Stuff You Should Know - What were the Freedom Schools?

Episode Date: October 3, 2019

Freedom Schools were set up in Mississippi in the heart of the Civil Rights Movement, with the aim of giving young black school children agency and a future. They remain one of the more inspiring and progressive programs in American History, yet so few know about them. We're hoping to change that.  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

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Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart radios, How Stuff Works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and there's Jerry over there.

And I don't know if I said it or not, but I'm Josh Clark, and this is Stuff You Should Know. And I'm pretty excited about this one. Freedom. Freedom schools, yeah. We would be the best singing duo ever if that's how it worked. I would just go big and you would just Lou Reed it.

Yeah, exactly. Is that what I'm doing? Is Lou reading? I don't even know my own heritage. Sort of speak singing. Oh, okay. You know? Yeah.

That's what Lou Reed did. Maybe go to the refrigerator, baby. Yeah, remember that great song? He had it about the fridge? Right. I mean, one of those frozen snicker bars. They're not the ice cream kind, the actual snicker bar I put into the freezer.

Bring it over here, baby. That song? That's the one. And Nico would go, I am placing it in the freezer. Was she German? Yeah, she had to be German. Was she German?

I mean, she was, if not German Austrian or something. Well, I'm just saying, I didn't even know. I knew nothing about her, except Nico sat in with the Velvet Underground for a while. And then my amazing vocal talents. Yeah, that was good. That's what clued me to the idea that she was a German. There's a movie about her later years that I want to see

that came out this year or something. I think it was called Taken. Liam Neeson played her. That's right. So, Chuck, we're talking about freedom schools, as we already said, and then we got silly. Now we're getting back to it, okay? That's right, because this is not a silly topic.

No. And it has a COA at the beginning. Should we talk about that? Yeah, I think we should. Yeah, so this is about the freedom schools, which, as you will very soon find out, we're in Mississippi during the civil rights movement. I mean, like, in probably the most dangerous place

in the country, during the most dangerous point in the civil rights movement, that's where this story takes place. That's right. And freedom schools were great, and they were a great thing, and we're happy to be talking about them. But in a lot of the quotes and in a lot of the curriculum of the freedom schools themselves,

they use the word Negro, and it's obviously not a word that people use anymore, but some of the curriculum class titles feature that word. And so just letting everyone know that that's coming. Right. And we're not gonna say, we're just gonna read their curriculums and their quotes as it existed back then.

Yeah, I think this heads up, yeah, we're just kind of sticking to the vernacular of the times being used in context. Yes, within reason, of course. Sure. So this takes place in the summer of 1964, but I wanna go back a little further than that, to 1954. Ooh.

With the groundbreaking, sea-changing, Brown versus Board of Education ruling, where the Supreme Court said, you know that separate but equal thing that we said back in 1896 was constitutional? Yeah. That's not true. Segregation is not constitutional,

it's not legal anymore, everybody needs to integrate. Schools at least. But they failed to say and do it by 1964 or 1960 or next year, they just said, I think something like a deliberate and speedy manner or something like that. And so Mississippi said,

oh well you didn't tell us when we had to do it by. So how about never? Yeah, let me just dig my heel in here and the other one in here and we're just going to keep our schools segregated. And not only segregated, Mississippi had some of the poorest excuses for schools for African-American students in the country.

The state average for Mississippi, I think in 1960, was that they spent four times more on schools for white children than they did on schools for black children. That was just the state average and sometimes it was way worse. You're talking about budgets, spinning budgets.

In Tunica, they spent $172.80 per white people on average in 1962. As per year? That was in that year. Per school year, yeah. 172.80, they spent $5.99 per black people. Wow. Yeah, and that's just kind of how it was.

Like you went to school in sharecropper schools or what they were called if you were a black kid and you got a terrible education by comparison. White kid schools usually ran for about six months out of the year. If you were an African-American kid in Mississippi, your school might run three if it was even open that year. The rest of the time you were expected to be out

in the fields working and just knowing your place basically. Yeah, and as you'll see throughout this podcast, those sharecropper schools, not only did they fail them fundamentally on things like literacy and maths and things like that, but they also failed them historically because, and I think things have gotten a lot better, but one could make the argument

that history classes still fail historically in telling the true picture of some of these things. Absolutely. But back then it was like at the sharecropper schools here, you're learning white history and it's not just like this is the important history, but like this is the only history, yours does not matter. Exactly, yeah.

