged in the production and use of geographic knowledge to make a place
within and against a White supremacist society. This geographic knowledge creation
takes many forms, from the everyday to the spectacular and from artistic expressions to
scientific constructs. Noting the limited integration of Black geographies into main-
stream pedagogical spaces, Eaves (2020) laments the fact that “Black subjects and spaces
have most often been rendered as mere data points on a map and measured in quanti-
tative and environmentally deterministic ways.” She suggests that Geography educators
should move beyond just asking these questions of “where” or “how many” and prioritize
understanding a Black sense of place on its own terms rather than “at the mercy of
others.” This statement harkens back to the sentiments of SNCC organizer Charles Cobb
at the beginning of this paper. Doing justice to a Black sense of place is not about
squeezing people of color into disciplinary and educational conventions, but expanding
what counts as geographic learning, who creates and benefits from that learning, and
what progressive social and political work geographic education should perform.
We follow Jarvis Givens’ (2021) call for a “new grammar for Black education” as the
United States’ education system has historically been a site of both deep suffering and
a sacred site of Black spirituality. While “the history of Black, Brown, and Indigenous
peoples relative to white domination is marked by resistance, fugitivity, and creativity,
these histories are themselves situated within the larger core vibrancy of Black, Brown,
and Indigenous life” (Patel, 2016b, p. 83). The fight for freedom through Black education
“was a fugitive project from its inception – outlawed and defined as a criminal act
regarding the slave population in the southern states and, at times, too, an object of
suspicion and violent resistance in the North” (Givens, 2021, p. 3). Fugitive learning
moves beyond simply examining and broadening our educational approaches, practices,
and settings and calls upon educators “to disrupt schooling through transformative
dialogue, investigation, and action” (Navarro & Navarro, 2020, p. 159).
A fugitive pedagogy knows that Black education was about more than establishing
traditional academic skill sets, but was “fundamentally [also] about challenging and
transcending antiblack sentiments that structured the South and known world”
(Givens, 2021, p. 159). In challenging their assigned roles in society, Black people as
slaves and second-class citizens, fugitive pedagogy inspired “suspicion and refusal” and
helped “students understand the urgent demand to make the world anew” (Givens, 2021,
p. 230). As such, “fugitive learning should not be understood as a simple metaphor but
rather as a historical and contemporary act of resistance” (Navarro & Navarro, 2020,
p. 158).
The comments of Givens, Domosh, Inwood, and Eaves provoke us to reconsider what
has traditionally counted as geographic knowledge and educational practice, both inside
and outside of the classroom and when placed within the context of fugitive learning
JOURNAL OF GEOGRAPHY IN HIGHER EDUCATION 415
open space to reconsider how we teach Geography. Critical within this push towards
fugitive pedagogy is envisioning geographic knowledge production beyond the elite,
often oppressive reach of state power or elite specialists – including professional geo-
graphers and Geography educators. An important avenue for fugitive learning practices
is establishing ways of defining and doing Geography education beyond the traditional
state-run classroom and exploring the formulation, teaching and learning of knowledge
in alternative educational settings. Freedom Schools represent such settings, places
created explicitly to leverage education in the service of antiracism and in ways that
center a Black worldview.
Freedom schools as black geographies of education
At the heart of fugitive learning, and the Freedom School philosophy was a belief in
resisting and developing a more just alternative to segregated public schools in 1960s
Mississippi. Freedom Schools engaged in creating subaltern places of political education–
transforming churches, backyards, community centers, and other meeting places in Black
communities into schoolhouses. These education geographies, in the words of Logue
(2008), were devoted to “radical conceptions of pedagogy, citizenship, and power” and
had a decidedly different goal than that of state-run schools. Where state education
sought to reproduce passive and demoralized Black communities, Freedom School
curriculum fought to transform Black people individually and collectively into active
participants in their own liberation. Freedom Schools have their origin in a long-standing
and still ongoing Black recognition that education can never be separated from the
politics of knowledge production and struggle for self-determination and racial justice.
True to the idea of fugitive learning, this tradition of subversive Black education extends
across time and space. The Mississippi Freedom Schools grew out of a number of fugitive
learning movements, such as the conversion of antebellum slave cabins on plantations
into clandestine classrooms and the Black demands for education in the Reconstruction
era. Other important antecedents included the often-under-acknowledged work of Black
principals and teachers in subverting inequality in segregated schools, Septima Clark’s
literacy and citizenship workshops for Black adults beginning in the 1950s, the training of
grass roots activists at the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, and Black student
activism on many university campuses (Kendi, 2012; Payne & Strickland, 2008).
We believe that revisiting Mississippi Freedom Schools is a valuable point of inter-
vention in these aforementioned agendas of diversifying and exploring fugitive teaching
and learning practices that advance Black Geographies of education. When SNCC field
secretary Charles Cobb formally proposed establishing Freedom Schools in December of
1963, he articulated a project of resistant place making and the urgency of creating sites of
learning that pushed back against White Supremacy’s control of information, education,
and life chances. Encouraging Black creativity, Cobb said: “If we are concerned about
breaking the [racist] power structure, then we [Black communities] have to be concerned
about building our own institutions to replace the old, unjust decadent ones which make
up the existing power structure. Education in Mississippi is an institution which must be
reconstructed from the ground up” (as cited in Chilcoat & Ligon, 1999, pp. 46–47).
416 D. H. ALDERMAN ET AL.
Years later, Cobb (2008) would write of the critical role that Geography played in
the Freedom Schools, the necessity of creating comfortable and safe spaces for Black
students to express and explore ideas and build self-esteem consequential to the
struggle for citizenship rights. Frequently populated with White volunteer teachers/
facilitators from privileged backgrounds outside the South, Freedom Schools dis-
played their own racial and class tensions, and despite their revolutionary curricu-
lum were largely silent on issues of gender and sexual equality. Yet, Mississippi’s
Freedom Schools strongly supported Black Mississippians in “collectively develop-
[ing] a more realistic perception of U.S. society, themselves, the conditions of their
oppression, and the conceptualization of alternatives to the prescribed [racist] social
order” (Logue, 2008, p. 60).
