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Selects: What were the Freedom Schools? · Stuff You Should Know

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: Hey, everybody, happy Saturday. I hope you have your cereal
• 0:03
  Speaker 1: and your bowl and you've watched some Saturday morning cartoons
• 0:07
  Speaker 1: and you are in your comfy's chair. Because the select
• 0:10
  Speaker 1: that I'm picking for you is a great history episode
• 0:13
  Speaker 1: from October twenty nineteen. But what were the Freedom Schools?
• 0:18
  Speaker 1: It's a great story that needed to be told by us,
• 0:22
  Speaker 1: and so we did so, so I hope you enjoy it.
• 0:26
  Speaker 1: We love our episodes on the civil rights era, and
• 0:30
  Speaker 1: this is a real good one, so check it out. Now,
• 0:33
  Speaker 1: What were the Freedom Schools? Welcome to Stuff you Should Know,
• 0:41
  Speaker 1: a production of iHeartRadio.
• 0:49
  Speaker 2: Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and
• 0:51
  Speaker 2: there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and there's Jerry over there.
• 0:54
  Speaker 2: And I don't know if I said it or not,
• 0:56
  Speaker 2: but I'm Josh Clark and this is stuff you should know,
• 1:00
  Speaker 2: and I'm pretty excited about this one. Freedom Freedom Schools.
• 1:05
  Speaker 1: Yeah, we would be the best singing duo ever. If
• 1:09
  Speaker 1: that's how it worked, I would just go big and
• 1:11
  Speaker 1: you would just read it.
• 1:12
  Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. Is that? What I'm doing is lou reading
• 1:15
  Speaker 2: I don't even know my own heritage sort of speak singing,
• 1:18
  Speaker 2: Oh okay, you know, yeah, that's what lou Reid did. Yeah,
• 1:23
  Speaker 2: maybe go to the refrigerator, baby.
• 1:26
  Speaker 1: Remember the great song about the fridge.
• 1:28
  Speaker 2: Right, give me one of those frozen snicker bars. You're
• 1:32
  Speaker 2: not the ice cream kind, the actual snicker bar I
• 1:35
  Speaker 2: put into the freezer. Bring it over here, baby, that song.
• 1:40
  Speaker 1: That's the one, and Nico would go, I am placing
• 1:44
  Speaker 1: it in the freezer.
• 1:46
  Speaker 2: Was she German? Uh?
• 1:48
  Speaker 1: Yeah, she had to be German. Was she German? I
• 1:51
  Speaker 1: mean she was if not German, Austrian or something.
• 1:54
  Speaker 2: Well, I'm just saying I didn't even know. I knew
• 1:56
  Speaker 2: nothing about her except Nico sat in with the velvet
• 1:59
  Speaker 2: underground for a.
• 1:59
  Speaker 1: While than my amazing vocal talents.
• 2:02
  Speaker 2: Yeah, that was good. That's what clued me to the
• 2:04
  Speaker 2: idea that she was as a gemins.
• 2:06
  Speaker 1: There's a movie about her later years that I want
• 2:08
  Speaker 1: to see that came out this year or something.
• 2:11
  Speaker 2: I think it's called Taking Liam Neeson played it. That's right, So, Chuck,
• 2:17
  Speaker 2: we're talking about freedom schools, as we already said, and
• 2:19
  Speaker 2: then we got silly. Now we're getting back to it.
• 2:20
  Speaker 1: Okay, that's right, because this is not a silly topic. No,
• 2:23
  Speaker 1: but and it has a CoA at the beginning. Shall
• 2:25
  Speaker 1: we talk about that, Yeah, I think we should. Yeah.
• 2:27
  Speaker 1: So this is about the Freedom Schools, which, as you
• 2:30
  Speaker 1: will very soon find out, we're in Mississippi during the
• 2:34
  Speaker 1: Civil rights movement.
• 2:35
  Speaker 2: I mean, like in probably the most dangerous place in
• 2:39
  Speaker 2: the country. Yeah, during the most dangerous point in the
• 2:42
  Speaker 2: civil rights movement. That's where this story takes place.
• 2:45
  Speaker 1: That's right. And freedom schools were great, and they were
• 2:48
  Speaker 1: a great thing, and we're happy to be talking about them.
• 2:50
  Speaker 1: But and a lot of the quotes and a lot
• 2:52
  Speaker 1: of the curriculum of the Freedom schools themselves, they use
• 2:55
  Speaker 1: the word negro, and it's obviously not a word that
• 2:58
  Speaker 1: people use anymore, but some of the curriculum class titles
• 3:03
  Speaker 1: feature that word. And so just letting everyone know that
• 3:06
  Speaker 1: that's coming, right, And we're not going to say we're
• 3:09
  Speaker 1: just going to read their curriculums and their books as
• 3:12
  Speaker 1: it existed back then.
• 3:13
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I think this heads up. Yeah, we were just
• 3:16
  Speaker 2: kind of sticking to the vernacular of the times being
• 3:19
  Speaker 2: used in context.
• 3:20
  Speaker 1: Yes, within reason, of course.
• 3:22
  Speaker 2: Sure. So, so this takes place in the summer of
• 3:27
  Speaker 2: nineteen sixty four. But I want to go back a
• 3:30
  Speaker 2: little further than that to nineteen fifty four with the
• 3:32
  Speaker 2: the groundbreaking sea changing Board Brown Versus Board of Education ruling,
• 3:40
  Speaker 2: where the Supreme Court said, you know that separate but
• 3:42
  Speaker 2: equal thing that we said back in eighteen ninety six
• 3:45
  Speaker 2: was constitutional. Yeah, that's not true. Segregation is not constitutional.
• 3:50
  Speaker 2: It's not legal anymore. Everybody needs to integrate schools at least,
• 3:55
  Speaker 2: but they failed to say and do it by nineteen
• 3:58
  Speaker 2: sixty four or nineteen sixty or next year. They just said,
• 4:02
  Speaker 2: I think something like in a like a deliberate and
• 4:05
  Speaker 2: speedy manner or something like that. And so Mississippi said, oh, well,
• 4:10
  Speaker 2: you didn't tell us when we had.
• 4:10
  Speaker 1: To do it by about never.
• 4:13
  Speaker 2: Yeah, let me just dig my heel in here and
• 4:15
  Speaker 2: the other one in here, and we're just going to
• 4:17
  Speaker 2: keep our schools segregated. And not only segregated. Mississippi had
• 4:21
  Speaker 2: some of the poorest excuses for schools for African American
• 4:26
  Speaker 2: students in the country. The state average for Mississippi, I
• 4:32
  Speaker 2: think in nineteen sixty was that they spent four times
• 4:37
  Speaker 2: more on schools for white children than they did on
• 4:40
  Speaker 2: schools for black children. That was just the state average,
• 4:43
  Speaker 2: and sometimes it was way worse.
• 4:45
  Speaker 1: You're talking about budgets, spinning budgets.
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  Speaker 2: In Tunica, they spent one hundred and seventy two dollars
• 4:52
  Speaker 2: and eighty cents per white pupil on average in nineteen
• 4:55
  Speaker 2: sixty two.
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  Speaker 1: That's per year that was in that year school year one.
• 4:59
  Speaker 2: Hundred and seven to eighty. They spent five dollars or
• 5:02
  Speaker 2: ninety nine cents per black people.
• 5:04
  Speaker 1: Wow.
• 5:04
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and that's just kind of how it was like.
• 5:07
  Speaker 2: You went to school in sharecropper schools or what they
• 5:10
  Speaker 2: were called. If you were a black kid and you
• 5:12
  Speaker 2: were you got a terrible education. By comparison white kids.
• 5:17
  Speaker 2: Schools usually ran for about six months out of the year. Yeah,
• 5:20
  Speaker 2: if you were an African American kid in Mississippi, your
• 5:22
  Speaker 2: school might run three if if it was even open
• 5:25
  Speaker 2: that year. The rest of the time, you were expected
• 5:28
  Speaker 2: to be out in the field working and just knowing
• 5:30
  Speaker 2: your place basically.
