Selects: What were the Freedom Schools?

SPEAKER_07: With no fees or minimums, banking with Capital One is the easiest decision in the history of decisions. Even easier than deciding to listen to another episode of your favorite podcast. And with no overdraft fees, is it even a decision? That's banking reimagined. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. See CapitalOne.com slash bank. Capital One N-A. Member FDIC. With the new Dexcom G7, you can achieve better diabetes results without painful finger sticks. And send your glucose numbers to your compatible phone or watch so you can always see where you are and where you're heading. See how food and exercise affects your glucose, making it easier to spend more time in range and lower your A1c. Take more control of your diabetes with the number one recommended CGM brand. It's easy to get started today at Dexcom.com. Dexcom.com. SPEAKER_05: Dexcom data on file 2023. If your glucose alerts and readings from the G7 do not match symptoms or expectations, use a blood glucose meter to make diabetes treatment decisions. For a list of compatible devices, visit Dexcom.com slash compatibility. SPEAKER_06: Hey, everybody. Happy Saturday. I hope you have your cereal in your bowl and you've watched some Saturday morning cartoons and you are in your comfiest chair. Because the select that I'm picking for you is a great history episode from October 2019. What were the freedom schools? It's a great story that needed to be told by us. And so we did so. So I hope you hope you enjoy it. We love our episodes on the civil rights era. And this is a real good one. So check it out now. What were the freedom schools? SPEAKER_09: Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio. SPEAKER_07: 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. SPEAKER_06: We would be the best singing duo ever if that's how it worked. Yeah. I would just go big and you would just Lou read it. SPEAKER_07: Yeah, exactly. Is that what I'm doing? Is Lou reading? Yeah, I don't even know my own heritage. Sort of speak singing. Okay. You know? Yeah. That's what Lou Reed did. Yeah. SPEAKER_07: Maybe go to the refrigerator, baby. Yeah, remember that great song? SPEAKER_06: Yeah, about the fridge, right? Give me one of those frozen snicker bars. SPEAKER_07: 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, SPEAKER_06: 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. SPEAKER_07: I knew nothing about her except Nico sat in with the Velvet Underground for a while. And then my amazing vocal talents. That was good. SPEAKER_07: That's what clued me to the idea that she was a German. SPEAKER_06: There's a movie about her later years that I want to see that came out this year or something. SPEAKER_07: I think it's called Taken. Liam Neeson played it. 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? SPEAKER_06: 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, probably the most dangerous place in the country. SPEAKER_07: Yeah. During the most dangerous point in the civil rights movement. That's where this story takes place. SPEAKER_06: 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 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 like curriculum class titles feature that word. And so just letting everyone know that that's coming. Right. And we're not going to say, we're just going to read their curriculums and their quotes as it existed back then. Yeah, I think this this heads up. SPEAKER_07: Yeah, we're just kind of sticking to the vernacular of the times. Right. Being used in context. Yes, within reason of course. Sure. So this takes place in the summer of 1964, but I want to go back a little further than that to 1954. With the groundbreaking, sea-changing Brown versus Board of Education ruling, where the Supreme Court said, you know that 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 in a 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. Yeah. That was just the state average. Right. In some towns it was way worse. SPEAKER_06: SPEAKER_06: You're talking about budgets, spending budgets. Yeah. SPEAKER_07: In Tunica, they spent $172.80 per white pupil on average in 1962. That's per year? That was in that year. For school year. Yeah. 172.80. They spent $5.99 per black pupil. 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 were you got a terrible education by comparison. White kids schools usually ran for about six months out of the year. Yeah. 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. SPEAKER_06: And you know 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 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. SPEAKER_07: 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. Right. And that they were far worse off after the war of Northern Aggression freed them. Yeah. And that they weren't interested in politics, they weren't really self-starters and they needed white people to guide them. That's right. 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. Yeah. Things haven't changed at all. We're being kept down by Jim Crow era 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 sheriff's redneck brother. Oh yeah. Like you could get yourself killed just by going to vote, register to vote. Yeah. SPEAKER_06: And if the police were not inciting or committing the violence themselves, they certainly would turn a blind eye. Yeah. To anything that was going on. Exactly. And not do police work. SPEAKER_07: 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. SPEAKER_06: Yeah. And the Freedom Summer, and by the way, big shout out to Dave Roos. 