The very organization and operation of Freedom Schools, as a Black Geography
of education, modeled for students the possibilities of a liberatory, social order
responsive to community needs and experiences. Methods of teaching and learning
in Freedom Schools challenged the control at state-run Mississippi schools. Rather
than centered on tests, memorization of facts, and maintaining discipline, Freedom
Schools created a place where Black students could freely ask questions, not just
about academics but especially about political events, the Civil Rights Movement,
and the racist realities that shaped their lives (Etienne, 2013). According to Hale
(2016, p. 113), “Instead of sitting passively in rows of desks with the teacher in the
front of the room [as found in typical schoolrooms], students sat where they chose
and in a way that facilitated open dialogue between teacher and student.” There is
a long tradition of discussion in education, but Freedom Schools saw it as key to
creating a sense of equality and worth among otherwise disenfranchised students,
challenging authority, and transforming learning into social action (Chilcoat &
Ligon, 2001). Expression and resistance were also encouraged at Freedom Schools
through students’ publishing of newspapers, participating in theatrical productions,
creative writing, singing, extracurricular activities, and of course protests and
demonstrations (Hale, 2016).
The emphasis on discussion, dialogue, and questioning in Freedom Schools –
while certainly emerging from wider ideas about progressive education (Logue,
2008) – also closely followed the participatory democratic approach of SNCC.
SNCC organizers drew heavily from the Black community organizing teachings of
Ella Baker. Baker helped found SNCC in 1960 and mentored many of its organizers
to shun “top down” charismatic leadership for empowering communities to take
charge of their own freedom struggles. Historian Ransby (2003) notes that Baker’s
approach to teaching and learning, traceable to her work with worker education
projects of the 1930s, was the “governing ethos” of the Freedom Schools. Baker
chaired the committee in charge of designing the Freedom Schools. The schools’
pedagogy reflected Black feminist values she brought to SNCC, namely knowing and
being accountable to the life situations of oppressed Black people. Focused on
enabling communities to participate directly in discussions, debates, and decisions
about social change, she positioned ordinary working people as central to the
movement.
JOURNAL OF GEOGRAPHY IN HIGHER EDUCATION 417
The geographical work of civil rights
Important to our discussion is that Freedom Schools engaged Black young people in
critical fugitive learning about their own region to better understanding how the region
was organized socially and politically. SNCC placed great value on using the production
of information and education – often geographic in nature – as a mobilization tool. Well
before SNCC field secretaries would enter communities in the Deep South, they would
avail themselves of social and spatial data resources and current news about those
communities’ local economy, political and demographic profile, physical and cultural
landscapes, and their broader regional, national, and even global interconnections
(Inwood & Alderman, 2020). Volunteer teachers for Freedom Schools used similar
geographic audits and analyses during their orientation training at the Western College
for Women in Oxford, Ohio. Done partly for safety since so many of the volunteers had
little background in the violent Jim Crow South it also ensured that teachers were
responsive and respectful of student and community needs. On average, these volunteer
teachers came from families earning nearly 50% more than the national average and
almost eight times as much as the Mississippi families hosting them (Hale, 2016, p. 93).
For students enrolled in Freedom Schools there was a high premium placed on using
information and education to raise the consciousness of Black southerners and challenge
what SNCC worker Charles Sherrod called “the black box of community” (Inwood &
Alderman, 2020). That black box referred to those spatial and social conditions of race
and inequality that define one’s place within communities. Confronting that black box
and knowing one’s community (and by extension one’s region and nation) were central
to oppressed groups not accepting the exploitation and inhumanity that structured their
daily lives. While SNCC wanted to use Freedom Schools and other initiatives to dis-
mantle the box of racism that enveloped communities, Mississippi’s state-run schools
sought to maintain this box tightly by curtailing academic freedom.
White public education officials in 1960s Mississippi created and enforced
a curriculum that deliberately squashed Black students’ discussions of citizenship rights
and knowledge of African American historical and geographic contributions. “In the
1950s and 1960s [B]lack public school teachers were under constant surveillance, and
discussing civil rights issues, even in all-[B]lack Mississippi schools, could lead to
termination of employment” (Sturkey, 2010, p. 353). The intent was clear – to maintain
racial control and keep Black youth, the future of any sustained Freedom Movement –
apathetic, disengaged, and uninformed. Freedom School volunteer teachers saw how the
lack of even the most basic geographic and historical education compromised SNCC’s
goal of participatory democracy. They wrote letters home about how some of their Black
students “did not know how many states were in the union or the name of the nation’s
capital” and others “had never heard of the Supreme Court’s 1954 school desegregation
decision” (Sturkey, 2010, p. 354).
In sharp contrast, running throughout the Freedom School curriculum were several
opportunities for students and their teachers to develop an explicitly anti-racist knowl-
edge and understanding of the region and nation. This included mapping the uneven
power relations that tried to set the terms of Black life, and the value of cross-regional
comparative analysis. Our intent in the next section of this paper is to offer a critical
reading of portions of the Freedom School’s regionally oriented curriculum. The
418 D. H. ALDERMAN ET AL.
expansion of spatial imagination and radical geographic literacy enacted through
Freedom Schools, while seemingly new for the White-dominated disciplinary cultures
of Geography and Geography education, has always existed. The fact that we may see it as
unexpected and remarkable is testimony to how much, according to Hawthorne (2019,
p. 1), Black innovations in space and place “have not always been recognized as ‘properly’
geographical and have thus been systematically excluded from the formal canon of
disciplinary Geography.” Undergirding our exploration of SNCC Freedom School curri-
culum is a wider contention that the work of producing, disseminating, and applying
geographic knowledge in many conventional and unconventional forms played an
important role not just in the American Civil Rights Movement but also throughout
the entire Black Freedom Struggle. From the liberation from enslavement to the struggle
against Jim Crow segregation and to the current fight against police brutality, Black
communities have deployed spatial thinking and tools in self-determined ways
(Alderman & Inwood, 2016).
Freedom curriculum case studies: radical pedagogy of regional analysis
To materialize Charles Cobb’s vision of establishing Freedom Schools in Mississippi,
SNCC established a Summer Educational Program Committee. The seven-person com-
mittee, under the co-leadership of Lois Chaffee, organized a two-day curriculum design
conference held in New York City in March of 1964. Just a few months before the start of
classes, the conference, under the chairship of Ella Baker, brought together national
educators, civil rights activists, clergy, and others to formulate and write a curriculum to
guide volunteer teachers, many of whom were pedagogically inexperienced (Chilcoat &
Ligon, 1999). Perlstein (1990, p. 309) reports: “Remediation, science, and mathematics
received some attention [from curriculum writers] and the conference developed
a number of sample reading and writing lessons as well as more general pedagogical
guidelines” for use in Freedom Schools. Yet, the focus of most participants fell on
leadership development, including instruction in Black history, as part of creating
a broader “citizenship curriculum.”