And even worse than that, when they were taught about their heritage or whatever, it was usually in relation to slavery and it was also in relation to how black people preferred to be slaves and that they were far worse off after the war of Northern aggression freed them and that they weren't interested in politics, they weren't really self-starters

and they needed white people to guide them. That was the education you got as an African-American kid in Mississippi around the time of the civil rights struggle. And by the time 1964 rolled around, there was a lot of agitation going on in the African-American community. A lot of people saw, hey, there's no integration going on.

Things haven't changed at all. We're being kept down by Jim Crow air laws and we're going to agitate for change. And in response to that, there was a lot of violence against that agitation for change from the KKK, from the state police, from local sheriffs, from the local sheriffs, Redneck brother, like you could get yourself killed

just by going to vote, register to vote. Yeah, and if the police were not inciting or committing the violence themselves, they certainly would turn a blind eye to anything that was going on and not do police work. So it's in this context around December of 1963 that a guy named Robert Moses, who was one of the members of,

I believe he was with CORE, the, no, I'm sorry, he was with SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in Mississippi. And he said, I've got an idea. We're going to call it Freedom Summer. Yeah, and the Freedom Summer, and by the way, big shout out to Dave Ruse. Big shout out.

One of our stable of writers these days from the old howstuffworks.com website, Dave is helping us out. And boy, he does a great job. He does. It's always a pleasure. So thanks, Dave. But yeah, the Freedom Summer was in 1964

and the whole goal of the Freedom Summer was really to get people registered to vote en masse. Right, that was the stated goal of it. Yeah, for sure. The subtext of it, John Hale wrote a book on Freedom Summer and Freedom Schools, which you're going to talk about. And he actually helped Dave out with this article.

So shout out to John Hale too. But he had a quote from John Lewis, the great John Lewis, who said basically the point of Freedom Summer was to force a showdown between local authorities and federal authorities. Because the local authorities were abusively enforcing white supremacy

and the federal authorities were turning a blind eye to it. And so they said we need to put ourselves in visible harms way and force a showdown between these two entities. Yeah, in 1964 is key. It wasn't just sort of picked randomly. It was key because the Civil Rights Act was going to be signed in July of that year,

but it did not include black voting rights protection. And the Democratic National Convention was going to be at the end of August of that year in Atlantic City. And this is basically like, let's get black folks registered to vote so they can go in there and unseat these Dixie Crats, these Southern Democrats

who were still very much segregationist. In Mississippi, for the Democratic Convention, their delegation, the Mississippi delegation was all white. Yeah, and that was another big, big goal was to create a separate black delegation for that national convention. Right. So to get this, to force the showdown

between local authorities and federal authorities, the Civil Rights activists like Robert Moses working in Mississippi had zero illusions that the federal government was gonna come down and help them out no matter what they were doing. Instead, they would be forced to act if white Northern kids, the children of these federal authorities

came down to Mississippi and put themselves in harms way too. Yeah, kids meaning college students. Right, right. Kids to old folks like us. Right, exactly, youngsters. But they weren't sending down like 12 year olds. No, no, no, nothing like that.

But like college students who wanted to come down and help people who truly believed in the cause of civil rights. Yeah, white, liberal, progressive, Northern, oftentimes Jewish, but not always. But as far as getting the federal authorities to pay attention, that first descriptor is the most important one, white.

Yes. Because again, they knew in Mississippi no federal authorities were gonna pay attention to that. And I mean, they had good reason to think that. Kennedy had the Civil Rights Act as far back as 1960, but agreed not to bring it up in Congress because they were still trying to figure out how to keep the Dixie Crats happy

and maybe get some sort of integration going or civil rights going. And they've just been left hung out to dry by the federal authorities so many times that they were totally right in that assumption. Yeah, and they knew that in order to really affect change, like you said, they were gonna get no assistance from the federal government.

So they need to do it on the ground, grassroots style. And what they were really looking toward was the future. And they knew that getting kids involved was the key. And the only way to do that, or they figured the best way to do that, and I think they were right, was to devise what was called the freedom schools. In the summer of 1964, which ended up being 41 summer schools,

community-based summer schools where they had core curriculums, for sure, but what they really were trying to do is teach young black kids about their history and their self-worth and give them a path forward in the United States with a voice. Like give them an education that they couldn't find anywhere in those sharecropper schools,

where the sharecropper schools point was to keep them down, uneducated and out of politics so that they couldn't vote. These freedom schools were meant to do the exact opposite to teach them their self-worth, but also to say, here's how you can actually enact change and to create the next generation of civil rights activists in Mississippi.