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. Yeah. 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. SPEAKER_07: 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 we'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. Sure. 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 harm's way and force a showdown between these two entities. Yeah, and 1964 is key. SPEAKER_06: 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 Dixiecrats. Right. The southern Democrats who were still very much segregationist. In Mississippi, for the Democratic convention, their delegation, the Mississippi delegation was all white. SPEAKER_07: Yeah, and that was another big, big goal was to create a separate black delegation for that national convention. SPEAKER_06: Right. So to get this, to force the showdown between local authorities and federal authorities, SPEAKER_07: the civil rights activists like Robert Moses working in Mississippi had zero illusions that the federal government was going to 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 harm's way too. Yeah, kids meaning, you know, college students. SPEAKER_06: 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. SPEAKER_07: 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. SPEAKER_06: But as far as getting the federal authorities to pay attention, that first descriptor is the most important one, white. SPEAKER_07: Yes. Because again, they knew in Mississippi, no federal authorities were going to 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 Dixiecrats happy. Right. 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. SPEAKER_06: Yeah, and they knew that in order to really affect change, like you said, they were going to 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. Right. 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. Yeah. 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. SPEAKER_07: These Freedom Schools were meant to do the exact opposite, to teach them their self-worth, but also to say like, 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 School. Yeah, and like 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. SPEAKER_06: Absolutely. SPEAKER_07: And it's still going on now as we'll see, like 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. Yeah. That's sad. SPEAKER_06: All right. That's a great preamble. Should we take a break? All right, we are going to take a break and we're going to come back and really dig into the mission of the Freedom Schools right after this. SPEAKER_03: I'm Lauren Brett Pacheco, host of Symptomatic, a medical mystery podcast, a production of Ruby's Studio from iHeartMedia. Every other week, we're talking about the Freedom Schools. We're talking about the Freedom Schools. We're talking about the Freedom Schools. We're talking about the Freedom Schools. We're talking about the Freedom Schools. We're talking about the Freedom Schools. SPEAKER_08: We're talking about the Freedom Schools. We're talking about the Freedom Schools. We're talking about the Freedom Schools. We're talking about the Freedom Schools. You may have heard of me live inaudible. I live in media. Every other week got to know the everyday people living with a mysterious illness and hear first-hand stories of struggle and perseverance on their quest for answers. SPEAKER_00: During day, I feel I'm getting sick. I have that flu feeling and the next morning, I'd be fine. that fluish feeling, and then the next morning I'd be fine. SPEAKER_01: Then he started getting nodules on his body. He had been to so many different doctors, and I just felt like they were just throwing a dart at what this could be and trying different medications. SPEAKER_04: You couldn't imagine that anyone could be alive and have a mutation in that gene. SPEAKER_08: Listen to Symptomatic, a medical mystery podcast on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. SPEAKER_07: Apple Card is the credit card created by Apple. You earn 3% daily cash back upfront when you use it to buy a new iPhone 15, AirPods, or any products at Apple. And you can automatically grow your daily cash at 4.15% annual percentage yield when you open a high-yield savings account. Apply for Apple Card in the Wallet app on iPhone. Apple Card subject to credit approval. Savings is available to Apple Card owners SPEAKER_02: subject to eligible credit. Apple Card owners subject to eligibility. Savings accounts by Goldman Sachs Bank USA. Member FDIC. Terms apply. SPEAKER_06: ["The geography of American University in And then form the basis for statewide student action, like here's how you can boycott something. Here's how you can raise awareness. Like teach them how to be grassroots activists. SPEAKER_07: 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. SPEAKER_06: That's right. So it all starts with volunteers. 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 someplace, 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. Endanger your life and help teach these kids. SPEAKER_07: Yeah. And I think something like a thousand, I saw 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. SPEAKER_06: About 380 of them ended up being teachers out of about 700 or so who volunteered for the Freedom Summer. SPEAKER_07: Yeah. And 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. 