Written largely by Boston community activist and former Harlem educator Noel Day
and his wife Peggy Damon-Day, the citizenship curriculum was meant to help students
“develop an awareness of themselves as social agents.” The curriculum encouraged
students to question “their life situations in terms of what they wanted their lives and
communities to be and how they could work toward a more just and equitable existence”
(Chilcoat & Ligon, 1999, p. 54). Important to the civic portion of the Freedom School
curriculum was the creation of a series of case studies for focusing student discussion of
the “political, economic, and social . . . forces at work in . . . [their] society” (as cited in
Perlstein, 1990, p. 309). Although educational and civil rights historians and SNCC
veterans have not previously discussed these case studies from a geographic education
perspective, the lessons nonetheless encouraged Black students to develop a critical
regional knowledge. Students worked with teachers to produce knowledge about the
social and spatial conditions and structures of power at work in the Deep South, situating
their own experiences within an understanding of struggles facing Black people. This
curriculum empowered the relational sense of place and spatial imagination of Black
youth through broader discussions of human rights. We argue that this spatial
JOURNAL OF GEOGRAPHY IN HIGHER EDUCATION 419
imagination was critical to Freedom Schools’ overarching goal of empowering oppressed
communities, transforming the South’s segregated society, and teaching students long-
term skills that went beyond the classroom. The fugitive Geography education operatio-
nalized in Freedom Schools encouraged students to challenge their own understanding of
the South while also considering the multiplicity of different, more just Souths that could
exist as an alternative within the region.
To outline our argument we turn our attention to some case studies within the 1964
curriculum that demonstrates the radical pedagogy of geographic learning that took place
within the Mississippi Freedom Schools. An important resource in understanding the
lessons developed and taught in Freedom Schools is the online available work of Emery
et al. (2004), who took on the significant labor of locating, assembling, and recreating
Freedom School curriculum materials. According to them, gaining a complete picture of
all that was taught in 1964 Mississippi is difficult, not just because of the vagaries of
historic preservation but because Freedom Schools teachers could choose how to use
provided curriculum units. Teachers sometimes wrote their own lessons, and SNCC
openly encouraged them to improvise as they encouraged the curriculum to students’
place-specific lives.
Identifying regional conditions and structures of oppression in the south
Critical to the geographic education found in Freedom Schools was the idea that there
was not just one single objective reality that was the Southeastern US. Rather, the region
functioned and felt differently, and hence constituted a different reality, depending upon
who you were and your racial and class standing within southern society. One of the first
curriculum units presented in Freedom Schools was “Comparison of Students’ Realities
with Others.” It was intended to encourage students to develop a critical consciousness of
the effects of racial inequality in their own lives by comparing their socio-economic status
and well-being to that of Mississippi’s White society. Freedom School organizers felt that
identifying regional conditions of oppression, while at times difficult emotional labor,
was essential to finding alternatives to the current racialized reality confronting students,
and ultimately, defining new directions for action. Carrying out pedagogically this
comparison and critique of regional realities allowed Freedom School students to under-
stand how the organization of a White supremacist South was not just a passive setting
but played a direct role in their oppression. By linking their stories (and that of their
families and communities) with state and region level statistical data and wider inter-
rogations of the South’s material landscapes of racism, students were encouraged to
discuss how their poverty and marginalization were strongly linked not only to their
racial identity but also that identity as embedded within and shaped by living in the South
(Emery et al., 2004, p. 195).
The fugitive learning at Freedom Schools heavily emphasized students creating alter-
native systems of public knowledge about the South that juxtaposed their regionally and
racially based experiences of oppression and lack of opportunity against White claims
that the South was modernizing and joining the national industrial economy.
A curriculum case study available to Freedom School teachers and students to facilitate
this discussion was an essay entitled “The South as an Underdeveloped Country.” The
case study encouraged student discussion of the South’s economic history and
420 D. H. ALDERMAN ET AL.
Geography and the state of regional development in the 1960s in a way that centered
Black perspectives and lived realities. The lesson offered a detailed discussion likely not
found in most state-run Mississippi classrooms at the time. It noted that much of the
post-World War II development and progress in the South was uneven and in some cases
non-existent for many marginalized and poor groups, especially the Black communities
whose labors drove centuries of regional growth. Running through this curriculum unit
was an idea made many years later by Clyde Woods (1998), who argued that racialized
underdevelopment in the South did not simply happen, but resulted from a long-
established monopoly of White power “arresting” the development opportunities of
Black people – even as these oppressed communities found ways to survive.
Centering a data-informed understanding of racialized inequalities at work within
Mississippi and the rural South, Freedom Schools explored 1960 US Census data with
students. This included information showing that Black workers in Mississippi earned
only 29% of the average income of Whites, as those who were employed by plantations
were not covered by minimum wage laws. Census statistics drew attention to the fact that
only one-third of housing units for Mississippi’s Black communities could be classified as
being in sound condition and not deteriorating or dilapidated. Over 75% of Black-owned
or rented housing units in rural areas of the state had no piped water and over 90% of
those homes had no indoor plumbing (Emery et al., 2004, p. 181). Always underlying
these data examinations were students reflections on how their own families and com-
munities fit into these regional patterns. The curriculum called on students to answer
questions such as “Who works in your family? What kind of work does your father do?
Your mother? Do they work for white people or for Negroes (sic)? . . . . Do they get paid
a lot or a little? . . . . Do you think they could use more money? . . . .Why don’t they get
more money?” (Emery et al., 2004, p. 131).