• 5:31
  Speaker 1: Yeah. And you know, as you'll see throughout this podcast,
• 5:34
  Speaker 1: those sharecropper schools not only did they fail them fundamentally
• 5:37
  Speaker 1: on things like literacy and maths and things like that,
• 5:41
  Speaker 1: but they also failed them historically because and I think
• 5:45
  Speaker 1: things have gotten a lot better, but one could make
• 5:47
  Speaker 1: the argument that history classes still fail historically and telling
• 5:50
  Speaker 1: the true picture of some of these things. Absolutely, But
• 5:53
  Speaker 1: back then it was like at the sharecropper schools here
• 5:56
  Speaker 1: you're learning white history, and it's not just like this
• 6:00
  Speaker 1: is the important history, but this is the only history.
• 6:03
  Speaker 1: Yours does not matter exactly.
• 6:04
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and even worse than that, when they were taught
• 6:08
  Speaker 2: about their heritage or whatever, it was usually in relation
• 6:10
  Speaker 2: to slavery, and it was also in relation to how
• 6:15
  Speaker 2: black people preferred to be slaves and that they were
• 6:18
  Speaker 2: far worse off after the War of Northern Aggression freed them.
• 6:21
  Speaker 2: And that was just they weren't interested in politics, they
• 6:24
  Speaker 2: weren't really self starters, and they needed white people to
• 6:26
  Speaker 2: guide them. That was the education. You guy as an
• 6:29
  Speaker 2: African American kid in Mississippi around the time of the
• 6:33
  Speaker 2: Civil Rights struggle, and by the time nineteen sixty four
• 6:37
  Speaker 2: rolled around, there was a lot of agitation going on
• 6:40
  Speaker 2: in the African American community. A lot of people saw, hey,
• 6:44
  Speaker 2: there's no integration going on, things haven't changed at all,
• 6:48
  Speaker 2: were being kept down by Jim Crow era laws, and
• 6:50
  Speaker 2: we're going to agitate for change. And in response to that,
• 6:54
  Speaker 2: there was a lot of violence against that agitation for
• 6:58
  Speaker 2: change from the KKK, from state police, from local sheriffs,
• 7:02
  Speaker 2: from the local sheriffs redneck, Yeah, like you could get
• 7:05
  Speaker 2: yourself killed just by going to vote, registered to vote.
• 7:10
  Speaker 1: Yeah. And if the police were not inciting or committing
• 7:13
  Speaker 1: the violence themselves, they certainly would turn a blind eye, yeah,
• 7:16
  Speaker 1: to anything that was going on exactly and not do
• 7:19
  Speaker 1: police work.
• 7:19
  Speaker 2: So it's in this context around December of nineteen sixty
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  Speaker 2: three that a guy named Robert Moses, who was one
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  Speaker 2: of the members of I believe, he was with Core
• 7:30
  Speaker 2: the No I'm sorry, he was with SNICK, the student
• 7:34
  Speaker 2: Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in Mississippi, and he said, I've got
• 7:41
  Speaker 2: an idea. We're gonna call it Freedom Summer.
• 7:43
  Speaker 1: Yeah, And the Freedom Summer. And by the way, big
• 7:46
  Speaker 1: shout out to Dave Ruse, big shout out one of
• 7:48
  Speaker 1: our stable of writers these days from the old house
• 7:52
  Speaker 1: Stuffworks dot com website. Dave is helping us out. And
• 7:54
  Speaker 1: boy he does a great job.
• 7:56
  Speaker 2: He does.
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  Speaker 1: It's always a pleasure. Yeah, So thanks Dave. But yeah,
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  Speaker 1: the Freedom Summer was in nineteen sixty four, and the
• 8:02
  Speaker 1: whole goal of the Freedom Summer was really to get
• 8:05
  Speaker 1: people registered to vote en mass right.
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  Speaker 2: That was the stated goal of it.
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  Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure, the subtext of it.
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  Speaker 2: John Hale wrote a book on Freedom Summer and Freedom Schools,
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  Speaker 2: which we're going to talk about, and he actually helped
• 8:17
  Speaker 2: Dave out with this article, So shout out to John
• 8:19
  Speaker 2: Hale too. But he had a quote from John Lewis,
• 8:23
  Speaker 2: the Great John Lewis, who said, basically, the point of
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  Speaker 2: Freedom Summer was to force a showdown between local authorities
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  Speaker 2: and federal authorities, because the local authorities were abusively enforcing
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  Speaker 2: white supremacy and the fed authorities were turning a blind
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  Speaker 2: eye to it, and so they said, we need to
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  Speaker 2: put ourselves in visible harm's way and force a showdown
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  Speaker 2: between these two entities.
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  Speaker 1: Yeah, in nineteen sixty four is key. It wasn't just
• 8:53
  Speaker 1: sort of picked randomly. It was key because the Civil
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  Speaker 1: Rights Act was going to be signed in July that year,
• 9:00
  Speaker 1: but it did not include black voting rights protection, and
• 9:05
  Speaker 1: the Democratic National Convention was going to be at the
• 9:07
  Speaker 1: end of August of that year in Atlantic City. And
• 9:10
  Speaker 1: this is basically like, let's get black folks registered to
• 9:13
  Speaker 1: vote so they can go in there and unseat these Dixiecrats.
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  Speaker 1: The Southern Democrats who were still very much segregationists.
• 9:20
  Speaker 2: In Mississippi for the Democratic Convention. Their delegation, the Mississippi delegation,
• 9:26
  Speaker 2: was all white.
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  Speaker 1: Yeah, and that was another big, big goal, was to
• 9:29
  Speaker 1: create a separate black delegation for that national convention.
• 9:34
  Speaker 2: So to get this to force the showdown between local
• 9:37
  Speaker 2: authorities and federal authorities. The civil rights activists like Robert
• 9:42
  Speaker 2: Moses working in Mississippi had zero illusions that the federal
• 9:48
  Speaker 2: government was going to come down and help them out,
• 9:50
  Speaker 2: no matter what they were doing. Instead, they would be
• 9:53
  Speaker 2: forced to act if white Northern kids, the children of
• 9:58
  Speaker 2: these federal authorities, came down to Mississippi and put themselves
• 10:02
  Speaker 2: in harm's way too.
• 10:03
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Kids meaning you know, college students, right right, So
• 10:06
  Speaker 1: kids to old folks like us, right, exactly, youngsters, but
• 10:10
  Speaker 1: they weren't sending down like twelve year olds.
• 10:11
  Speaker 2: No, no, no, nothing like that, but like college students who
• 10:13
  Speaker 2: wanted to come down and help people who truly believed
• 10:16
  Speaker 2: in the cause of civil rights.
• 10:17
  Speaker 1: Yeah, white, liberal, progressive, Northern oftentimes Jewish, but not always.
• 10:23
  Speaker 2: But as far as getting the federal authorities to pay attention,
• 10:26
  Speaker 2: that first descriptor is the most important one White. Yes,
• 10:30
  Speaker 2: because again they knew in Mississippi no federal authorities were
• 10:34
  Speaker 2: going to pay attention to that. And I mean they
• 10:36
  Speaker 2: had good reason to think that Kennedy had the Civil
• 10:38
  Speaker 2: Rights Act as far back as nineteen sixty but agreed
• 10:41
  Speaker 2: not to bring it up in Congress because they were
• 10:43
  Speaker 2: still trying to figure out how to keep the Dixiecrats happy,
• 10:46
  Speaker 2: right and maybe get some sort of integration going or
• 10:50
  Speaker 2: civil rights going, And they've just been left hung out
• 10:54
  Speaker 2: to dry by the federal authorities so many times that
• 10:56
  Speaker 2: they were totally right in that assumption.
• 10:58
  Speaker 1: Yeah, And they knew that in order to really affect change,
• 11:02
  Speaker 1: like you said, they were going to get no assistance
• 11:04
  Speaker 1: from the federal government, so they need to do it
• 11:06
  Speaker 1: on the ground, grassroots style. And what they were really
• 11:11
  Speaker 1: looking toward was the future, and they knew that getting
• 11:14
  Speaker 1: kids involved was the key and the only way to
• 11:17
  Speaker 1: do that. Or they figured the best way to do that,
• 11:19
  Speaker 1: and I think they were right was to devise what
• 11:22
  Speaker 1: was called the Freedom Schools in the summer of nineteen
• 11:25
  Speaker 1: sixty four, which ended up being forty one summer schools,
• 11:29
  Speaker 1: community based summer schools where they had core curriculums for sure,
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  Speaker 1: But what they really were trying to do is teach
• 11:36
  Speaker 1: young black kids about their history and their self worth
• 11:39
  Speaker 1: and give them a path forward in the United States.