That was the point of the freedom schools. Yeah, and it was hitting me as I was reading this, how progressive that was for 1964 because that would be progressive now in places like even Georgia. Absolutely, and it's still going on now, as we'll see that the Children's Defense Fund revived the freedom schools back in the 80s,

and I think they still have them. And it does still have a tinge of subversion, sadly, teaching black kids in America their self-worth. That's sad. All right, that's a great preamble. Should we take a break? Phew. All right, we are going to take a break

and we're going to come back and really dig in to the mission of the freedom schools right after this. MUSIC Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road.

Ah, OK, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear.

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available on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Okay, so Freedom Schools, again, launched and proposed by SNCC. Snick? Snick. Snick leader, Charlie Cobb, in December 63. And they had three, the original idea was let's get 11th to 12th graders because they're just on the cusp

of being in the real world, arguably already were in the real world. Yeah. You know what I'm saying? Sure. And they had three stated purposes that they wanted to accomplish, supplement what they aren't learning in high school, simple enough, number two, give them a broad

intellectual and academic experience during the summertime to bring back to students in the classrooms, I guess in the fall. Yeah. And then form the basis for statewide student action. Like here's how you can boycott something, here's how you can raise awareness. Right.

Like teach them how to be grassroots activists. And also one of the things that they wanted to teach them that we'll see is this is how things work. Like here's the nuts and bolts of this power structure that we live in that holds us down. And here, understanding how it works, you can start to poke around and figure out how to overcome that. That was a huge, huge part of it.

That's right. So it all starts with volunteers. Right. And these, like we said, are mainly college students. They saw this by way of ads in the New York Times and other groups and college campuses that basically said, hey, this is what we want to do. You've been watching this on TV every night.

I know that you might live in Manhattan or Brooklyn or some place, but if you are a young, white, liberal, progressive and you really want to make a difference, get off your couch and come down to Mississippi for the summer. Sure. And help teach your life and help teach these kids. Yeah. And I think something like a thousand, I saw it like as much

as 2,500, a bunch of people answered this call. Like Northern, mostly white college students came down to Mississippi for this freedom summer, not just the freedom schools. Yeah. Yeah. I think 280 of them ended up being teachers out of about 700 or so who volunteered for the freedom summer.

Yeah. I've heard different stories on how the people who got selected to be teachers for the freedom schools were selected. This article makes it sound like the greener ones, the ones who really shouldn't be put in harm's way, were assigned to the freedom schools, but from what I've read, they were very much in harm's way as being teachers of these freedom schools.

Yeah. But regardless of who got assigned to become a freedom school teacher or why, they were told, you're going to have to pay your way to and from Mississippi. You're going to have to pay your own room and board, so expect to have to shell out over 200 bucks or up to 200 bucks over the course of the summer. Yeah.

It also said they would live basically in the homes of local black families. I wonder if they paid them rent. I don't know if they paid them rent, but the black families who did put these white Northern college students up over the summer to teach freedom schools very much put their own families and homes in harm's way because the freedom school and actually the whole freedom summer volunteers who came

down, they didn't take Mississippi by surprise. The white power establishment in Mississippi knew they were coming. Yeah. They were very unhappy about this. They said publicly that these people would be treated as invaders, that this was a second war of Northern aggression. They doubled the number of highway patrol officers and not to

keep the peace. They knew they were coming down and they were not happy about these freedom schools or the freedom summer in general. Yeah. I guess we should go ahead and say right off the bat to add gravity to the situation. There may be a short stuff in here. I've been wanting to do one on the disappearance of these three

men, but the core training crew, Congress of racial equality was core and they were helping out with the freedom rides in the early 60s on the buses in Selma in the deep south. There were three gentlemen, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, two white men and another colleague, James Cheney, a young black man that worked with core. They went missing in Longdale, Mississippi and were basically taken and murdered.

