Freedom School Video by carmenkynard
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Image Source: https://nmaahc.si.edu/explore/stories/freedmens-bureau-new-beginnings-recently-freed |
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Welcome to the FREEDOM SCHOOL digital universe! 2024 marked the 70th year anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education. This website takes its inspiration from the enduring legacies and contemporary betrayals of Brown, a landmark moment in the history of race in the United States and global anti-blackness in its explicit reversal of Plessy v. Ferguson as a state-sanctioned Apartheid regime. It is worth stating that Brown set its sights on schooling for its radical targeting-- vs another institution--- as it was buoyed by longstanding Black innovations and commitments to democratic education. This makes Black education a fugitive praxis and rhetoric towards radical equality. The curriculum of this website includes (but is not limited to): Mississippi Freedom Summer/Freedom Schools; founding of HBCUs; African American literacy and emancipation; Black YAL and children’s literature; Black student protest; Black language studies; Black girl literacies; BlackBoyCrit pedagogy; culturally sustaining pedagogies; BlackCrit; histories of Black teachers/Black women teachers; Black feminist/queer pedagogies; segregation/ desegregation/ resegregation.
I draw heavily from the historical entry of rhetoric-composition (RC) studies going all the way back to Harvard in the 1800s as RC is the arm of the university that trained and employs me. 19th century Harvard invented “Freshmen English”--- the course-child of rhetoric-composition studies. The sole objective was to make sure that white male students at Harvard wrote, talked, and sounded like wealthy, white gentlemen. Anyone in RC knows this as fact because it was overt policy. Today “Freshman English” is still the main, required course in college curricula and the students who “test out of it” via white apparatuses like SATs, AP exams, expensive/private/segregated schooling are, in sum, stamped as the ones who already write, talk, and sound like wealthy, white men too. Not much has changed. Some of us, however, trace our lineage to a different, educational tradition where HBCUs, Black teachers, and legacies of African American literacies flipped it all in reverse, especially Black women educators like Anna Julia Cooper and Hallie Quinn Brown. Teaching from and with this legacy is the only reason some of us are here in the university; it is also the only reason why some of us stay. 1971 was the first year in the history of U.S. higher education where the number of Black students attending PWIs equaled the numbers of Black students attending HBCUs. Up until that point, white colleges refused to admit Black students. This moment in time was the birth of modern-day rhetoric-composition studies and the battle over what constitutes college literacy, especially the gateway course--- or “gatekeeper” course depending on how you get down. In the aftermath of 1960s Black Freedom Struggles, urban city-centers had universities that saw the first, large influx of Brown and Black college students who made those colleges face a real reckoning about the ways in which college learning/ writing/ literacy was a white assimilationist tool. While many codified white assimilationist pedagogies at this time, Black educators have always left us a different ancestral legacy for content and delivery style. Too many spaces still ignore these alternatives to white assimilationist pedagogies across the k-20 spectrum. Silence and erasure, however, never mean our absence. Welcome to Black Education! ~Dr. Carmen Kynard, Ph.D. | August 2025 How many do you recognize at left? Click on their images to learn more.
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