• 11:43
  Speaker 2: Yeah, with a voice, like give them an education that
• 11:45
  Speaker 2: they couldn't find anywhere in those sharecropper schools. Where the
• 11:48
  Speaker 2: sharecropper schools point was to keep them down, uneducated, and
• 11:53
  Speaker 2: out of politics so that they couldn't vote. These freedom
• 11:57
  Speaker 2: schools were meant to do the exact opposite, Yeah, to
• 12:00
  Speaker 2: teach them their self worth, but also to say, like,
• 12:03
  Speaker 2: here's how you can actually enact change and to create
• 12:06
  Speaker 2: the next generation of civil rights activists in Mississippi. That
• 12:10
  Speaker 2: was the point of the Freedom.
• 12:11
  Speaker 1: School Yeah, And like it was hitting me as I
• 12:13
  Speaker 1: was reading this, how progressive that was, Yeah for nineteen
• 12:16
  Speaker 1: sixty four, because that would be progressive now in places
• 12:20
  Speaker 1: like even Georgia.
• 12:21
  Speaker 2: Absolutely, And it's still going on now, is we'll see,
• 12:23
  Speaker 2: Like the Children's Defense Fund revived the Freedom schools back
• 12:27
  Speaker 2: in the eighties, and I think they still have them,
• 12:29
  Speaker 2: and it does still have a tinge of subversion. Sadly,
• 12:33
  Speaker 2: teaching black kids in America they're self worth, Yeah, that's
• 12:36
  Speaker 2: that's sad.
• 12:37
  Speaker 1: All right, that's a great preamble. Should we take a break?
• 12:44
  Speaker 1: All right, we are going to take a break, and
• 12:45
  Speaker 1: we're going to come back and really dig into the
• 12:47
  Speaker 1: mission of the Freedom schools right after this things Okay,
• 13:14
  Speaker 1: So Freedom Schools again launched and proposed by s n
• 13:19
  Speaker 1: CC snick snick snick leader Charlie Cobb in December sixty three,
• 13:25
  Speaker 1: and they had three The original idea was, let's get
• 13:28
  Speaker 1: eleventh and twelfth graders because they're just on the cusp
• 13:31
  Speaker 1: of being in you know, in the real world. Arguably
• 13:34
  Speaker 1: already were in the real world. Yeah, you know what
• 13:37
  Speaker 1: I'm saying. And they had three stated purposes that they
• 13:40
  Speaker 1: wanted to accomplish. Supplement what they aren't learning in high
• 13:43
  Speaker 1: school simple enough. Number two, give them a broad intellectual
• 13:47
  Speaker 1: and academic experience during the summertime to bring back to
• 13:52
  Speaker 1: students in the classrooms I guess in the fall, and
• 13:55
  Speaker 1: then form the basis for statewide student action like here's
• 13:59
  Speaker 1: how you can boy caught something, here's how you can
• 14:01
  Speaker 1: raise awareness, like teach them how to be grassroots activists.
• 14:05
  Speaker 2: And also one of the things that they wanted to
• 14:08
  Speaker 2: teach them that we'll see is this is how things work, Like,
• 14:11
  Speaker 2: here's the nuts and bolts of this power structure that
• 14:14
  Speaker 2: we live in that holds us down, and here, understanding
• 14:18
  Speaker 2: how it works, you can start to poke around and
• 14:20
  Speaker 2: figure out how to overcome that. That was a huge,
• 14:23
  Speaker 2: huge part of it.
• 14:24
  Speaker 1: That's right. So it all starts with volunteers, right. And these,
• 14:29
  Speaker 1: like we said, are mainly college students. They saw this
• 14:33
  Speaker 1: by way of ads in the New York Times and
• 14:36
  Speaker 1: other groups and college campuses that basically said, hey, this
• 14:39
  Speaker 1: is what we want to do. You've been watching this
• 14:42
  Speaker 1: on TV every night. I know that you might live
• 14:45
  Speaker 1: in Manhattan or Brooklyn or someplace, but if you are
• 14:49
  Speaker 1: a young white liberal progressive and you really want to
• 14:53
  Speaker 1: make a difference, get off your couch and come down
• 14:55
  Speaker 1: to Mississippi for the summer. Sure in danger your life
• 14:59
  Speaker 1: and helped teach these kids.
• 15:01
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and I think something like a thousand I saw,
• 15:04
  Speaker 2: like as much as twenty five hundred. A bunch of
• 15:07
  Speaker 2: people answered this call, Like northern mostly white college students
• 15:13
  Speaker 2: came down to Mississippi for this freedom summer, not just
• 15:16
  Speaker 2: the freedom schools.
• 15:17
  Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I think two hundred and eighty of them
• 15:19
  Speaker 1: ended up being teachers. Out of about the seven hundred
• 15:21
  Speaker 1: or so who volunteered for the Freedom Summer.
• 15:23
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and I've heard different stories on how the people
• 15:28
  Speaker 2: who got selected to be teachers for the Freedom schools
• 15:31
  Speaker 2: were selected. This article makes it sound like the greener ones,
• 15:37
  Speaker 2: the ones who really shouldn't be put in harm's way,
• 15:40
  Speaker 2: were assigned to the Freedom schools. But from what I've read,
• 15:43
  Speaker 2: they were very much in harm's way as being teachers
• 15:46
  Speaker 2: of these Freedom schools.
• 15:47
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 15:48
  Speaker 2: But regardless of who got assigned to become a Freedom
• 15:53
  Speaker 2: School teacher or why, they were told you're gonna have
• 15:56
  Speaker 2: to pay your way to and from Mississippi, You're gonna
• 15:59
  Speaker 2: have to pay your own room and board, so expect
• 16:01
  Speaker 2: to have to shell out over two hundred bucks or
• 16:04
  Speaker 2: up to two hundred bucks over the course of the summer.
• 16:06
  Speaker 1: Yeah. It also said they would live basically in the
• 16:09
  Speaker 1: homes of local black families. I wonder if they paid
• 16:12
  Speaker 1: them rent.
• 16:14
  Speaker 2: I don't know if they paid them rent. But the
• 16:16
  Speaker 2: black families who did put these white Northern College students
• 16:20
  Speaker 2: up over the summer to teach Freedom schools very much
• 16:24
  Speaker 2: put their own families homes in harm's way. Because the
• 16:27
  Speaker 2: Freedom school and actually the whole Freedom Summer volunteers who
• 16:31
  Speaker 2: came down. They didn't take Mississippi by surprise. The white
• 16:34
  Speaker 2: power establishment Mississippi knew they were coming and they were
• 16:37
  Speaker 2: very unhappy about this. They said publicly that these people
• 16:40
  Speaker 2: would be treated as invaders, that this was a second
• 16:44
  Speaker 2: war of Northern Aggression. They doubled the number of highway
• 16:48
  Speaker 2: patrol officers and not to keep the peace. They knew
• 16:52
  Speaker 2: they were coming down, and they were not happy about
• 16:54
  Speaker 2: these Freedom schools or the Freedom Summer in general.
• 16:57
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and I guess we should go ahead and say
• 16:59
  Speaker 1: right off the bat to add gravity to the situation.
• 17:02
  Speaker 1: And there may be a short stuff in here. I've
• 17:04
  Speaker 1: been wanting to do one on the disappearance of these
• 17:06
  Speaker 1: three men. But the Core Training Crew Congress of Racial
• 17:11
  Speaker 1: Equality was Core and they were helping out with the
• 17:15
  Speaker 1: freedom rides in the early sixties on the buses in
• 17:18
  Speaker 1: Selma in the Deep South. And there were three gentlemen,
• 17:22
  Speaker 1: Andrew Goodman and Michael Scharner, two white men, and another colleague,
• 17:27
  Speaker 1: James Cheney, a young black man that worked with corr.
• 17:30
  Speaker 1: They went missing in Longdale, Mississippi, and were basically taken
• 17:35
  Speaker 1: and murdered. So this is this is before a few
• 17:39
  Speaker 1: months before the Freedom Schools were to launch, and you're
• 17:42
  Speaker 1: going down there knowing that these men disappeared under mysterious circumstances.