This is before the freedom schools were to launch and you're going down there knowing that these men disappeared under mysterious circumstances. I'm pretty sure it was like a week before, basically, because it happened like they got the news during the orientation in Oxford, Ohio that they held for the freedom school teachers. The news came through that these three guys had gone missing and then were later found murdered.

Some people did back out and were like, I can't take this risk, but it seems like most of them pressed on. Yeah, absolutely. I think some people's resolve was doubled by that kind of thing too, but their disappearance and ultimately their deaths proved that idea that the civil rights activists in Mississippi needed these white northern volunteers to come down because James Cheney, he was a local Mississippi activist.

He was a black guy and Michael Schwerner and Goodman. Both of them were white and because they went missing along with Cheney, 150 FBI agents and 200 sailors from the local naval station showed up to search for these guys. Michael Schwerner's widow said this never would have happened if my husband had been a black man, that all this was happening because he was white. This is rife with a lot of quotes that a lot of them were not

going to read, but I did want to read this one from Howard Zinn. This is the message at this orientation that you talked about at the Western College for Women in Oxford, so you're showing up, you're like, I want to volunteer, I want to do the right thing. They sit you down in an auditorium and say this, you'll arrive in Rouleville, which is a place in Rouleville in the Delta, it will be 100 degrees, you'll be sweaty and dirty,

you won't be able to bathe often or sleep well or eat good food. I don't know about that. I bet that was some pretty decent food. That kind of stuck out to me too. Howard Zinn might not have thought so. The first day of school, there may be four teachers and three students and the local Negro minister will phone you to say,

you can't use this church basement after all because his life has been threatened and the curriculum we've drawn up, Negro history and American government may be something you know only a little about yourself, well, you'll knock on doors all day in the hot sun to find students, you'll meet on someone's lawn under a tree, you'll tear up the curriculum and teach what you know and it seems like that's really kind of what happened.

Very prescient. Yeah, I don't know if that quote was long after him describing it but if that's what they told them at orientation before the freedom schools then yeah that's exactly how it ended up. And how many, I think originally they were going to target like I said 11th and 12th graders, 20 schools, about a thousand students but when you know when school day started

parents heard about this and brought everybody basically. They did something like I've seen as much as 2,500 but at least 2,000 students were enrolled in freedom schools in Mississippi this summer. Yeah and they doubled the number of schools plus one to 41. To 41. Some I think Hattiesburg had six different schools, Meridian had a school with 200 students, that was the

biggest one. It was and they originally intended like you said 11th and 12th graders maybe as young as middle like middle schoolers possibly but really that was it and it ended up being elementary school kids, I believe there's an 80 year old enrolled at one of the freedom schools and it just became a sensation in Mississippi among the African American community.

And there was a New York Times article, they sent a reporter down to kind of cover this and the reporter was in Holly Springs and there was a school teacher from Chicago named Aviva Futurian and she said, they were probably like are you from outer space? Kind of sounds like it. The silver jumpsuit she was wearing didn't help but she said that they were teaching under a sweet gum tree and this

became kind of like that was another reason why that Oxford quote from Howard's Inn was so prescient and it's like a lot of times like they didn't have any place to actually meet, they had to meet outside or on somebody's front porch or something like that. Because someone might say like he said in the quote like hey use my church basement but then when the KKK found out they're you know they may burn across it in that church yard and then

that preacher has to say I'm sorry I can't take the risk. Well so you know Schwerner and Cheney and Goodman when they went, when they were murdered, kidnapped and murdered, they were investigating the burning of the church that they were going to be holding their freedom school. That's what they were doing down there and they went to go find out what happened and that's when they went missing. Yeah, so message sent loud and clear, so school was outside

which is every kid's favorite thing. Right and then as we'll see there was another, there was at least one school that got firebombed and burned to the ground after school had already started. I don't think it was like after hours but the next day the school met in the like yard next to this burned down building that they've been meeting in the day before. Yeah, pretty amazing.

Yeah, so there was a lot of, I mean this wasn't just going to school, there were, there's a whole state full of white people who violently did not want you to be learning this stuff. Yeah, they were just as organized on, you know, the defense of this. Right. Or I guess the offense, which would that be, they weren't

defending it. No. To go on the offensive. Sure. I just got mixed up in my head. Yeah, you gotta find that. All right, so in the spring of 1964, they met and they were like, listen, we need to get a curriculum together because

this is a real school. They're going to tear it up but we're going to get it down at least. And the final one had sections for, like I said, reading, writing, arithmetic, the three R's in science. But the bulk of it was what they called citizen curriculum, citizenship curriculum, which is basically like African American civics, which they had never heard of.