In helping students explore and understand the conditions in the South that oppressed
Black communities, Freedom Schools offered an innovative curriculum for uncovering
the broader power structures embedded within Mississippi. Freedom schools did this by
identifying the community decision-makers who perpetuate and profit from the discri-
minatory treatment of Black people. These same decision-makers were responsible for
reproducing social myths that denied the power-laden realities of life in Mississippi and
the harmful effects of racism. Drawing inspiration from SNCC’s Research Department,
the lesson prompts students to ask questions about White-vested interests in exploiting
Black labor and how it affects the (un)realization of political rights:
“Who makes money when Negroes are paid less than white people? Does the farmer make
more money if the workers he hires are Negro? Why? Is it profitable for the farmer to keep
Negro labor cheap? How does he do it? Do the myths help him do it? How? . . . Why does
Northern industry come to Mississippi? They come from the North because Mississippi has
cheaper labor and they can make more money . . . .Why don’t white people want the Negro
to vote? . . . The same farmer is able to pay Negroes less money than white people are paid
because the state laws of Mississippi support segregation and inequality. Who makes these
laws? How do they get their jobs? Who elects them? What would happen to these men and
these laws if Negroes voted? (Emery et al., 2004, p. 137)
This Freedom School lesson asks students to unpack the “black box” of their community
as connected to a wider Geography of economic and political power at work in
Mississippi, the South, and even national industry.
JOURNAL OF GEOGRAPHY IN HIGHER EDUCATION 421
Students were encouraged to locate the specific powerful decision-makers near where
they live (mayor, big farmers, business owners, plant managers, mill owners, etc.) and
determine the many connected and interlocking ways that these social agents worked
with and influenced other power brokers to maintain White Supremacy. The Freedom
School drew particular attention to the role that police, who have long brutalized and
oppressed Black communities, play in helping the “farmer and businessman make money
by enforcing the segregation laws.” Later, students charted out what could be called
a “power map” of the social and spatial connections and networks between institutions
and powerful people undergirding the oppressive conditions at work in their own
community. The Freedom School curriculum includes a sample chart as guidance.
Students are encouraged to identify and discuss the common organizations, local and
state government committees, and corporate boards that powerful decision-makers
occupy together as well as how these relations are part of larger geographic scales of
power stetching “from local towns and cities up to the highest levels of the national
government” (Emery et al., 2004, p. 139).
A keen spatial sensitivity to the origins and effects of racialized power in shaping the
South is evident in the fugitive learning at Freedom Schools. Students conducted critical
readings of their community’s landscapes and distribution of resources and were encour-
aged by their teachers to compare the segregated conditions of White and Black schools,
White and Black housing, employment opportunities, and quality/accessibility to med-
ical facilities. Students were not “taught” these differences or inequalities; rather, students
through a series of questions drew their own conclusions, feelings, and reactions. As
Perlstein (1990) observes, the Freedom School curriculum “encouraged [students] to see
the characteristics of their environment as fundamentally political rather than merely
physical” (p. 312). This interpretation of how social differences and inequalities become
built into and reaffirmed through one’s geographical surroundings is now a standard
lesson in many Human Geography classrooms. And indeed, it was these struggles over
social and spatial inequality during the Civil Rights Movement that helped form the
Critical Geography we know today (Barnes and Sheppard 2019). Over a half century ago,
SNCC and Freedom School organizers employed a pedagogy intent upon exposing and
challenging the regional conditions, infrastructures, and power structures of racial
oppression. In doing so, they answered a question of growing relevance to contemporary
Geography educators – how can we design curriculum that centers the everyday experi-
ences, needs, and well-being of students from historically marginalized groups?
Regional comparison for raising political consciousness and relational sense of
place
Another key part of the geographic education contained within the Freedom School
curriculum was the value placed on regional comparison and how the political education
of Mississippi’s Black youth depended upon seeing the South as part of a wider
Geography of racial struggles and human rights. Of particular importance was under-
standing that racism was not something that was strictly southern and there was an
efficacy or usefulness in students expanding their spatial imagination to frame alterna-
tives to the status quo. For example, Freedom School organizers used the “North to
Freedom?” curriculum unit to help students discuss race relations in the South versus the
422 D. H. ALDERMAN ET AL.
North and then deploy those critical regional comparisons to become cognizant of what
the Black migrant experience meant for escaping racial oppression. Crucially, the “North
to Freedom?” curriculum sought: “To help the students see clearly the condition of the
Negro in the North, and see that migration to the North is not a basic solution [against
racism]” (Emery et al., 2004, p.132).
The curriculum responded to what was already a long established “Great Migration”
of Black men, women, and families out of the South to secure more rights, greater job
opportunities, better education systems, and equal access to healthcare in other regions of
the US. The Freedom School lesson began with Geography: students were shown a map
of the U.S. with the Southeast region shaded and then students would locate on the map
many of the northern cities that were major destinations for migrating Black
Mississippians. While the North was widely expressed as an escape route from the
oppressive conditions of life in the Jim Crow South, the reality was more complicated.
Racism in the North, while differentially situated, none-the-less worked to deny Black
people rights and freedoms. Freedom Schools provoked questions about why students
and their families felt Mississippi was intolerable and how those conditions became
manifested in their own communities.
Freedom School teachers infused further meaning into the map lesson by showing
students magazine pictures and statistical materials about northern ghettos. Those
images became a jumping off point for student discussions about who in their family
had relocated North, what life was like for them outside the South, and what social
struggles continued. This included everything from overcrowded segregated housing and
schools to high rates of infant death and race-based restrictions on jobs, income, and
medical care. Problems of policing, White Supremacy, and internalized racism stretched
beyond just the Mississippi Delta and the greater South. Because of the curriculum,
students “began to see two things at once: that the North was not a real escape, and that
the South was not some vague white monster doomed irrationally to crush them.”
Rather, racism is a systemic form of inequality with causes, impacts, and even vulner-
abilities to change (Emery et al., 2004, p. 99). Within Freedom Schools, students began to
articulate what was unjust both within and outside of their geographic region and how
they could themselves lead and organize movements against these injustices.
To further explore the racialized realities found in northern states as well as the
potential to learn from political mobilization in other regions, Freedom School teachers
could use a suggested case study entitled “Chester, PA: Community Organization in the
Other America.” Chester, Pennsylvania in the 1960s was an industrial city where the
Black working class felt the brunt of high unemployment rates and very low median
income. Students were taken through the story of demonstrators using large public
blockades and organizing Black neighborhoods to successfully protest poorly equipped
and overcrowded schools and demand for “more jobs, better housing . . . better medical
care, and an end to discrimination” (Emery et al., 2004, p. 218). Students discussed the
goals, tactics, and strategies of the Chester movement, and the place- and social-specific
differences inherent in carrying out a northern civil rights struggle, even as certain
national commonalities existed in racial inequality and social mobilization strategies.