• 17:47
  Speaker 2: I'm pretty sure it was like a week before basically,
• 17:49
  Speaker 2: because it happened like they got the news during the
• 17:52
  Speaker 2: orientation in Oxford, Ohio that they held for the Freedom
• 17:55
  Speaker 2: School teachers. The news came through that these three guys
• 17:59
  Speaker 2: had gone missing and then were later found murdered.
• 18:01
  Speaker 1: And some people did back out and were like, I
• 18:03
  Speaker 1: can't take this risk, but it seems like most of
• 18:06
  Speaker 1: them pressed on right.
• 18:07
  Speaker 2: Yeah. Absolutely, and I think some people's resolve was doubled
• 18:12
  Speaker 2: by that kind of thing too. But their disappearance and
• 18:15
  Speaker 2: ultimately their deaths proved that idea that these the civil
• 18:20
  Speaker 2: rights activists in Mississippi needed these white Northern volunteers to
• 18:24
  Speaker 2: come down. Because James Cheney, he was a local Mississippi activist,
• 18:29
  Speaker 2: he was a black guy. And Schwarner, Michael Schwarner and
• 18:34
  Speaker 2: Goodman Goodman, both of them were white. And because they
• 18:38
  Speaker 2: went missing along with Cheney, one hundred and fifty FBI
• 18:41
  Speaker 2: agents and two hundred what are the sailors from the
• 18:44
  Speaker 2: local naval stations showed up. Sure showed up to search
• 18:48
  Speaker 2: for these guys. And Michael Schwarener's widow said, this never
• 18:52
  Speaker 2: would have happened if my husband had been a black man,
• 18:56
  Speaker 2: and all this was happening because he was white.
• 18:58
  Speaker 1: I do want to there's this is rife with a
• 19:00
  Speaker 1: lot of quotes that a lot of them were not
• 19:02
  Speaker 1: going to read, but I did want to read this
• 19:03
  Speaker 1: one from Howard Zen. This is the message at this
• 19:07
  Speaker 1: orientation that you talked about at the Western College for
• 19:10
  Speaker 1: Women in Oxford. So you're showing up like I want
• 19:13
  Speaker 1: to volunteer. I want to do the right thing. They
• 19:15
  Speaker 1: sit you down an auditorium and say this. You'll arrive
• 19:19
  Speaker 1: in Ruleville, which is a place in Ruleville in the Delta.
• 19:24
  Speaker 1: It will be one hundred degrees. You'll be sweaty and dirty.
• 19:26
  Speaker 1: You won't be able to bathe offen, or sleep well
• 19:28
  Speaker 1: or eat good food. I don't know about that. I
• 19:30
  Speaker 1: bet that was some pretty decent food.
• 19:31
  Speaker 2: That kind of stuck out to.
• 19:32
  Speaker 1: Me too, Howard Zen. Might it not have thought? So
• 19:35
  Speaker 1: the first day of school, there may be four teachers
• 19:37
  Speaker 1: and three students, and the local Negro minister will phone
• 19:40
  Speaker 1: you to say you can't use his church basement after all,
• 19:43
  Speaker 1: because his life has been threatened. And the curriculum we've
• 19:46
  Speaker 1: drawn up Negro history and American government may be something
• 19:50
  Speaker 1: you know only a little about yourself. Well, you'll knock
• 19:53
  Speaker 1: on doors all day in the hot sun to find students.
• 19:55
  Speaker 1: You'll meet on someone's lawn under a tree. You'll tear
• 19:58
  Speaker 1: up the curriculum and teach what you need. And it
• 20:01
  Speaker 1: seems like that's really kind of what happened.
• 20:03
  Speaker 2: It was very prescient. Yeah. I don't know if that
• 20:05
  Speaker 2: quote was long after in him describing it, but if
• 20:08
  Speaker 2: that's what they told them at orientation before the Freedom schools,
• 20:11
  Speaker 2: then yeah, that's exactly how it ended up.
• 20:14
  Speaker 1: And how many I think originally they were gonna target,
• 20:17
  Speaker 1: like I said, eleventh and twelfth graders, twenty schools, about
• 20:21
  Speaker 1: one thousand students, right, But when you know, when school
• 20:25
  Speaker 1: day started, parents heard about this and brought everybody.
• 20:28
  Speaker 2: Basically they did something like I've seen as much as
• 20:30
  Speaker 2: twenty five hundred, but at least two thousand students were
• 20:34
  Speaker 2: enrolled in Freedom Schools in Mississippi this summer.
• 20:37
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and they doubled the number of schools plus one
• 20:39
  Speaker 1: to forty one.
• 20:40
  Speaker 2: To forty one some I think Hattiesburg had six different schools.
• 20:44
  Speaker 2: Meridian had a school with two hundred and two hundred students.
• 20:48
  Speaker 2: That was the biggest one. It was, and they originally intended,
• 20:52
  Speaker 2: like you said, eleventh and twelfth graders, maybe as young
• 20:55
  Speaker 2: as middle like middle schoolers possibly, but really that was it,
• 20:59
  Speaker 2: and it ended up being elementary school kids. I believe
• 21:02
  Speaker 2: there was an eighty year old enrolled at one of
• 21:04
  Speaker 2: the Freedom schools, and it just became a sensation in
• 21:09
  Speaker 2: Mississippi among the African American community, and there was a
• 21:14
  Speaker 2: there was a New York Times article. They sent a
• 21:17
  Speaker 2: reporter down to kind of cover this, and the reporter
• 21:20
  Speaker 2: was in Holly Springs and there was a school teacher
• 21:23
  Speaker 2: from Chicago named Aviva Futtorian, and she said.
• 21:28
  Speaker 1: They were probably like, are you from outer space?
• 21:30
  Speaker 2: Kind of sounds like it. The silver jump suit she
• 21:32
  Speaker 2: was wearing didn't help, but she said that they were
• 21:36
  Speaker 2: teaching under a sweet gum tree. And this became kind
• 21:39
  Speaker 2: of like. That was another reason why that Oxford quote
• 21:42
  Speaker 2: from Howard's Inn was so prescient. It's like a lot
• 21:45
  Speaker 2: of times like they didn't have any place to actually meet,
• 21:49
  Speaker 2: They had to meet outside or on somebody's front porch
• 21:52
  Speaker 2: or something like that.
• 21:53
  Speaker 1: Because someone might say, like he said in the quote,
• 21:56
  Speaker 1: like hey, use my church basement. But then when the
• 21:59
  Speaker 1: KKK there, you know, they may burn across it in
• 22:02
  Speaker 1: that churchyard, and then that preacher has to say, I'm sorry,
• 22:05
  Speaker 1: I can't take the risk.
• 22:06
  Speaker 2: Well, so you know Schwerner and Cheney and Goodman when
• 22:10
  Speaker 2: they went when they were murdered, kidnapped and murdered, they
• 22:14
  Speaker 2: were investigating the burning of the church that they were
• 22:17
  Speaker 2: going to be holding their freedom school. That's what they
• 22:19
  Speaker 2: were doing out there, and they went to go find
• 22:20
  Speaker 2: out what happened, and that's when they went missing.
• 22:22
  Speaker 1: Yeah, so message sent loud and clear. So school is outside,
• 22:26
  Speaker 1: which is every kid's favorite.
• 22:27
  Speaker 2: Thing, right, and then we as we'll see, there was
• 22:29
  Speaker 2: another There was at least one school that got fire
• 22:32
  Speaker 2: bombed and burned to the ground after school had already started.
• 22:36
  Speaker 2: I don't think any it was like after hours. But
• 22:39
  Speaker 2: the next day the school met in the yard next
• 22:44
  Speaker 2: to this burned down building that they'd been meeting in
• 22:47
  Speaker 2: the day before.
• 22:48
  Speaker 1: Yeah, pretty amazing.
• 22:49
  Speaker 2: So there was a lot of I mean, this wasn't
• 22:51
  Speaker 2: just going to school. There's a whole state full of
• 22:54
  Speaker 2: white people who violently did not want you to be
• 22:59
  Speaker 2: learning this stuff.
