HISTORY IS NOT ENOUGH

It Is Time to Bring Back Freedom Schools

Janice Graham↔

We have spent decades insisting that our children learn their history. We were right. But knowing the history of Black struggle is not the same as knowing how to continue it.

Our children must understand more than what their ancestors endured and accomplished. They must understand how those ancestors organized, challenged institutions, built economic resources, confronted public officials, demanded accountability, and exercised the rights of citizenship that had been denied them.

We have a model for this. We once called them Freedom Schools.

During the Civil Rights Movement, the Mississippi Freedom Schools and the Citizenship Schools associated with Septima Clark, Esau Jenkins and the Highlander tradition taught far more than reading, writing and Black history. They cultivated critical thinking, political consciousness, community leadership and the practical skills of organizing. The Mississippi Freedom Schools of 1964 encouraged young people to examine the conditions of their lives and consider how those conditions might be changed. Citizenship Schools helped adults acquire the literacy and civic knowledge necessary to exercise rights long denied them.

These were not simply educational programs. They were instruments of community empowerment. It is time to reclaim and expand that tradition.

I am proposing the establishment of the Ida B. Wells–Frederick Douglass–W.E.B. Du Bois Freedom Schools, a community-based youth service movement for political literacy, civic education,  financial education, civic responsibility, organizing and public service, grounded in Black cultural and historical consciousness.

Our churches, Black Greek-letter organizations, Boys & Girls Clubs, recreation centers, neighborhood associations, professional organizations and community institutions already possess much of the infrastructure needed to begin. They have buildings, meeting rooms, professional expertise, community relationships, and generations of experience. What is needed is the collective commitment to make the political and civic education of our young people an organized, sustained community responsibility.

The Freedom Schools need not wait for new buildings or another national bureaucracy. They can operate as Saturday academies, after-school programs, summer learning institutes, and dedicated civic education components within existing summer camps. Public schools, community centers, and youth-serving organizations can become partners in a coordinated network of local Freedom Schools.

And these cannot become another place where adults deliver speeches while children sit quietly listening.

They must become laboratories of citizenship.

Let our teenagers attend city council, county commission, and school board meetings. Let them learn to read public budgets, examine legislation, research community problems, prepare petitions and present their findings to elected officials and fellow residents. Let them organize neighborhood service projects, conduct community surveys, develop proposals and learn how to build coalitions.

Teach them financial literacy alongside political literacy. Banking, credit, debt, taxes, household budgets, entrepreneurship, public finance and the economic consequences of public policy belong in the same educational conversation. Young people should understand both how to manage their own resources and how the public collects, distributes, and spends resources.

Teach them to distinguish political performance from governing authority, representation from actual decision-making power, and public promises from measurable outcomes.

The Freedom Schools must also restore the traditions of debate, public speaking, oratory, and reasoned argument to our young people’s education. They should learn to research an issue, construct an argument, defend a position with evidence, listen critically, challenge an opposing argument, and speak persuasively before an audience.

These are not merely academic exercises. They are essential skills of leadership, citizenship and public accountability.

Every Freedom School should offer structured debate and public speaking instruction, with opportunities for local, regional and eventually national competitions. Imagine teenagers debating municipal spending priorities, housing policy, educational equity, public transportation and environmental conditions. Imagine them preparing testimony before school boards and city councils, conducting public forums, moderating community discussions and defending proposals they have researched and developed themselves.

The great Black traditions of oratory and debate belong to this inheritance. Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, W.E.B. Du Bois and generations of Black preachers, educators, organizers and public intellectuals demonstrated that the spoken word, grounded in knowledge and conviction, could challenge entrenched power and mobilize communities.

We should be preparing another generation capable of speaking with intellectual discipline, historical consciousness and moral clarity.

And every participating student should complete a community action project. Not a hypothetical classroom exercise, but meaningful work addressing an actual concern in the community where that young person lives, worships, learns or plays.

An annual Freedom Schools Youth Civic Congress could bring these young people together to debate public issues, deliver original speeches, present their community projects and demonstrate what they have learned about the responsibilities of citizenship. Their work should be evaluated not merely for eloquence, but for the quality of their research, the strength of their reasoning, their ability to listen and their capacity to work with others.

We should not have to wait until our children reach college to introduce them to political organizing, public service or the obligations of citizenship. Nor should we assume that a high school civics course, however well taught, can substitute for direct participation in community life.

The history of Black liberation is also a history of institution-building. Our people created schools, mutual-aid societies, newspapers, churches, businesses and organizations because they understood that freedom required knowledge, resources, discipline and collective effort.

We must teach that history. Then we must teach its application.

The next generation should not inherit only the stories of the struggle. They should inherit the skills, the institutions and the confidence to carry forward the unfinished work of freedom and justice. They must also have the freedom to question, disagree, examine evidence and develop their own informed political judgments. That independence is part of the citizenship we seek to cultivate.

Cultural knowledge tells us who we are. Historical knowledge tells us how we got here. Political literacy teaches us how power works. Civic engagement teaches us how to exercise our agency within it.

We have the buildings. We have the history. We have the expertise. We have the children. What we need is the collective will to bring the Freedom Schools back to life.

Not as monuments to what our ancestors accomplished, but as living institutions preparing young people to understand their citizenship, exercise their rights, fulfill their responsibilities, and shape the communities they will inherit.

We are not simply proposing that our children learn about freedom. We are proposing that they learn how to exercise it.

THE CONVERSATION IS THE WORK. BUT THE WORK MUST ALSO LEAVE THE ROOM.

— Janice Graham

JANICE OFF THE MIC
OUR COMMON GROUND with Janice Graham