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. SPEAKER_06: Yeah. It also said they would live basically in the homes of local black families. I wonder if they paid them rent. SPEAKER_07: 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. 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. SPEAKER_06: Yeah. And 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. 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. And there were three gentlemen, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, two white men, and another colleague, James Chaney, a young black man that worked with CORE. They went missing in Longdale, Mississippi, and were basically taken and murdered. So this is before, a few months before the Freedom Schools were to launch. And you're going down there knowing that these men disappeared under mysterious circumstances. SPEAKER_07: 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. SPEAKER_06: And some people did back out and were like, I can't take this risk. It seems like most of them pressed on. SPEAKER_07: Right. Yeah, absolutely. And 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 these, the civil rights activists in Mississippi needed these white northern volunteers to come down because James Chaney, he was a local Mississippi activist. He was a black guy. And Schwerner, Michael Schwerner and Goodman. Both of them were white. And because they went missing along with Chaney, 150 FBI agents and 200 sailors from the local naval station showed up to search for these guys. And Michael Schwerner's widow said, this never would have happened if my husband had been a black man. That all of this was happening because he was white. SPEAKER_06: I do want to, this is rife with a lot of quotes that a lot of them we're 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 set you down in an auditorium and say this. You'll arrive in Ruleville, which is a place. It is. Ruleville. 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. SPEAKER_07: It was 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. SPEAKER_06: 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. SPEAKER_07: They did. They didn't as much as 2,500, but at least 2,000 students were enrolled in Freedom Schools in Mississippi this summer. Yeah. SPEAKER_06: And they doubled the number of schools plus one to 41. To 41. SPEAKER_07: 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 was 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 Futorian. And she said... SPEAKER_06: And you were probably like, are you from outer space? Right. SPEAKER_07: 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 Zinn was so prescient. 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. SPEAKER_06: And someone might say, like he said in the quote, like, hey, use my church basement. But then when the KKK found out, they may burn a cross in that churchyard. And then that preacher has to say, I'm sorry, I can't take the risk. SPEAKER_07: So you know, Schwerner and Chaney and Goodman, 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. SPEAKER_06: Yeah. So message sent loud and clear. Yeah. So school was outside, which is every kid's favorite thing. SPEAKER_07: 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 any, it was like after hours. But the next day, the school met in the like yard next to this burned down building that they'd 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 SPEAKER_07: to be learning this stuff. SPEAKER_06: 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. SPEAKER_07: No. To go on the offensive. SPEAKER_06: Sure. I just got mixed up in my head. Yeah. You got it. 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. SPEAKER_07: They're going to tear it up, but we're going to get it down at least. SPEAKER_06: And the final one had sections for, like I said, reading, writing, arithmetic, the three R's and 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. SPEAKER_07: Yeah. Like I'm sure parents told them stories and stuff. SPEAKER_06: But as far as going to school, they had never encountered anything like this before. SPEAKER_07: I mean, depending on the age of their parents to their parents might have never heard anything like that before either. 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 when you sent me right. Yeah. SPEAKER_07: But go read it. It's called Unit 4 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. Yeah. 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 11th and 12th graders back in the 60s. And it still rings 100 percent true today. SPEAKER_06: 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. SPEAKER_06: And 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. Right. Or things that you see that these white people have. Right. Which I'm sure was, you know, you covet things. That's what people do. So I'm sure that was a natural inclination. Like, I want the stuff that they have. But it's so important to say like that the stuff isn't what matters. Well, not only just stuff in general, but there's they kind of walk the students through SPEAKER_07: 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? And the purpose of this curriculum wasn't to teach black kids to hate white kids. No. As a matter of fact, it actually teaches them to understand white people more. Yeah. 