• 23:00
  Speaker 1: Yeah, they were just as organized on you know, the
• 23:03
  Speaker 1: defense of this right or I guess the offense, which
• 23:07
  Speaker 1: would that be. They weren't defending it, no, to go
• 23:11
  Speaker 1: on the offensive. Sure, I just got mixed up in
• 23:14
  Speaker 1: my head.
• 23:15
  Speaker 2: Yeah, you got it finally, all right.
• 23:16
  Speaker 1: So in the spring of nineteen sixty four they met
• 23:19
  Speaker 1: and they were like, listen, we need to get a
• 23:21
  Speaker 1: curriculum together, because this is a real school.
• 23:23
  Speaker 2: They're going to tear it up, but we're going to
• 23:26
  Speaker 2: get it down at least.
• 23:28
  Speaker 1: And the final one had sections for like I said, reading, writing, arithmetic,
• 23:34
  Speaker 1: the three RS, and science. But the bulk of it
• 23:37
  Speaker 1: was what they called citizen curriculum, citizenship curriculum, which is
• 23:42
  Speaker 1: basically like African American civics, which they had never heard of,
• 23:46
  Speaker 1: right and never learned. Yeah, Like, I'm sure parents told
• 23:50
  Speaker 1: them stories and stuff, but as far as going to school,
• 23:53
  Speaker 1: they had never encountered anything like this before.
• 23:55
  Speaker 2: Well, I mean, depending on the age of their parents too,
• 23:57
  Speaker 2: their parents might have never heard anything like that before either.
• 24:01
  Speaker 2: So there was the citizenship curriculum was broken into seven
• 24:05
  Speaker 2: units and each one built upon the last unit. It
• 24:10
  Speaker 2: was meant to basically say, here's the status quo, here's
• 24:14
  Speaker 2: what's wrong with the status quo, here's how to change
• 24:17
  Speaker 2: to the status quo. Or basically, the three buckets you
• 24:19
  Speaker 2: could put everything in, and the one. I haven't read
• 24:23
  Speaker 2: all of them, but I went and read the fourth one,
• 24:26
  Speaker 2: called the Power Structure, Unit four, and I would strongly recommend.
• 24:30
  Speaker 2: I think the Student Non Violent Coordinating Committee's digital archive
• 24:35
  Speaker 2: has it like digitized.
• 24:37
  Speaker 1: Yeah, that's when you sent me, right, But.
• 24:39
  Speaker 2: Go read it. It's called Unit four, Introducing the Power Structure,
• 24:43
  Speaker 2: and it explains how and why white people are taught
• 24:51
  Speaker 2: to be afraid of and hate black people, how black
• 24:56
  Speaker 2: people are taught that they're inferior, and and that the
• 25:00
  Speaker 2: reason behind the whole thing is money and profits, and
• 25:05
  Speaker 2: that all of the racism and hatred and fear and
• 25:08
  Speaker 2: crime and all that stuff is all just window dressing
• 25:13
  Speaker 2: around this power structure that's meant to keep people servile
• 25:16
  Speaker 2: and available for cheap labor so that some people can
• 25:20
  Speaker 2: profit more off of their work. It's the most disgusting
• 25:23
  Speaker 2: thing I've ever read, but it's also one of the
• 25:25
  Speaker 2: most eye opening, and it was designed for eleventh and
• 25:29
  Speaker 2: twelfth graders to back in the sixties, and it still
• 25:33
  Speaker 2: brings one hundred percent true today.
• 25:35
  Speaker 1: Yeah, the one that I'm going to dig in and
• 25:37
  Speaker 1: read I didn't have time but number six material things
• 25:42
  Speaker 1: and soul things. So this is almost the last one
• 25:47
  Speaker 1: on the citizenship curriculum units, and that is that black
• 25:51
  Speaker 1: people will not achieve true freedom by trying to acquire
• 25:54
  Speaker 1: more stuff, but by using their insights about oppression to
• 25:57
  Speaker 1: create a new kind of society. And I think that's
• 25:59
  Speaker 1: so important in these In this curriculum, it's like we're
• 26:03
  Speaker 1: not trying to teach you like, hey, go out there
• 26:05
  Speaker 1: and try and gain status in society so you can
• 26:10
  Speaker 1: get a bigger house, right, or things that you see
• 26:13
  Speaker 1: that these white people have, right, which I'm sure was
• 26:16
  Speaker 1: you know, you covet things. That's what people do, so
• 26:17
  Speaker 1: I'm sure that was a natural inclination, like I want
• 26:21
  Speaker 1: the stuff that they have. But it's so important to
• 26:24
  Speaker 1: say like that the stuff isn't what matters.
• 26:25
  Speaker 2: Well, not only just stuff in general, but there's they
• 26:28
  Speaker 2: kind of walk the students through it in this curriculum
• 26:31
  Speaker 2: where they say, like, what are some things that white
• 26:34
  Speaker 2: people have that you don't have that you wish you had.
• 26:37
  Speaker 2: What are some things white people have that you don't want?
• 26:40
  Speaker 2: And the purpose of this curriculum wasn't to teach black
• 26:44
  Speaker 2: kids to hate white kids. Now, as a matter of fact,
• 26:47
  Speaker 2: it actually teaches them to understand white people more. Yeah,
• 26:50
  Speaker 2: let me read you this quote from this unit four.
• 26:53
  Speaker 2: We have learned that although it seems that white people
• 26:55
  Speaker 2: have better schools, for instance, that they pay for it
• 26:58
  Speaker 2: by learning lies and by learning to hate and be afraid.
• 27:03
  Speaker 2: We have learned that we are misled by these lies too,
• 27:05
  Speaker 2: that the myths have taught us to believe that we
• 27:07
  Speaker 2: are inferior and dumb, and that we have made no
• 27:10
  Speaker 2: contributions to society. So it's just it's saying like, don't
• 27:14
  Speaker 2: hate white people. They're being duped by this too, right,
• 27:17
  Speaker 2: But they're patsies in this power structure too. They just
• 27:21
  Speaker 2: happened to not be the group that's being stepped on, right,
• 27:26
  Speaker 2: you know, but they're still being used and abused.
• 27:28
  Speaker 1: Yeah, school children in particular for context, and well, it's
• 27:34
  Speaker 1: interesting too when you just talked about like they wanted
• 27:38
  Speaker 1: the same things, not necessarily stuff as the white students.
• 27:42
  Speaker 1: One of the most popular classes because you know, they
• 27:45
  Speaker 1: would get in there and say, this is what I
• 27:47
  Speaker 1: want to learn. And that's the whole part about tearing
• 27:49
  Speaker 1: up the curriculum. One of the most popular subjects in
• 27:52
  Speaker 1: one of these schools was French, and they wanted to
• 27:56
  Speaker 1: learn French because they knew white kids had a French teacher.
• 27:59
  Speaker 1: Like something is innocuous as that, Like I want to
• 28:01
  Speaker 1: learn French.
• 28:02
  Speaker 2: Too, right, And I mean that was the point in schools,
• 28:04
  Speaker 2: not just like sit down and shut up and listen,
• 28:06
  Speaker 2: this is what we're here to teach you. It was
• 28:08
  Speaker 2: what do you want to learn?
• 28:09
  Speaker 1: Yeah?
• 28:09
  Speaker 2: What are you guys going to feel good about yourselves
• 28:12
  Speaker 2: for knowing that you came You didn't know when you
• 28:14
  Speaker 2: came in here. And so teaching in the Freedom Schools
• 28:17
  Speaker 2: that summer was super improvisational and spontaneous. They really did
• 28:22
  Speaker 2: tear up the curriculum in a lot of a lot
• 28:24
  Speaker 2: of cases.
• 28:25
  Speaker 1: Sounds like a good model for schools period.
• 28:28
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it sounds like one of those like Waldorf schools
• 28:30
  Speaker 2: or a Monassori school or something like that. It sounds
• 28:33
  Speaker 2: very much like one of those childhood Yeah, but I
• 28:36
  Speaker 2: mean that was that was the point, was to not
• 28:40
  Speaker 2: to drill them with what the adults thought they should learn.
• 28:43
  Speaker 2: But to raise up their self worth and self esteem
• 28:46
  Speaker 2: and whatever that took is what they taught them.
