In 1964, during the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee’s (SNCC) “Freedom Summer” in Mississippi, Freedom Schools began to supplement the sharecropper’s education received by Blacks and poor whites.
BY JACQUELINE HUBBARD, ESQ., President, ASALH
African Americans are under assault. There is a genuine concern that our children cannot be taught their history today in Florida. There has been expressed concern that if the truth of American history is told, it might make certain children feel uncomfortable because of the guilt of their ancestors.
What about Black children? If there is a prohibition on teaching the truth about the Black experience in America, how will children understand the world they live in? What about the comfort of Black children? Is it fair for them to only learn a skewed version of history that erases their ancestors’ journey?
Why can’t children learn about Black Americans’ ability to overcome mistreatment, enslavement, brutality, Black Codes, Jim Crow, mass incarceration, and discrimination of every kind, and yet — in many instances — thrive? Those among us who study and know American history will have to teach them.
In 1964 during the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee’s (SNCC) “Freedom Summer” in Mississippi, Freedom Schools began as a supplement to the sharecropper’s education received by Blacks and poor whites.
During a six-week summer program, participants learned reading, writing, math, history, and civics. Nearly 40 freedom schools served close to 2,500 children, parents, and grandparents.
With Gov. Ron DeSantis’s recent attacks on Black history in Florida and other states surely soon to follow, these schools are as necessary in 2023 as they were 60 years ago.
Black history is American history with all its hypocrisy, lofty ideals, cruelty, enslavement and mass incarceration. It is also about an African heritage that led to religious practices that gave hope and salvation, art, music and a uniquely American culture envied by the world over.
By omitting Black history, children are not taught about the courage of Black soldiers who fought in all American wars, from the War of Independence to recent conflicts. Burying the amazing inventions, advances in medicine, science, politics and art made by African Americans serve only to keep us in mental slavery.
Harvard-trained Dr. Carter G. Woodson — known as the “father of Black history” — founded the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH) in 1915 to study and appreciate Black history. He also established “Negro History Week” in 1926, that later became “Black History Month” in 1976.
Black History Month exists to celebrate the accomplishments of Black people throughout the history of this nation. However, the white supremacist ideology that plagues American society works hard to continue the legacy of racial terror, enslavement, mass incarceration, intimidation, and segregation.
This is partly due to the apathy of many American citizens who continue to ignore the past and the present. America must wake up to our present-day political horror and accept that our past is responsible for this condition. Instead of burying this history, it needs to be taught.
Dr. Henry Louis Gates, director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard, recently wrote in the New York Times that Woodson was acutely aware of politics’ role in the classroom. Gates quoted Woodson on the pseudo-scholarship of the Lost Cause.
Woodson wrote: “Starting out after the Civil War, the opponents of freedom and social justice decided to work out a program which would enslave the Negroes’ mind inasmuch as the freedom of body had to be conceded. It was well understood that if by the teaching of history the white man could be further assured of his superiority and the Negro could be made to feel that he had always been a failure and that the subjection of his will to some other race is necessary the freedman, then, would still be a slave.”
With Gov. Ron DeSantis’s recent attacks on Black history in Florida and other states surely soon to follow, Freedom Schools are as necessary in 2023 as they were 60 years ago.
Perhaps the time has finally gotten here where each of us, as Americans, needs to acknowledge that American history has been a brutal and racist history. The truth is the treatment of Black Americans resulted in organized racial terror before and after the end of Reconstruction. How do we know?
The NAACP, The Equal Justice Initiative from Montgomery, Ala., and the Tuskegee University have documented nearly 4,400 racial terror lynchings against Black Americans, primarily in the Southern United States and Mid-West, from the end of Reconstruction in 1877 until 1950.
There are many more, still not yet fully documented. Two recorded racial terror lynchings occurred here in Pinellas County during the early part of the last century. Pinellas Remembers, which began as the Pinellas County Community Coalition, honored Parker Watson and erected a lynching memorial marker at the location where John Evans was lynched in St. Petersburg.
The freedom school opening in St. Pete will teach our youth and their parents an inclusive American history. The St. Petersburg branch of ASALH acknowledges the community support it has received for the soon-to-be-open repository of learning.
Attorney Jacqueline Hubbard graduated from the Boston University Law School. She is currently the president of the St. Petersburg Branch of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, Inc.