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 just it's saying, like, don't hate white people. They're they're being duped by this, too. Right. But they're they're patsies in this power structure, too. They just happen to not be the the group that's being stepped on. Right. You know, but they're still being used and abused. SPEAKER_06: Yeah. Schoolchildren in particular for context. And well, 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, you know, 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. Right. 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. SPEAKER_07: 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? Yeah. What are you guys going to feel good about yourselves for knowing that you came 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 a lot of cases. Sounds like a good model for schools, period. SPEAKER_06: Yeah. It sounds like one of those like Waldorf schools or a Montessori school or SPEAKER_07: something like that. It sounds very much like one of those child led. Yeah. Yeah. But I mean, that was that was the point was to not to drill them with what the adults thought they should learn, but to to raise up their self-worth and self-esteem and whatever that took is what they taught them. SPEAKER_06: 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 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 SPEAKER_07: qualified as alternative newspapers. 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. Can you believe 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 had their own newspapers. And in some communities, that's 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. SPEAKER_06: 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 see little kids doing for fun. SPEAKER_06: And I remember doing for fun. So it doesn't surprise me that like that the newspaper was every school had their own and it seems like they were really, really into it. SPEAKER_07: I could see your little family newspaper like, extra, extra, mom puts too much hot sauce on eggs this morning. They ruined. SPEAKER_06: 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 a 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. Yeah. 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. SPEAKER_07: Yeah, no, it's super cool. SPEAKER_06: 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. Right. And there were music groups. The great, great folk singer and activist Pete Seeger went down there, of course, and toured the freedom schools. Yeah. It was like, here's how you play a G chord and sing about like things that matter. Pretty great. SPEAKER_07: Why don't you go on over to the fridge? Give me a frozen snicker bar. No, no, no. I don't even like frozen snickers. That's the big reveal at the end of the song. But you know Lou Reed does. SPEAKER_06: Sure. Or did. Yeah. RIP. SPEAKER_07: 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. SPEAKER_03: University of Washington rowing team that competed for the gold at the Summer Olympics in Berlin. This inspirational true story follows a group of underdogs as they take on elite rivals from around the world. See the boys in the boat only in theaters this Christmas. Get tickets at boysintheboatmovie.com. SPEAKER_08: I'm Lauren Brett Pacheco, host of Symptomatic, a medical mystery podcast, a production of Ruby Studio from I Heart Media. Every other week, we get to know the everyday people living with a mysterious illness and hear their firsthand stories of struggle and perseverance on their quest for answers. SPEAKER_00: During the day, I'd feel like I'm just getting sick. I'd sort of have that fluish feeling. And then the next morning I'd be fine. SPEAKER_01: Then he started getting nodules on his body. He had been to so many different doctors and I just felt like they were just throwing a dart at what this could be and trying different medications. SPEAKER_04: You couldn't imagine that anyone could be alive and have a mutation in that gene. SPEAKER_08: Listen to Symptomatic, a medical mystery podcast on the I Heart Radio app or wherever you get your podcasts. SPEAKER_07: Hey, everybody, are you low on time? Well, then you can make the hours that you've got a whole lot happier with DashPass from DoorDash. You can sign up for DashPass today and use our code STUFF23 and you'll get 50% off up to a $10 value when you spend $12 or more after signing up for DashPass. SPEAKER_06: That's right. DashPass members get $0 delivery fees and get this up to 10% off eligible DoorDash orders. And that's going to include personal care items, drinks, groceries and much more. And get this. It's all for only $9.99 a month. SPEAKER_07: Yeah, members save more than $35 per month on average. It's pretty nuts. Plus, if you sign up for DashPass now, you'll get your first month free. Put a little joy back into your schedule. Sign up for DashPass today. Use code STUFF23 and get 50% off up to a $10 value when you spend $12 or more signing up for DashPass. Subject to change, terms apply. That's 50% off up to a $10 value when you spend $12 or more after signing up for DashPass. Use code STUFF23. Subject to change, terms apply. Sign up for more. Become a DashPass member today. 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. And 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 firebombed. 