• 28:48
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and it's cool that they didn't. Not only were
• 28:51
  Speaker 1: they concerned about civics and the core academics, but something
• 28:55
  Speaker 1: that could have very easily been pushed to the side
• 28:57
  Speaker 1: is creative pursuit. And they really embraced that because they
• 29:02
  Speaker 1: found that these students were natural poets and really eager
• 29:06
  Speaker 1: to get in there and read and write poetry. They
• 29:09
  Speaker 1: read Robert Frost and Langston Hughes and Gertrude Stein and
• 29:13
  Speaker 1: wrote a lot of poetry themselves. Some of it is
• 29:15
  Speaker 1: just heartbreaking, some of it inspiring, some of it both.
• 29:19
  Speaker 1: There was one school in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, Freedom School, students
• 29:23
  Speaker 1: of Saint John's Methodist Church. They wrote their own declaration
• 29:27
  Speaker 1: of independence and it's all in here in this article.
• 29:30
  Speaker 1: We can't go through the whole thing, but I encourage
• 29:32
  Speaker 1: you to read this thing in full. It's really heady
• 29:35
  Speaker 1: like advanced stuff.
• 29:36
  Speaker 2: It really is. There are also newspapers were really big
• 29:40
  Speaker 2: at the Freedom schools, and they qualified as alternative newspapers,
• 29:45
  Speaker 2: and that guy John Hale, the professor from South Carolina
• 29:48
  Speaker 2: who wrote the book on Freedom Schools literally literally. He
• 29:52
  Speaker 2: says that in Mississippi that summer, the freedom schools student
• 29:57
  Speaker 2: run newspapers were the biggest so of civil rights news,
• 30:02
  Speaker 2: can you believe in the entire states? Amazing, and that
• 30:04
  Speaker 2: they were the state's first taste of alternative news.
• 30:07
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 30:07
  Speaker 2: Ever, but that like almost all of the forty one
• 30:11
  Speaker 2: schools had their own newspapers, and in some communities that's
• 30:13
  Speaker 2: that's how some adults were learning what they needed to
• 30:16
  Speaker 2: do to go register to vote by reading it in
• 30:18
  Speaker 2: the student run freedom school newspaper.
• 30:21
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I was a newspaper staffer. I think you were too,
• 30:23
  Speaker 1: probably right, Sure were you just starting your own papers?
• 30:26
  Speaker 2: Sure?
• 30:28
  Speaker 1: But I was a newspaper staffer in high school. And
• 30:30
  Speaker 1: there's something about like putting together a publication that even
• 30:35
  Speaker 1: I've seen little kids doing for fun, and I remember
• 30:39
  Speaker 1: doing for fun. So it doesn't surprise me that like
• 30:43
  Speaker 1: that the newspaper was. Every school had their own, and
• 30:46
  Speaker 1: it seems like they were really really into it.
• 30:48
  Speaker 2: I could see your little family newspaper, You're like extra extra.
• 30:51
  Speaker 2: Mom puts too much hot sauce on eggs. This morning day.
• 30:54
  Speaker 1: Ruined well, it's on my mind because I just got
• 30:56
  Speaker 1: back from vacation and we went with one, two, three,
• 31:01
  Speaker 1: four older girls plus my younger daughter, and they did
• 31:05
  Speaker 1: the Beach Blotter. They'd put together their own little magazine
• 31:08
  Speaker 1: for the week, and I just remembered, I'm like, man,
• 31:11
  Speaker 1: kids are just drawn to putting together newspapers and magazines,
• 31:15
  Speaker 1: and these kids in the Freedom Schools leaped at the
• 31:17
  Speaker 1: chance to interview people and to be little cub reporters
• 31:22
  Speaker 1: and type this stuff up. They were really big on
• 31:24
  Speaker 1: taking typing classes because that would lead to work obviously
• 31:27
  Speaker 1: later on as well. I just thought it was really
• 31:30
  Speaker 1: kind of a cool part of this whole thing.
• 31:31
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I know, it's super cool.
• 31:33
  Speaker 1: As was the theater. There was a traveling group called
• 31:36
  Speaker 1: the Free Southern Theater that would perform a play called
• 31:39
  Speaker 1: in White America, and they would go around to Freedom
• 31:42
  Speaker 1: schools and perform this play. And there were music groups,
• 31:45
  Speaker 1: the Great Great Folks. Singer and activist Pete Seeger went
• 31:48
  Speaker 1: down there, of course and toured the Freedom schools. I
• 31:51
  Speaker 1: was like, here's how you play a G chord and
• 31:53
  Speaker 1: sing about like things that matter. Pretty great.
• 31:56
  Speaker 2: Why don't you go on over to the fridge rosen
• 32:00
  Speaker 2: snicker bone.
• 32:01
  Speaker 1: No, no, no, I don't.
• 32:03
  Speaker 2: Even like frozen snickers. That's the big reveal at the
• 32:05
  Speaker 2: end of the song.
• 32:06
  Speaker 1: But you know, lou Reid does sure or did?
• 32:08
  Speaker 2: Yeah? So should we take another break?
• 32:12
  Speaker 1: Yeah?
• 32:12
  Speaker 2: Okay, We're going to take a break. Everybody, so sit
• 32:15
  Speaker 2: tight and we'll be right back and things.
• 32:20
  Speaker 1: Job and job.
• 32:40
  Speaker 2: So like I said, Chuck, this experiment in pushing Mississippi
• 32:45
  Speaker 2: into the civil rights era was not well received by
• 32:48
  Speaker 2: the white power establishment, and I think it kind of
• 32:51
  Speaker 2: varied from one community to another, and but none none
• 32:57
  Speaker 2: of them were happy from what I understand, and the
• 32:59
  Speaker 2: ones that were unhappiest with the Freedom Schools were very,
• 33:02
  Speaker 2: very violent in retaliation for these things. This one summer,
• 33:07
  Speaker 2: this Freedom Summer lasted ten weeks. I think the Freedom
• 33:10
  Speaker 2: Schools lasted six weeks, but the Freedom Summer itself lasted
• 33:13
  Speaker 2: ten weeks. And in that ten week period, thirty homes
• 33:18
  Speaker 2: of black residents, thirty seven black churches were fire bombed.
• 33:23
  Speaker 2: In one summer in Mississippi, demonstrators were shot at thirty
• 33:29
  Speaker 2: five different times by the police. Eighty volunteers were attacked
• 33:36
  Speaker 2: or beaten by white mobs or police officers. There were
• 33:40
  Speaker 2: six known murders that summer related to the Freedom Summer,
• 33:44
  Speaker 2: and female volunteers were sexually assaulted. It was a really violent,
• 33:50
  Speaker 2: dangerous place to be doing what they were doing at
• 33:53
  Speaker 2: the time.
• 33:54
  Speaker 1: Yeah, there was one town, Macomb, Mississippi. There were more
• 33:57
  Speaker 1: than a dozen bombings in two months, more than twelve
• 34:01
  Speaker 1: bombings in a two month period, twelve and a half,
• 34:04
  Speaker 1: and there were they were called the bombing capital of
• 34:07
  Speaker 1: the world at the time, again local police turning a
• 34:11
  Speaker 1: blind eye.
• 34:11
  Speaker 2: I get the impression that, like they actually qualified as
• 34:14
  Speaker 2: the bombing capital of the world.
• 34:16
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it wasn't just a thing written in a freedom
• 34:18
  Speaker 1: school paper, right, It.
• 34:19
  Speaker 2: Wasn't like an offhanded comment like they may have qualified
• 34:22
  Speaker 2: as the bombing capital of the world.
• 34:25
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it's crazy.
• 34:27
  Speaker 2: And even if there wasn't like direct violence, there was
• 34:31
  Speaker 2: indirect violence, intimidation, intimidation. People would probably drive.
• 34:35
  Speaker 1: By and say the worst things.
• 34:38
  Speaker 2: Get right exactly. So it was not it was a
• 34:41
  Speaker 2: struggle to just make it through this summer, but they
• 34:44
  Speaker 2: did as a matter of fact, and one of the
• 34:47
  Speaker 2: goals of this Freedom Schools was to create or help
• 34:52
  Speaker 2: get the Mississippi Democratic Freedom Party, the antidote to the
• 34:57
  Speaker 2: Dixiecrats in Mississippi seated at the Democratic National Convention, and
• 35:03
  Speaker 2: they attempted to do that and actually got a meeting
• 35:07
  Speaker 2: at the Credentials Committee of the DNC, but we're ultimately
• 35:11
  Speaker 2: turned down.
