How Mississippi Turned Education into Liberation | Activist History

In 1954, the US Supreme Court struck down segregated school systems in the case “Brown v Board of Education.” However, by the mid-1960s, some paces in the South, such as Mississippi, still had segregated school systems and taught curriculum that often left out the Black experience. The Mississippi Freedom Schools were developed in 1964 as part of a massive Freedom Summer campaign focused on voter registration drives and educating Mississippi students for change, organized by COFO (the Council of Federated Organizations, a coalition of civil rights groups). The idea was that if education is the indoctrination of the young into an ideological system, then the Freedom School must reeducate Black children to reject the dominant ideology and construct a new system.