The Chester case study centered on developing leadership, applied organizational tech-
niques, and potential next steps in upending 300 years of oppression – all while creating
a widespread belief among students that changes can be made (Emery et al., 2004, p. 211).
JOURNAL OF GEOGRAPHY IN HIGHER EDUCATION 423
Making these cross-regional comparisons and connections–a critical form of
spatial learning and analysis–were deemed important to SNCC Freedom Schools
for understanding the wider relational Geography of racism and chipping away at
what some Black communities saw as the insurmountable challenge of overcoming
White Supremacy. Teachers were encouraged to facilitate student discussion about
social life in other parts of the US and to think internationally and historically.
Another curriculum case study available to Black students was “Nazi Germany
Compared to the South.” The purpose of the unit was to develop an understanding
of the degrading effects of institutionalized persecution on the human psyche and
the wider social, political, and geographic contexts of persecution beyond the
Mississippi and the Deep South. Students engaged the history of Nazi Germany
through maps, case studies, and inquiry-based discussion. The curriculum high-
lighted the parallels between Nazi Germany and certain features of the Black
experience within the U.S. South, both historically and existing in 1964. In
particular, the curriculum focused on the “parallel conditions of persecution” at
work in both regions, eras, and repressive systems (Emery et al., 2004, p. 288).
Freedom School teachers explored these parallels by presenting students with
events from the Third Reich and asking them to draw comparisons to the institu-
tion of slavery, Black history and meaningful stories from their own personal
histories.
Freedom Schools also used comparative analyses of Nazi Germany to reveal
“certain universal tendencies in societies characterized by persecution of minority
groups, [allowing] the student . . . [to] see that persecution and its debilitating effects
on the victim cannot be limited to their own race, but can involve any group of
people, depending on the particular historical conditions of a society” (Emery et al.,
2004, p. 288). Students constructed their own critical spatial perspective as they
began drawing comparisons between their own realities within the Mississippi Delta
and other regions. Underlying this production of knowledge in Freedom Schools
was an understanding that the struggles of Black youth in Mississippi were part of
wider scales of civil and human rights struggles in the world. Geography educators
today accomplish these goals by conducting regional comparison and finding lines
of mutuality (shared feeling, action, or relationship), where students can expand
their “relational sense of place” (Varró & Van Gorp, 2021). By exercising such
relational thinking, Freedom School students could situate their own lives and Black
senses of place within the commonalities, differences, and possibilities they saw in
other regions, places, and eras.
Making regional and other spatial and historical comparisons and connections
worked directly against the efforts of Mississippi’s state-run education system to
keep Black students uninformed of and alienated from the Movement and a wider
critical (inter)national perspective. Such a goal remains highly important given
ongoing efforts by authorities to curtail discussions of racism and civil rights in today’s
classrooms and that educators increasingly stress the role that geographic thinking
should play in preparing critical, empowered, and conscious young people “attuned to
social justice issues, and . . . [ready] to actively participate in civic life” (Bednarz, 2019,
p. 526).
424 D. H. ALDERMAN ET AL.
Implications for higher education
The Freedom Schools are not a static piece of American history but instead an innovative
and essential intervention in U.S. education and curriculum development. To illustrate
why, we focus on a debate that occurred in a special issue of the Annals of the Association
of American Geographers focused on “New Approaches to the Geography of the United
States.” The issue, edited by Arch Gerlach, included pieces addressing geographic educa-
tion and teaching and it was published in March 1964 at the same time SNCC was working
to establish Freedom Schools in the Deep South. In the introduction, Gerlach declared:
There have been many changes and improvements in the scope, content, and treatment of
the Geography of the United States since the first compendious American Geography was
prepared by Jebediah Morse in 1789 [. . .] There is a need for new methods of treatment as
well as new content to match the progress of Geography toward a more scientific precision
and closer integration with other disciplines. (Gerlach, 1964, p. 1)
The subsequent pieces argue that the study and teaching of Geography are undergoing
significant and needed changes. A key theme of the articles focused on “debates about
approaches to geographic understanding” (Berry, 1964, p. 4). These debates outlined the
differences between “natural as opposed to human” references as well as “systematic
versus regional; historical or developmental as contrasted with functional and organiza-
tional” approaches to knowledge generation and how these necessarily orient students in
specific ways (ibid). Perhaps this is unsurprising given the intellectual focus of the
discipline at the time, but when placed against the kind of curriculum SNCC was
producing and the grassroots education movement it was engaged in, the juxtaposition
explodes the staid and racist underpinnings of Geography at the time – lessons we argue
are crucial for contemporary geographic education.
Ironically, the release of this issue of the Annals coincided with southern US Senators
leading the longest filibuster in U.S. history against the 1964 U.S. Civil Rights Act, which
represented perhaps the most fundamental reordering of space and place in America.
Passage of the Act ended legal segregation across the United States, although this
discrimination would continue in a de facto basis (Deskins Jr., 1981). As this debate
took place, SNCC was in Mississippi creating course content that connected U.S. racism
and segregation to broader regional and national analysis that explored the economic,
political, and social connections between what Clyde Woods (1998) called the “plantation
bloc” and the broader U.S. nation-state. As relevant today as they were in 1964, these
issues were not only not on the radar of academic practitioners of Geography at the time,
but their absence represents the kind of knowledge generation that has long underpinned
exploitative power structures. Wright (2019) notes that professional scholars are trained
traditionally to produce knowledge in ways secluded from the working-class masses,
which does not serve the interests of liberation. For too long geographic education,
especially in the USA context has existed within this vacuum.
Our examination of SNCC, Freedom Schools, and the curriculum they developed
reflects the kind of organic intellectualism and true “public intellectualism” (Wright,
2019) at the heart of the struggle for equality. When there is pushback against teaching
about race and racism both within the U.S. and internationally (Elzas, 2021), SNCC’s
work is a reminder that activists have been engaging in these struggles decades before
“professional” academics. Freedom Schools can frame important decisions about
JOURNAL OF GEOGRAPHY IN HIGHER EDUCATION 425
enhancing the civic efficacy of contemporary geographic education. Given the physical
and social violence that Freedom School teachers, students, and communities faced in
1964, we in higher education are provoked to ask: Will we remain silent in the face of the
expansive white supremacist violences that now predominant? Will our discussions in
classrooms mirror the kind of apolitical curriculum that passed for geographic debate in
the 1960s? Alternatively, will we use an understanding of Freedom Schools and the kind
of liberatory pedagogy activists and organizers employed to rethink how we approach the
study of Geography and the central role the making of space and region plays in the
struggle for life and freedom.