• 35:12
  Speaker 1: Yeah, they had delegates. This is just amazing. They had
• 35:14
  Speaker 1: delegates from all forty one of these schools and they
• 35:17
  Speaker 1: met at a statewide convention in Meridian, Mississippi, a place
• 35:22
  Speaker 1: I have been through on a greyhound bus.
• 35:25
  Speaker 2: Wow, that's a country song in emotion right there.
• 35:28
  Speaker 1: For sure. That was a place where they stopped us
• 35:31
  Speaker 1: and the drug dogs got on.
• 35:33
  Speaker 2: Oh gotcha in Meridian?
• 35:34
  Speaker 1: Huh Yeah? And I was like, oh, interesting, I never
• 35:36
  Speaker 1: thought about greyhound buses. Is probably a great way to
• 35:39
  Speaker 1: transport drugs, but probably not heys.
• 35:42
  Speaker 2: Speaking of country music, have you seen that Ken Burns documentary?
• 35:45
  Speaker 1: Not yet. I've heard it's great. Oh my, it's good.
• 35:47
  Speaker 2: I'm in the country music now.
• 35:51
  Speaker 1: Well, I saw your Dixie Chicks tattoo on your neck,
• 35:54
  Speaker 1: So I wonder what.
• 35:54
  Speaker 2: That was all about. Just pen right now, I haven't
• 35:56
  Speaker 2: I haven't pulled the trigger all the way.
• 35:58
  Speaker 1: Okay, Yeah, I'm looking forward to seeing that. So they
• 36:01
  Speaker 1: wrote these kids, these delegates went down there, they wrote
• 36:04
  Speaker 1: their own political platform for the MFDP, and it was
• 36:10
  Speaker 1: it's amazing, like, these are kids that in six weeks
• 36:13
  Speaker 1: time went from just basically having no hope whatsoever to
• 36:19
  Speaker 1: fully forming a delegation and writing their own political platform
• 36:24
  Speaker 1: and presenting it in public. Right.
• 36:26
  Speaker 2: And it wasn't it wasn't like, hey, let's get these
• 36:28
  Speaker 2: kids citied at the DNC, Like the Mississippi Democratic Freedom
• 36:32
  Speaker 2: Party was made up of adult activists, but the kids
• 36:37
  Speaker 2: from the Freedom Schools helped write their platform. They also
• 36:41
  Speaker 2: formed from this delegation that met at the end of
• 36:44
  Speaker 2: the summer, the Mississippi Student Union. And this actually brought
• 36:48
  Speaker 2: to fruition one of the other stated goals of Freedom Schools,
• 36:51
  Speaker 2: which was creating the next generation of activists. Right, because
• 36:54
  Speaker 2: when Freedom School was over and Sharecropper School started back
• 36:58
  Speaker 2: again or even integrated schools around the state, all of
• 37:01
  Speaker 2: a sudden there were kids wearing like one Man, one
• 37:05
  Speaker 2: Vote buttons, which could get you expelled, and actually did
• 37:08
  Speaker 2: get some kids expelled. But there were like little civil
• 37:10
  Speaker 2: rights activists showing up to school aware now of the
• 37:14
  Speaker 2: situation they were dealing with, and ready to take it on.
• 37:17
  Speaker 1: Yeah, twenty five of them volunteered to be the first
• 37:21
  Speaker 1: to desegregate their local high schools. Yeah, so that call
• 37:24
  Speaker 1: comes out, like we have to desegregate. Who's going to
• 37:27
  Speaker 1: be the one? I know, just the people to walk
• 37:30
  Speaker 1: in there, and twenty five of these graduates of the
• 37:32
  Speaker 1: Freedom Schools did so.
• 37:33
  Speaker 2: Yeah, so it was a big deal. I mean, they
• 37:36
  Speaker 2: managed to create the next generation of activist leaders. But
• 37:42
  Speaker 2: one of the other kind of the through lines of
• 37:45
  Speaker 2: the civil rights struggle during this time and of the
• 37:49
  Speaker 2: Freedom Schools themselves, was the idea that if you had
• 37:54
  Speaker 2: I think the quote was if you have strong people
• 37:58
  Speaker 2: or no, strong people, don't need strong leaders, And a
• 38:03
  Speaker 2: civil rights activist, nam Ela Baker said that, and the
• 38:05
  Speaker 2: point was like, if you teach everybody how to struggle
• 38:09
  Speaker 2: for themselves, how to fight for themselves, how to stand
• 38:11
  Speaker 2: up for themselves, you don't have to wait around for
• 38:13
  Speaker 2: Martin a once in a you know, handful of generations
• 38:17
  Speaker 2: person like Martin Luther King Junior to come along and
• 38:20
  Speaker 2: lead the way. The people can lead the way themselves.
• 38:23
  Speaker 2: And that was one of the things that they were
• 38:25
  Speaker 2: doing with the Freedom Schools, not just trying to come
• 38:27
  Speaker 2: up with the next leaders they needed leaders, sure, but
• 38:30
  Speaker 2: also to make everybody who came to the Freedom School
• 38:33
  Speaker 2: like aware and ready for action.
• 38:35
  Speaker 1: So one of the sad legacies was, you know, we
• 38:40
  Speaker 1: said at the beginning that what they wanted to do
• 38:42
  Speaker 1: was one of their big goals was to seat the
• 38:45
  Speaker 1: Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party at that sixty four convention in August,
• 38:50
  Speaker 1: and they won a public hearing which was a big
• 38:52
  Speaker 1: win in and of itself with the DNC committee that
• 38:55
  Speaker 1: was broadcast on live TV. The widow of Michael Schwerner
• 38:59
  Speaker 1: showed up talk, doctor Martin Luther King Junior showed up
• 39:03
  Speaker 1: to talk. And the last one and this is just
• 39:07
  Speaker 1: very sad and shameful. The last speaker and they said
• 39:11
  Speaker 1: Dave describes her as the most dangerous to that democratic
• 39:14
  Speaker 1: establishment was a former sharecropper named Fanny lou Hamer.
• 39:18
  Speaker 2: Did you see her testimony? Yeah, she was as brave
• 39:22
  Speaker 2: as they come.
• 39:22
  Speaker 1: She was as brave as they come, but her brave
• 39:25
  Speaker 1: and pissed. Yeah. But her testimony was interrupted on national
• 39:29
  Speaker 1: TV by President Lyndon Johnson. He called an impromptu press
• 39:32
  Speaker 1: conference in the middle of her testimony. So all the
• 39:36
  Speaker 1: TV breaks away, of course, because the president has a
• 39:38
  Speaker 1: press conference they need to get to, and everyone was thinking,
• 39:40
  Speaker 1: all right, this is big news. He's going to announce
• 39:43
  Speaker 1: his VP pick for the sixty four election or something
• 39:45
  Speaker 1: like that, and he basically got on TV and sort
• 39:48
  Speaker 1: of ad libbed had Today is the nine month anniversary
• 39:51
  Speaker 1: of the assassination of JFK, and black people all around
• 39:56
  Speaker 1: the country and white liberal progressives are going, what's a
• 39:59
  Speaker 1: nine month in her? Like? Are you kidding me?
• 40:02
  Speaker 2: Not just liberals and civil rights activists, but the news
• 40:07
  Speaker 2: too saw right through. Oh and it actually backfired because
• 40:11
  Speaker 2: Johnson interrupting Fanny lou Hamer became news itself, and so
• 40:16
  Speaker 2: Fanny lou Hamer's testimony stayed on the news for days afterward,
• 40:20
  Speaker 2: got way more exposure because of Johnson's clumsy, ham fisted attempt.
