Freedom Schools... Freedom Then and Freedom Now! (September 24, 2025)

I. Opening

• Thank you to our wonderful first HYE panelists!
• Remember: No RR on the day you present (it will be counted as extra credit if you do)​

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II. Journal Writing Inspired by Alexis Pauline Gumbs’s UNDROWNED

• Time to Write: Reflect on an excerpt from Gumbs’s UNDROWNED 
• about beaked whales.  


• Listen to the read-aloud and/or follow along here. 

 

• Write whatever/wherever this excerpt takes you. You might ruminate: what are you refusing?  In your research? In your writing? In your life? As a graduate student? Where do you embrace your being “difficult”?  The “queerness of your forms of life”?

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Sign-Up Sheet for Hype Panel Presentations

Sample of Undergrad Slide Presentation

Sign-Up Sheet for Black YAL Book

List of YA Books for the Course

PDF of Public-Facing Learning Guide

Link to Course Policies & Processes

Image Source: https://www.civilrightsteaching.org/resource/exploring-freedom-schools

II. Review of Project #1-- The Book Exhibit

​This project asks you to explore Black Speculative YA Literature via a graphic display. The project is inspired by the massive exhibit halls of NCTE (National Council of Teachers of English) and ALA (American Library Association).  Every year, these large conferences display the newest YA and children’s books and feature dozens, maybe even hundreds, of YA authors and children’s book illustrators who meet audiences and lead keynote talks. Today, schools have banned/marked most BIPOC authors and so these book display events seem to be getting bigger and louder, especially after the pandemic had curbed so much travel and conference attendance.  Join in this loud and proud movement! All the Black youth characters and their authors who you are reading have been banned (or will be soon).  Black literacy, as we have explored this semester, has always been fugitive so the nation-state’s censoring stops nothing!

Image Source: https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=3575447032551674&set=a.917525578343846

Part A: "Mississippi Goddam"

1) Choose your song (options range from the SNCC Freedom Singers to John Coltrane) with no overlapping with colleagues
2) Find your designated slide on the "Playlist" (click here for link)-- be careful NOT to write on other folx's page
3) Start designing your slide-- any images must weblinked to their source
4) Discuss your song/artist/context (brief) and what you see/hear/feel as its connection to Freedom Summer/Freedom Schools 

"We Shall Not Be Moved" by SNCC Freedom Singers (1963)--- see here also

Mississippi Mass Meetings (1964)

"Mississippi Goddam" by Nina Simone (1964)

"Change Gon Come" by Sam Cooke (1964)

"We Shall Overcome" recorded by Mahalia Jackson (1964)

Live Performance by Sister Rosetta Tharpe (Releases "This Train" in 1964)

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"Traveling Shoes" by Rev. Cleophus Robinson & The Bethlehem Baptist Church Choir (1964)

Jimmie Lee Jackson's Alabama Mass Meeting (1965)

"Freedom Highway" by Staple Singers (1965)

"People Get Ready" by the Impressions (1965)

"A Love Supreme" by John Coltrane (1965)

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Part B: SNCC Role-Playing Exercises for the Freedom Schools

1) Look at the Exercise #3 "The Guest" and Exercise I "The Reporter." 
2) With a partner, talk through your answers....

Part C: "Material Things & Soul Things"

1) Journal on any block of questions presented on pages 2-4 of the "Material Things and Soul Things" section of this curriculum (part II, unit 6).
2) Reflect on these questions: what do you think of this curriculum?  Why/how are "Soul Things" so centered?  Why is "soul power" connected to but different from persuasion?

The prolific Black Studies theorist, Fred Moten, argues that fugitivity involves Black people’s refusal to accept unjust standards and oppression. He calls fugitivity a kind of desire and spirit that is always dreaming of escape and transgression even when not achievable. Fugitivity embraces living on the outer edges, plays with what is considered improper, and does not compromise with racist regimes by rendering them as inevitable. Fugitive success is not always about annihilation of anti-black regimes though; it is also about cleverly and joyfully thwarting them from moment to moment (click here for more).