Right. And never learned. Yeah. Like I'm sure parents told them stories and stuff but as far as going to school, they had never encountered anything like this before. Well, I mean, depending on the age of their parents, too, their parents might have never heard anything like that before

either. Yeah, that's a good point. So there was, the citizenship curriculum was broken into seven units and each one built upon the last unit. Right. It was meant to basically say, here's the status quo, here's what's wrong with the status quo, here's how to change to the status quo or basically the three buckets you could put

everything in. Right. And the one, I haven't read all of them, but I went and read the fourth one called the power structure, unit four, and I would strongly recommend, I think the student nonviolent coordinating committee's digital archive has it like digitized. Yeah.

That's the one you sent me, right? Yeah. But go read it. It's called unit four, introducing the power structure and it explains how and why white people are taught to be afraid of and hate black people, how black people are taught that they're inferior and that the reason behind the whole thing is money and profits and that all of the racism and

hatred and fear and crime and all that stuff is all just window dressing around this power structure that's meant to keep people servile and available for cheap labor so that some people can profit more off of their work. It's the most disgusting thing I've ever read, but it's also one of the most eye-opening and it was designed for eleventh and twelfth graders back in the sixties and it still brings a hundred percent true today.

Yeah. The one that I'm going to dig in and read, I didn't have time, but number six, material things and soul things. So this is almost the last one on the citizenship curriculum units and that is that black people will not achieve true freedom by trying to acquire more stuff but by using their insights about oppression to create a new kind of society. I think that's so important in this curriculum.

It's like we're not trying to teach you like, hey, go out there and try and gain status in society so you can get a bigger house or things that you see that these white people have, which I'm sure you covet things, that's what people do, so I'm sure that was a natural inclination. I want the stuff that they have, but it's so important to say that the stuff isn't what matters. Not only just stuff in general, but they kind of walk the

students through it in this curriculum where they say like, what are some things that white people have that you don't have that you wish you had? What are some things white people have that you don't want? The purpose of this curriculum wasn't to teach black kids to hate white kids. As a matter of fact, it actually teaches them to understand white people more.

Let me read you this quote from this unit four. We have learned that although it seems that white people have better schools, for instance, that they pay for it by learning lies and by learning to hate and be afraid, we have learned that we are misled by these lies too, that the myths have taught us to believe that we are inferior and dumb and that we have made no contributions to society. So it's saying like, don't hate white people, they're being

duped by this too. But they're patsies in this power structure too, they just happen to not be the group that's being stepped on. But they're still being used and abused. Yeah, school children in particular for context. And well, and it's interesting too when you just talked about like they wanted the same things, not necessarily stuff, as the white students, one of the most popular

classes, because they would get in there and say, this is what I want to learn. And that's the whole part about tearing up the curriculum. One of the most popular subjects in one of these schools was French. And they wanted to learn French because they knew white kids had a French teacher. Like something as innocuous as that, like I want to learn

French too. Right, and I mean that was the point in schools, not just like sit down and shut up and listen. This is what we're here to teach you. It was, what do you want to learn? What are you guys going to feel good about yourselves for knowing that you didn't know when you came in here? And so teaching in the freedom schools that summer was

super improvisational and spontaneous. Yeah, collaborative. They really did tear up the curriculum in a lot of cases. Sounds like a good model for schools, period. Yeah, it sounds like one of those like Waldorf schools or a Montessori school or something like that. It sounds very much like one of those models. That's child-bed.

Yeah, but I mean that was, the point was to not to drill them with what the adults thought they should learn, but to raise up their self-worth and self-esteem. And whatever that took is what they taught them. Yeah, and it's cool that they didn't, not only were they concerned about civics and the core academics, but something that could have very easily been pushed to the side is creative pursuits.

And they really embraced that because they found that these students were natural poets and really eager to get in there and read and write poetry. They read Robert Frost and Langston Hughes and Gertrude Stein and wrote a lot of poetry themselves. Some of it is just heartbreaking. Some of it inspiring. Some of it both.