A detailed discussion of Freedom Schools with university students offers a way of
exploring the spatial imagination and alternative Geography knowledge production that
always undergirded the Civil Rights Movement. Many popular memorial and pedagogi-
cal treatments of the Movement run the danger of “oversimplifying the sophisticated
intellectual work and strategic planning of everyday activism” along with glossing over
the oppressive conditions facing Black communities in the Deep South and the wider
nation (Inwood & Alderman, 2020, p. 706). Using our university classrooms to examine
Freedom Schools is key to building a civil rights pedagogy sensitive to the full range of
practices and places involved in antiracist struggles – expanding how these struggles are
understood in the past and the many ways they are enacted in the present. Gillespie
(2021) illustrates this well in her discussion of the Black female-led citizenship schools of
the 1950s and 1960s. She suggests that exploring Black geographies of education is a key
conduit for recovering often overlooked activists and activism; how the politics of this
activism flowed in different ways at different times and places (to different effects); and
why education remains unfinished civil rights work.
Bringing the story of Freedom Schools and its fugitive learning into the higher
education classroom does more than advance our understanding of the historical
geography of civil rights struggles. It is also a robust moment for higher educators to
rethink and expand what counts as geographic learning, whose lives matter in our
curriculum, where and for whom do we teach, and what social and political work
should pedagogy accomplish. The ongoing Black geographies turn represents many
things, but it especially stresses that we must do a better job of questioning dominant
white framings of the world and open ourselves to the alternative ways of knowing and
living of communities of color – something that was a cornerstone of SNCC’s educa-
tional resistance. McKittrick (2021, p. 3) describes Black geographies as knowledge
focused around imagining the practice of liberation and involves drawing attention to
groups and individuals and knowledge systems that reinvent the terms of Black life.
Freedom Schools, beyond their immediate historical context in 1964 and its spatial
context in Mississippi, is a case study in Black geographic knowledge production in the
service of an epistemic justice, a recognition that antiracism requires a mobilization of
information, communication, and the politics of knowing and truth telling. In this
respect, the Freedom Schools open wider disciplinary spaces to rethink how our own
current curriculum and pedagogical framings of Geography – even as they appear
objective, institutionalized, or even progressive – reproduce the kinds of displacements
and negative realities that Black geographies and Black liberation stand against. This
needs to be a central lesson within the context of a Geography curriculum that remains
unbearably white.
426 D. H. ALDERMAN ET AL.
Another important implication for higher education drawn from the Freedom Schools
is the wider goal of decentering traditional understandings of geographic knowledge and
teaching at work in many of our classrooms. Mississippi in 1964 is an important
touchstone in the larger ongoing institutional call for curriculum responsive to the social
struggles of historically excluded groups and a mode of culturally relevant teaching based
on the belief that “developing socio-political consciousness is equally as important as
developing students academically” (Jackson & Howard, 2014, p. 158). The learning
system deployed within Freedom Schools, which created dialogic spaces in which
students questioned and reflected upon the social and spatial power conditions under-
girding their lives and the lives of others within regions, states and communities, is
indicative of the value that collaborative knowledge production can contribute to
reforming Geography education. Given our responsibility to diversify and broaden
participation in our field, Freedom School curriculum prompts us to question whether
communities of color really see themselves, their worldviews and lived realities in what
passes as standard university Geography instruction. How many of our textbooks or our
university curricular modules argue for the kind of material reality that allows for life
unencumbered by racism, settler colonialism, and other oppressions?
Freedom Schools push us to acknowledge “the history of anti-Blackness that is
endemic to public education,” including at colleges and universities, and the need to
“counteract the deeply entrenched aspects of traditional schooling and cultivate disposi-
tions toward more just futures” (Davis et al., 2021, pp. 2–3). Doing so provokes us to
rethink our university classrooms as places of learning and subvert the dominant power
relations and forms of inequality that characterize education (Heyman, 2001). We must
also learn to recognize, honor and sustain the various spaces curated by and for Black
people on campuses as they heal from and resist anti-Blackness (Warren & Coles, 2020).
While reforming university spaces, curriculum, and practices is essential, it is also
important for educators to interrogate the inherent contradictions, if not antagonisms,
between state-run higher education, especially in PWIs (Primarily White Institutions),
and emancipatory teaching and learning. The public university was institutionalized
historically to advance settler colonialism and racial capitalism (Luke & Heynen, 2021)
and its neo-liberal incarnation today appears committed more to entrepreneurialism
than social justice (Baldwin, 2021). Despite lip service and even some more fully throated
efforts in diversity, equity, and inclusion, most universities have failed to come to terms
with their historical and ongoing complicity in perpetuating racism and colonialization.
From the perspective of many students of color, the notion of an inclusive multicultural
campus is an “imaginary geography” (Harwood et al., 2018, p. 1245).
Inspired by Harney and Moten’s (2013) idea of “the undercommons,” which decries
the exclusionary effects of the university’s professionalization of knowledge and hierar-
chies of privilege, Greer (2018) highlights the “pathologizing encounters” that occur
between “inclusive” administrative and academic structures and historically margin-
alized groups. According to her, meaningful inclusion is about supporting marginalized
students, learning from their “intelligences of survival and activism” and bringing these
“forms of study into conversation with curricula,” but inclusion is also importantly about
exposing, targeting and disabling the institutional practices and policies that create
student disenfranchisement (Greer, 2018, p. 16). In this way, thinking about and through
Freedom Schools invites a sober realization that colleges and universities must do more
JOURNAL OF GEOGRAPHY IN HIGHER EDUCATION 427
than simply engage in culturally responsive teaching; rather, they must engage in a more
fundamental remaking of place, institution, and power – not just in classrooms but across
all spaces.
The success of Freedom Schools to operate independent of and in opposition to
the state provokes us to consider expanding where we teach and extending our
antiracist geographic education beyond the university’s classrooms and market-
driven missions. Kurtz (2019), for examples, discusses her participation in weekly
teach-ins outside the formal university workplace and how that pedagogical work
closely depended upon a knowledge produced by making connections with, assist-
ing, and learning from diverse public groups rather than speaking for those groups.