• 40:25
  Speaker 2: And the reason why her testimony and the idea of
• 40:28
  Speaker 2: a Mississippi Democratic Freedom Party was a it was a
• 40:33
  Speaker 2: threat to the Democrats was because if you got rid
• 40:38
  Speaker 2: of the Dixiecrats, if you forced integration on the South,
• 40:41
  Speaker 2: you were going to lose the solid South. The South
• 40:43
  Speaker 2: had always voted Democrats because they hated the Republicans, because
• 40:47
  Speaker 2: the Republicans were the party of Lincoln, who forced reconstruction
• 40:50
  Speaker 2: on them. So reconstruction comes along and all of the
• 40:53
  Speaker 2: Southerners went Democrat and they formed the Dixiecrats right well.
• 40:56
  Speaker 2: When Johnson signed the Civil Rights Amendment in nineteen sixty,
• 41:01
  Speaker 2: he said to an aid, we just handed the South
• 41:05
  Speaker 2: to the Republicans for a very long time. And it's
• 41:08
  Speaker 2: still the case still today. You are hard pressed to
• 41:11
  Speaker 2: find a county in the South that's blue. They're all red.
• 41:16
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Well that's not quite true, but.
• 41:17
  Speaker 2: No, it's one hundred percent. But I mean, okay, let
• 41:21
  Speaker 2: me put it this way.
• 41:22
  Speaker 1: Atlanta is as blue as blue gets.
• 41:24
  Speaker 2: But how many Atlanta's are there in the South.
• 41:26
  Speaker 1: No, that's I'm saying, you know, like anywhere else the
• 41:28
  Speaker 1: urban centers, sure, or where the blues are, but.
• 41:31
  Speaker 2: I mean like the north, the northern and southern suburbs,
• 41:35
  Speaker 2: they're all red.
• 41:36
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 41:37
  Speaker 2: I mean, Atlanta's like a little island of blue and
• 41:39
  Speaker 2: the thing are red.
• 41:40
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 41:41
  Speaker 2: It's just weird to think that that's the legacy of
• 41:43
  Speaker 2: this this.
• 41:44
  Speaker 1: Time still yeah. Yeah. So some of these students ended
• 41:50
  Speaker 1: up to go on and do great, great things, I think,
• 41:54
  Speaker 1: dare I say many of them went on to do
• 41:55
  Speaker 1: great things on a smaller scale, but some were sort
• 41:58
  Speaker 1: of known nationally and were pioneers in the black community.
• 42:02
  Speaker 1: One man, Eddie James Carthan, he was the first black
• 42:05
  Speaker 1: mayor in the Mississippi Delta, a very very big deal.
• 42:09
  Speaker 1: He was elected mayor at the age of twenty eight.
• 42:13
  Speaker 2: Which I mean back then though twenty eight was like
• 42:15
  Speaker 2: fifty today. Really sure, you know, aging's really regressed since then.
• 42:21
  Speaker 1: And we talked earlier about the fact that these schools continue.
• 42:27
  Speaker 1: They only operated in nineteen sixty four, but a few
• 42:30
  Speaker 1: of them were transformed into Freedom Centers and they were
• 42:33
  Speaker 1: meeting places for the Mississippi Student Union. They were community
• 42:38
  Speaker 1: meeting places, educational resources. Kindergartens would go there during the day,
• 42:43
  Speaker 1: they would have adult classes at night. And in the
• 42:46
  Speaker 1: nineteen eighties is when the Children's Defense Fund created its
• 42:50
  Speaker 1: own version of the Freedom Schools. All those years later
• 42:53
  Speaker 1: and they now operate in eighty seven cities across twenty
• 42:55
  Speaker 1: eight states, with their main focus being literacy.
• 43:00
  Speaker 2: It's pretty great.
• 43:00
  Speaker 1: But they still honor their African heritage because the school
• 43:03
  Speaker 1: day begins with a Harambi, traditional African welcoming celebration with
• 43:09
  Speaker 1: songs and chants.
• 43:10
  Speaker 2: That goes a little something like go on over to
• 43:13
  Speaker 2: the fridge. Have you noticed like it's kind of transformed
• 43:17
  Speaker 2: into singing. It was talking before you're ditching your lou
• 43:20
  Speaker 2: read this, I guess so of outgrowing them. Well, if
• 43:24
  Speaker 2: you want to know more about freedom schools, there's a
• 43:27
  Speaker 2: lot of it archived out there on the internet, and
• 43:30
  Speaker 2: you could do a lot worse than starting out at
• 43:32
  Speaker 2: the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee's digital archives. They've got a
• 43:35
  Speaker 2: lot of cool stuff on there. It's just really really
• 43:39
  Speaker 2: well done, nice short, punchy articles that link to the
• 43:42
  Speaker 2: next thing and the next thing and just make you
• 43:44
  Speaker 2: want to keep reading. Well, since I said Student Nonviolent
• 43:48
  Speaker 2: Coordinating Committee, it's time for a listener man.
• 43:52
  Speaker 1: So this was the This is the gentleman who wrote in.
• 43:56
  Speaker 1: We had a few people that wrote in trying to
• 43:58
  Speaker 1: explain our confusion on do process.
• 44:01
  Speaker 2: Oh is this the guy? I was like?
• 44:04
  Speaker 1: Which one was that in? That was in?
• 44:06
  Speaker 2: It was in Perophilius paraphilius as we were talking about
• 44:09
  Speaker 2: like people going to prison for gay sex in their
• 44:12
  Speaker 2: own home right consenting in Texas in the twenty first century.
• 44:17
  Speaker 1: And this is from Keith from Philadelphia, not a calm
• 44:20
  Speaker 1: law professor. Guys just a law student, but I thought
• 44:22
  Speaker 1: it could help clear this up. In the Lawrence v.
• 44:25
  Speaker 1: Texas due Process point, due process is essentially broken up
• 44:29
  Speaker 1: into two prongs procedural procedural.
• 44:33
  Speaker 2: That's a good three year olds.
• 44:36
  Speaker 1: Procedural and substantive. Did I say that right? Sub Procedural
• 44:42
  Speaker 1: due process is exactly what Josh was talking about. Provides
• 44:45
  Speaker 1: you notice an opportunity to be heard before rights are
• 44:50
  Speaker 1: taken away from you. Substantive due process is what the
• 44:53
  Speaker 1: court was referring to, and Lawrence the concept is somewhat complicated,
• 44:57
  Speaker 1: but simply stated, Substantive due process means certain rights that
• 45:01
  Speaker 1: are so fundamental that no amount of process or procedure
• 45:06
  Speaker 1: could ever legitimately deprive you of them. In other words,
• 45:09
  Speaker 1: consenting adults have such a fundamental right to privacy behind
• 45:13
  Speaker 1: closed doors that to punish them for having consensual sex
• 45:16
  Speaker 1: will violate their due process rights, no matter how much
• 45:19
  Speaker 1: procedure they are afforded.
• 45:21
  Speaker 2: Got it?
• 45:21
  Speaker 1: Yea? That is as clear as bell guys here, as.
• 45:24
  Speaker 2: Belle future law professor, I'm.
• 45:27
  Speaker 1: Losing it here. Thank you Keith from Philly.
• 45:30
  Speaker 2: Thank you Keith. That was a I mean, I emailed
• 45:33
  Speaker 2: them immediately. It's like a lot of people have written
• 45:35
  Speaker 2: and thanks to everybody wrote in and get wrote a shot.
• 45:38
  Speaker 2: But I emailed them back and was like, Keith, this
• 45:40
  Speaker 2: is the first one I've fully gotten.
• 45:43
  Speaker 1: Yeah, Keith, and I think if you stroll on over
• 45:44
  Speaker 1: to your refrigerator you will find a frozen snicker bar
• 45:47
  Speaker 1: waiting on you. Yeah, because we snuck into your home
• 45:50
  Speaker 1: in the middle of the.
• 45:50
  Speaker 2: Night, where as Chuck would say, a floes in one.
• 45:53
  Speaker 2: If you want to get in touch of this, like
• 45:55
  Speaker 2: Keith did, you can go on to stuff you Should
• 45:56
  Speaker 2: Know dot com and check out our social links, or
• 45:58
  Speaker 2: you can send us a good old fast email, wrap
• 46:00
  Speaker 2: it up, spank it on the bottom, maybe send it
• 46:04
  Speaker 2: along with the frozen stickerbar to stuff podcast at iHeartRadio
• 46:07
  Speaker 2: dot com.
• 46:12
  Speaker 1: Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
• 46:14
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• 46:19
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