There was one school in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, freedom school students of St. John's Methodist Church. They wrote their own Declaration of Independence. And it's all in here in this article. We can't go through the whole thing, but I encourage you to like read this thing in full. It's really heady, like advanced stuff. It really is.

There are also newspapers were really big at the freedom schools and they qualified as alternative newspapers. And that guy, John Hale, the professor from South Carolina who wrote the book on freedom schools. Literally. Literally. He says that in Mississippi that summer,

the freedom school student run newspapers were the biggest source of civil rights news in the entire state. Amazing. And that they were the state's first taste of alternative news ever. But that like almost all of the 41 schools have their own newspapers. And in some communities that's how some adults were learning

what they needed to do to go register to vote by reading it in the student run freedom school newspaper. Yeah, I was a newspaper staffer. I think you were too probably, right? Sure. Or were you just starting your own papers? Sure. But I was a newspaper staffer in high school.

And there's something about like putting together a publication that even I've seen little kids doing for fun. And I remember doing for fun. So it doesn't surprise me that the newspaper was, every school had their own. And it seems like they were really, really into it. I can see your little family newspaper, you're like extra, extra, mom puts too much hot sauce

on eggs this morning, they ruin. Well, it's on my mind because I just got back from vacation. And we went with one, two, three, four older girls, plus my younger daughter. And they did the beach blotter, they put together their own little magazine for the week. And I just remembered, I'm like, man, kids are just drawn to putting together

newspapers and magazines. And these kids in the freedom schools leapt at the chance to interview people and to be little cub reporters and type this stuff up. They were really big on taking typing classes because that would lead to work obviously later on as well. I just thought it was really kind of a cool part of this whole thing.

And yeah, no, it's super cool. As was the theater. There was a traveling group called the Free Southern Theater that would perform a play called In White America. And they would go around to freedom schools and perform this play. And there were music groups. The great, great folk singer and activist Pete Seeger

went down there, of course, and toured the freedom schools. Was like, here's how you play a G chord and sing about things that matter. Pretty great. Why don't you go on over to the fridge, give me a frozen snicker bar. No, no. I don't even like frozen snickers.

That's the big reveal at the end of the song. But you know we read does. Sure. Or did. Yeah. RIP. So should we take another break? Yeah.

OK, we're going to take a break everybody. So sit tight and we'll be right back. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new I Hard podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. OK, I see what you're doing.

Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This I promise you. Oh, god. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you.

Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yeah, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy.

You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You love movies, or maybe Justin

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So, like I said, Chuck, this experiment in pushing Mississippi into the Civil Rights era was not well received by the White Power establishment. And I think it kind of varied from one community to another. But none of them were happy from one community to another. But none of them were happy from what I understand. And the ones that were unhappiest with the Freedom Schools were very, very violent in retaliation for these things.

This one summer, this Freedom Summer lasted 10 weeks. I think the Freedom Schools lasted six weeks. But the Freedom Summer itself lasted 10 weeks. And in that 10-week period, 30 homes of Black residents, 37 Black churches were fire-bombed. And in one summer in Mississippi, demonstrators were shot at 35 different times by the police. 80 volunteers were attacked or beaten

by White mobs or police officers. There were six known murders that summer related to the Freedom Summer. And female volunteers were sexually assaulted. It was a really violent, dangerous place where they were doing what they were doing at the time. Yeah, there was one town in Macomb, Mississippi. There were more than a dozen bombings in two months.

More than 12 bombings in a two-month period. 12 and a half. And they were called the bombing capital of the world at the time. Again, local police turning a blind eye. I get the impression that they actually qualified as the bombing capital of the world. Yeah, it wasn't just a thing written in a Freedom School paper. It was an off-handed comment.

They may have qualified as the bombing capital of the world. Yeah. It's crazy. And even if there wasn't direct violence, there was indirect violence. Intimidation. Intimidation people would probably drive by and... Say the worst things.

Right, exactly. So it was a struggle to just make it through the summer. But they did, as a matter of fact. And one of the goals of this Freedom Schools was to create or help get the Mississippi Democratic Freedom Party, the antidote to the Dixie Crats in Mississippi, seated at the Democratic National Convention. And they attempted to do that and actually got a meeting

at the credentials committee of the DNC, but were ultimately turned down. Yeah, they had delegates. This is just amazing. They had delegates from all 41 of these schools, and they met at a statewide convention in Meridian, Mississippi. A place I have been through on a Greyhound bus. Wow.