Inspired by the 1964 Freedom Schools, higher education geographers Willie Wright
and Sage Ponder have collaborated with other educators, planners, and community
organizers to form the Jackson People’s School. It is a reading and discussion group
held outside the control of a conservative Mississippi Department of Education to
“deliberately train up Black teens in Jackson” on histories of human and civil rights
struggles across the state and prepare them as future decision-makers of the city
(Wright, 2022). As all of us assemble our teaching in new ways and locations, it is
important for us to support and defend – in the face of growing government bans –
a tradition of Black place making, fugitive learning and truth telling within our sites
of education (broadly defined), administrative policies, and professional organiza-
tions as well through our collaborations with wider communities. Such efforts move
beyond merely advancing an educational understanding of the world and instead
pushes us to see the myriad ways our work as geographers intertwines with libera-
tion or oppression. There is no greater lesson to be learned or praxis to be applied
in our classrooms.
Notes
1. A search for “Freedom Schools’’ within articles published in the Journal of Geography and
Journal of Geography in Higher Education, two leading outlets for those specializing in
educational practice and research, returns no results.
2. There is insufficient space here to carry out a full tracing of the development, operation, and
impact of Freedom Schools, and readers are encouraged to consult the outstanding work of
Hale (2016) and historians such as Sturkey (2010), K.Y. Taylor (2012), and Etienne (2013)
for further background.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Funding
This work was supported by the National Science Foundation; Division of Behavioral and
Cognitive Sciences [1660274].
428 D. H. ALDERMAN ET AL.
ORCID
Derek H. Alderman http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5192-8103
Bethany Craig http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4676-3663
Joshua Inwood http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8291-5970
Shaundra Cunningham http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8576-2757
References
Alderman, D. H., & Inwood, J. (2016). Civil rights as geospatial work: Rethinking African
American resistance. In J. W. Frazier, E. L. Tettey-Fio, & N. F. Henry (Eds.), Race, ethnicity,
and place in a changing America, 3rd ed (pp. 177–186). SUNY Press.
Baldwin, D. L. (2021). In the shadow of the ivory tower: How universities are plundering our cities.
Hachette UK.
Barnes, T. J., & Sheppard, E. (Eds.). (2019). Spatial histories of radical geography: North America
and beyond. John Wiley & Sons.
Bednarz, S. W. (2019). Geography’s secret powers to save the world. The Canadian Geographer/Le
Géographe Canadien, 63(4), 520–529. https://doi.org/10.1111/cag.12539
Berry, B. (1964). Approaches to regional analysis: A synthesis. Annals of the Association of
American Geographers, 54(1), 2–11. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8306.1964.tb00469.x
Bledsoe, A., & Wright, W. J. (2019). The pluralities of black geographies. Antipode, 51(2), 419–437.
https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12467
Chilcoat, G. W., & Ligon, J. A. (1999). “Helping to make democracy a living reality”: The
curriculum conference of the Mississippi freedom schools. Journal of Curriculum and
Supervision, 15(1), 43–68.
Chilcoat, G. W., & Ligon, J. A. (2001). Discussion as a means for transformative change: Social
studies lessons from the Mississippi freedom schools. The Social Studies, 92(5), 213–219. https://
doi.org/10.1080/00377990109604006
Cobb, C. E. (2008). Foreword: Full circle. In C. Payne & C. Strickland (Eds.), Teach freedom:
Education for liberation in the African-American tradition (pp. xi–xiv). Teachers College Press.
Davis, N. R., Marchand, A. D., Moore, S. S., Greene, D., & Colby, A. (2021). We who believe in
freedom: Freedom schools as a critical context for the positive, sociopolitical development of
black youth. Race Ethnicity and Education, 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1080/13613324.2021.
1969901
De Los Ríos, C. V., López, J., & Morrell, E. (2015). Toward a critical pedagogy of race: Ethnic
studies and literacies of power in high school classrooms. Race and Social Problems, 7(1), 84–96.
https://doi.org/10.1007/s12552-014-9142-1
Deskins, D. R., Jr. (1981). Morphogenesis of a black ghetto. Urban Geography, 2(2), 95–114.
https://doi.org/10.2747/0272-3638.2.2.95
Domosh, M. (2015). Why is our geography curriculum so white? AAG Newsletter. 1 June, p. 1.
http://news.aag.org/2015/06/why-is-our-Geography-curriculum-so-white/
Eaves, L. E. (2020). Interanimating black sexualities and the geography classroom. Journal of
Geography in Higher Education, 44(2), 217–229. https://doi.org/10.1080/03098265.2020.
1753029
Elzas, S. (2021). Academics under fire for studying racism in colour blind France. RFI.com. March
25, https://www.rfi.fr/en/france/20210325-studying-race-and-racism-in-universalist-colour-
blind-france-islamo-leftism-islamo-gauchisme-academia-paris
Emery, K., Braselmann, S., & Gold, L. (2004). Freedom school curriculum, 1964. Internet Archive.
https://archive.org/details/FreedomSchoolCurrWPhotoCopy
Etienne, L. (2013). A different type of summer camp: SNCC, freedom summer, freedom schools,
and the development of African American males in Mississippi. Peabody Journal of Education,
88(4), 449–463. https://doi.org/10.1080/0161956X.2013.821889
JOURNAL OF GEOGRAPHY IN HIGHER EDUCATION 429
Gerlach, A. (1964). New approaches to the geography of the United States. Introduction. Annals of
the Association of American Geographers, 54(1), 1. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8306.1964.
tb00468.x
Gillespie, D. M. (2021). The citizenship education program and black women’s political culture.
University Press of Florida.
Giroux, H. A. (1988). Schooling and the struggle for public life: Critical pedagogy in the modern age.
University of Minnesota Press.
Givens. (2021) .Fugitive pedagogy : Carter G. Woodson and the art of black teaching. Harvard
University Press.
Greer, G. H. (2018). Who needs the undercommons? Refuge and resistance in public high schools.
Brock Education Journal, 28(1), 5–18. https://doi.org/10.26522/brocked.v28i1.778
Hale, J. (2011). “The student as a force for social change”: The Mississippi freedom schools and
student engagement. The Journal of African American History, 96(3), 325–347. https://doi.org/
10.5323/jafriamerhist.96.3.0325
Hale, J. N. (2014). The forgotten story of the freedom schools. The Atlantic. 26 June, https://www.
theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/06/the-depressing-legacy-of-freedom-schools/373490/
Hale, J. N. (2016). The freedom schools. Columbia University Press.
Harney, S., & Moten, F. (2013). The undercommons: Fugitive planning and black study. Minor
Compositions.
Harwood, S. A., Mendenhall, R., Lee, S. S., Riopelle, C., & Huntt, M. B. (2018). Everyday racism in
integrated spaces: Mapping the experiences of students of color at a diversifying predominantly
white institution. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 108(5), 1245–1259.
https://doi.org/10.1080/24694452.2017.1419122
Hawthorne, C. (2019). Black matters are spatial matters: Black geographies for the twenty-first
century. Geography Compass, 13(11), e12468. https://doi.org/10.1111/gec3.12468
Heyman, R. (2001). Why advocacy isn’t enough: Realising the radical possibilities of the classroom.
International Research in Geographical and Environmental Education, 10(2), 174–178. https://
doi.org/10.1080/10382040108667435
Inwood, J. F. (2017). Critical pedagogy and the fierce urgency of now: Opening up space for critical
reflections on the US civil rights movement. Social & Cultural Geography, 18(4), 451–465.
https://doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2016.1197301
Inwood, J. F., & Alderman, D. H. (2020). “The care and feeding of power structures”:
Reconceptualizing geospatial intelligence through the countermapping efforts of the student
nonviolent coordinating committee. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 110(3),
705–723. https://doi.org/10.1080/24694452.2019.1631747
Inwood, J. F., & Alderman, D. H. (2021). Performing the spadework of civil rights: SNCC’s free
southern theater as radical place-making and epistemic justice. GeoJournal, 1–16. doi:10.1007/
s10708-021-10459-6.
Jackson, T. O., & Howard, T. C. (2014). The continuing legacy of freedom schools as sites of
possibility for equity and social justice for black students. Western Journal of Black Studies, 38
(3), 155–162.
Kendi, I. X. (2012). The black campus movement: Black students and the racial reconstitution of
higher education, 1965–1972. Springer.
Kurtz, H. E. (2019). Public intellectualism as assemblage. The Professional Geographer, 71(1),
179–183. https://doi.org/10.1080/00330124.2018.1453187
Logue, J. (2008). Mississippi freedom schools’ radical conception of pedagogy, citizenship, and
power. Philosophical Studies in Education, 39, 57–65.
Luke, N., & Heynen, N. (2021). Abolishing the frontier: (De) colonizing ‘public’ education. Social
& Cultural Geography, 22(3), 403–424. https://doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2019.1593492
McKittrick, K. (2011). On plantations, prisons, and a black sense of place. Social & Cultural
Geography, 12(8), 947–963. https://doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2011.624280
McKittrick, K. (2021). Dear science and other stories. Duke University Press.
430 D. H. ALDERMAN ET AL.
Mervosh, S., & Heyward, G. (2021).The school culture wars: “You have brought division to Us”.
New York Times, 18 August. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/18/us/schools-covid-critical-
race-theory-masks-gender.html
Moses, R. P., & Cobb, C. E. (2001). Radical equations: Math literacy and civil rights. Beacon Press.
Navarro, O., & Navarro. (2020). Fugitive learning through a teacher inquiry group: Urban
educators humanizing their classrooms & themselves. The High School Journal, 103(3),
157–175. https://doi.org/10.1353/hsj.2020.0010
Patel, L. (2016a). Pedagogies of resistance and survivance: Learning as marronage. Equity &
Excellence in Education, 49(4), 397–401. https://doi.org/10.1080/10665684.2016.1227585
Patel, L. (2016b). The irrationality of antiracist empathy. English Journal, 106(2), 81–84. https://
www.jstor.org/stable/26450214 .
Payne, C. M., & Strickland, C. (eds.). (2008). Teach freedom: Education for liberation in the
African-American tradition. Teachers College Press.
Perlstein, D. (1990). Teaching freedom: SNCC and the creation of the Mississippi freedom schools.
History of Education Quarterly, 30(3), 297–324. https://doi.org/10.2307/368691
Purifoy, D. (2021). The parable of black places. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers,
46(4), 829–833. https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12502
Ransby, B. (2003). Ella Baker and the black freedom movement: A radical democratic vision. Univ of
North Carolina Press.
Ray, R., & Gibbons, A. (2021, July 26). Why are states banning critical race theory? (The Brookings
Institution) https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2021/07/02/why-are-states-banning-
critical-race-theory/ .
Sturkey, W. (2010). “I want to become a part of history”: Freedom summer, freedom schools, and
the freedom news. The Journal of African American History, 95(3–4), 348–368. https://doi.org/
10.5323/jafriamerhist.95.3–4.0348
Taylor, K. Y. (2012). Focus on: The freedom schools. In J. Bale & S. Knopp (Eds.), Education and
capitalism: Struggles for learning and liberation (pp. 211–216). Haymarket Books.
Taylor, S. (2021). Nikole Hannah-Jones launches 1619 freedom school. Ebony. 22 December,
https://www.ebony.com/news/nikole-hannah-jones-1619-freedom-school/
Varró, K., & Van Gorp, B. (2021). Fostering a relational sense of place through video documentary
assignments. Journal of Geography in Higher Education, 45(1), 63–86. https://doi.org/10.1080/
03098265.2020.1803223
Warren, C. A., & Coles, J. A. (2020). Trading spaces: Antiblackness and reflections on black
education futures. Equity & Excellence in Education, 53(3), 382–398. https://doi.org/10.1080/
10665684.2020.1764882
Winston, C. (2021). Maroon geographies. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 111
(7), 2185–2199. doi:10.1080/24694452.2021.1894087.
Woods, C. A. (1998). Development arrested: The blues and plantation power in the Mississippi
Delta. Verso.
Wright, W. (2019). The Public is Intellectual. The Professional Geographer, 71(1), 172–178. https://
doi.org/10.1080/00330124.2018.1453186
Wright, W. (2022). Personal correspondence with authors. 16 February.
JOURNAL OF GEOGRAPHY IN HIGHER EDUCATION 431