That's a country song in motion right there. For sure. That was a place where they stopped us and the drug dogs got on. Oh, gotcha. In Meridian, huh? Yeah. And I was like, oh, interesting. I never thought about Greyhound buses.

This is probably a great way to transport drugs. Sure. But probably not. Speaking of country music, have you seen that Ken Burns documentary? Not yet. I've heard it's great. Oh my. Is it good?

I'm into country music now. Well, I saw your Dixie Chicks tattoo on your neck, so I wonder what that was all about. It's just pen right now. I haven't pulled the trigger all the way on. Yeah, I'm looking forward to seeing that. It's good. So they wrote these kids, these delegates went down there.

They wrote their own political platform for the MFDP. And it was, it's amazing, like these are kids that in six weeks time went from just basically having no hope whatsoever to fully forming a delegation and writing their own political platform and presenting it in public. Right. And it wasn't like, hey, let's get these kids seated at the DNC. Like the Mississippi Democratic Freedom Party was made up of adult activists, but the kids from the Freedom Schools helped write their platform.

Yeah. They also formed from this delegation that met at the end of the summer, the Mississippi Student Union. And this actually brought to fruition one of the other stated goals of Freedom Schools, which was creating the next generation of activists. Right. Because when Freedom School was over and sharecropper schools started back again. Right.

Or even integrated schools around the state. All of a sudden there were kids wearing like one man, one vote buttons. Yeah. Which could get you expelled and actually did get some kids expelled. But there were like little civil rights activists showing up to school aware now of the situation they were dealing with and ready to take it on. Yeah. 25 of them volunteered to be the first to desegregate their local high schools.

Yeah. So that call comes out like we have to desegregate who's going to be the one. I know just the people to walk in there and 25 of these graduates of the Freedom Schools did so. Yeah. That was a big deal. I mean they managed to create the next generation of activists leaders. But one of the other kind of the through lines of the civil rights struggle during this time

and of the Freedom Schools themselves was the idea that if you had, I think the quote was if you have strong people or no, strong people don't need strong leaders. Right. And a civil rights activist named Ella Baker said that. And the point was like if you teach everybody how to struggle for themselves, how to fight for themselves, how to stand up for themselves, you don't have to wait around for a once in a, you know, a handful of generations person like Martin Luther King, Junior to come along and lead the way.

Right. The people can lead the way themselves. Right. And that was one of the things that they were doing with the Freedom Schools. Not just trying to come up with like the next leaders. They needed leaders, sure, but also to make everybody who came to the Freedom School like aware and ready for action. So one of the sad, sad legacies was, you know, we said at the beginning that what they wanted

to do was one of their big goals was to seat the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party at that 64 convention in August. And they won a public hearing, which was a big win in and of itself with the DNC committee that was broadcast on live TV. The widow of Michael Schwerner showed up to talk. Dr. Martin Luther King, Junior showed up to talk. And the last one, and this is just very sad and shameful, the last speaker and they said, Dave describes her as the most dangerous to that Democratic establishment was a former

sharecropper named Fannie Lou Hamer. Did you see her testimony? Yeah. She was brave as they come. She was as brave as they come. She was brave and pissed. Yeah. But her testimony was interrupted on national TV by President Lyndon Johnson.

He called an impromptu press conference in the middle of her testimony. So all the TV breaks away, of course, because the president has a press conference they need to get to. Right. And everyone was thinking, all right, this is big news. He's going to announce his VP pick for the 64 election or something like that. And he basically got on TV and sort of ad-libbed. Today is the nine-month anniversary of the assassination of JFK and black people all around the country and white liberal progressives are going, what's a nine-month anniversary?

Right. Like, are you kidding me? Not just liberals and civil rights activists, but the news too saw right through. Oh, sure. And it actually backfired because Johnson interrupting Fannie Lou Hamer became news itself. Yeah. Fannie Lou Hamer's testimony stayed on the news for days afterward, got way more exposure because of Johnson's clumsy, ham-fisted attempt.

Yeah. And the reason why her testimony and the idea of a Mississippi Democratic Freedom Party was a threat to the Democrats was because if you got rid of the Dixie Crats, if you forced integration on the South, you were going to lose the solid South. The South had always voted Democrats because they hated the Republicans because the Republicans were the party of Lincoln who forced Reconstruction on them. Right. So Reconstruction comes along and all of the Southerners went Democrat and they formed the Dixie Crats, right?

Right. Well, when Johnson signed the Civil Rights Amendment in 1965, he said to an aide, we just handed the South to the Republicans for a very long time. Yeah. And it's still the case. Yeah. So today, you are hard-pressed to find a county in the South that's blue. They're all red.

Yeah. Well, that's not quite true, but... Nope. It's 100% true. But I mean, okay, let me put it this way. Atlanta's as blue as blue gets. But how many Atlannas are there in the South? No, that's what I'm saying.

You know, like anywhere else, the urban centers are where the blues are. But I mean, like the northern and southern suburbs, they're all red. I mean, Atlanta's like a little island of blue and a thing of red. Yeah. It's just weird to think that that's the legacy of this time. Still. Yeah. Yeah.

So some of these students ended up to go on and do great things. I think, dare I say, many of them went on to do great things on a smaller scale, but some were sort of known nationally and were pioneers in the black community. One man, Eddie James Carthen. He was the first black mayor in the Mississippi Delta. Very, very big deal. He was elected mayor at the age of 28. Which I mean, back then though, 28 was like 50 today.

Really? Sure. You know, aging's really regressed since then. And we talked earlier about the fact that these schools continue. They only operated in 1964, but a few of them were transformed into freedom centers. And they were meeting places for the Mississippi Student Union. They were community meeting places, educational resources. Kindergarten's would go there during the day.

They would have adult classes at night. And in the 1980s is when the Children's Defense Fund created its own version of the Freedom Schools all those years later. And they now operate in 87 cities across 28 states with their main focus being literacy. Yeah. It's pretty great. So how on are their African heritage, because the school day begins with a Harambee, traditional African welcoming celebration with songs and chants.

That goes a little something like, go on over to the fridge. Have you noticed like it's kind of transformed into singing. It was talking before. You're ditching your Lou Reedness. I guess so. I've outgrown them. Well, if you want to know more about Freedom Schools, there's a lot of it archived out there on the internet.

And you could do a lot worse than starting out at the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee's digital archives. They've got a lot of cool stuff on there. It's just really, really well done. Nice, short, punchy articles that link to the next thing and the next thing and just make you want to keep reading. Well, since I said Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, it's time for a listener mate. So this was the, this is the gentleman who wrote in.

We had a few people that wrote in trying to explain our confusion on due process. Oh, is this the guy? This is the guy. Okay, good. Which one was that in? That was in... It was in Paraphilius. Paraphilius.

Because we were talking about like people going to prison for gay sex in their own home. Right. Consenting in Texas in the 21st century. And this is from Keith from Philadelphia. Not a common law professor guys, just a law student. But I thought I could help clear this up in the Lawrence of v. Texas due process point. Due process is essentially broken up into two prongs. Procedural...

Procedural? That's it. Bill, three-year-old right there. Procedural and substantive. Did I say that right? Substantive. Procedural due process is exactly what Josh was talking about. Provides you notice an opportunity to be heard before rights are taken away from you.

Substantive due process is what the court was referring to in Lawrence. The concept is somewhat complicated but simply stated. Substantive due process just means certain rights that are so fundamental that no amount of process or procedure could ever legitimately deprive you of them. In other words, consenting adults have such a fundamental right to privacy behind closed doors that to punish them for having consensual sex will violate their due process rights no matter how much procedure they are afforded. Got it.

That is as clear as bell. As clear as bell. Future law professor. I'm losing it here. Yeah. Thank you, Keith, from Philly. Thank you, Keith. That was a...

I mean, I emailed him a media and he was like, a lot of people have written in. Thanks to everybody who wrote in and gave it a shot. But I emailed him back and I was like, Keith, this is the first one I've fully gotten. Yeah, Keith. And I think if you stroll on over to your refrigerator, you will find a frozen snicker bar waiting on you. You'll be snuck into your home in the middle of the night. Whereas Chuck would say a fwozen one.

If you want to get in touch with us like Keith did, you can go on to stuffyoushouldknow.com and check out our social links or you can send us a good old fashioned email. Wrap it up, spank it on the bottom, maybe send it along with the frozen snicker bar to stuffpodcast.ihartradio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app. Apple podcasts are available wherever you listen to your favorite shows. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever

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