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. Yeah. It was a really violent, dangerous place to be doing what they were doing at the time. Yeah. SPEAKER_06: That was there was one town, McComb, Mississippi. There were more than a dozen bombings in two months, more than 12 bombings in a two month period. Twelve and a half. And there were they were called the bombing capital of the world at the time. Again, local police turning a blind eye. SPEAKER_07: I get the impression that like they actually qualified as the bombing capital of the world. Yeah. It wasn't just a thing written in a Freedom School paper. SPEAKER_06: Right. It wasn't like an offhanded comment. SPEAKER_07: Like they may have qualified as the bombing capital of the world. Yeah. It's crazy. SPEAKER_07: And even if there wasn't like direct violence, there was indirect violence, SPEAKER_06: intimidation, intimidation. SPEAKER_07: People would probably drive by and say the worst things. Right. Exactly. So it was not a it was a struggle. To just make it through the summer. Yeah. 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 Dixiecrats in Mississippi, seated at the Democratic National Convention. And they they attempted to do that and actually got a meeting at the Credentials Committee of the DNC. But were ultimately turned down. SPEAKER_06: 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. SPEAKER_07: Wow. That's a country song in motion right there. SPEAKER_06: For sure. That was a place where they stopped us and the drug dogs got on. SPEAKER_07: Oh, gotcha. In Meridian, huh? SPEAKER_06: Yeah. And I was like, oh, interesting. I never thought about Greyhound buses is probably a great way to transport drugs. Sure. But probably not. SPEAKER_07: Hey, speaking of country music, have you seen that Ken Burns documentary? Not yet. I've heard it's great. SPEAKER_06: Oh, my. Is it good? SPEAKER_07: I'm into country music now. SPEAKER_06: 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 around. SPEAKER_06: Yeah, I'm looking forward to seeing that. It's good. So they wrote these 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. SPEAKER_07: Right. And it wasn't 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 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 the 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. Could get you expelled and actually did get some kids expelled. But they 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. SPEAKER_06: Yeah. Twenty five 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 twenty five of these graduates of the freedom schools did so. SPEAKER_07: Yeah. So it was a big deal. I mean they managed to create the next generation of activist 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 how to how to struggle for themselves how to fight for themselves or stand up for themselves you don't have to wait around for a Martin a once in a handful of generations person like Martin Luther King right junior to come along and lead the way. Right. The people can lead the way themselves. 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. SPEAKER_06: 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 Jr. 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. SPEAKER_07: Did you see her testimony? Yeah. She was brave as they come. She was as brave as they come. SPEAKER_06: Brave and pissed. SPEAKER_06: 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 had today is the nine month anniversary of the assassination of JFK. Yeah. 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. SPEAKER_07: 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. And so 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 it was a threat to the to the Democrats was because if you got rid of the Dixiecrats if you forced integration on the south. Yeah. 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 Dixiecrats. 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. Still 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. No it's 100 percent true. But but I mean OK let me put it this way. Atlanta is as blue as blue gets. The majority. But how many Atlantans are there in the south. SPEAKER_06: No that's what I'm saying. You know like anywhere else the urban centers. Sure. Are where the blues are. SPEAKER_07: But I mean like the north the northern and southern suburbs they're all red. Yeah. I mean Atlanta is 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 this time. SPEAKER_06: Still. Yeah. Yeah. So some of these students ended up to go on and do great 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 Carthan. He was the first black mayor in the Mississippi Delta. Very very big deal. He was elected mayor at the age of 28. SPEAKER_07: Which I mean back then though 28 was like 50 today. Really. Sure. You know aging has really regressed since since then. SPEAKER_06: And we talked earlier about the fact that these 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. Kindergartens 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. SPEAKER_07: Yeah it's pretty great. SPEAKER_06: But they still honor their African heritage because the school day begins with a Harambee traditional African welcoming celebration with songs and chants. SPEAKER_07: 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. SPEAKER_06: You're ditching your Lou Reedness. SPEAKER_07: 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 SPEAKER_06: trying to explain our confusion on due process. Oh is this the guy is like OK good. SPEAKER_06: Which which one was that in that was in. It was in paraphilias. SPEAKER_07: Paraphilias. 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. SPEAKER_06: And this is from Keith from Philadelphia. Not a con law professor guys just a law student. But I thought I could help clear this up in the Lawrence v Texas due process point. Due process is essentially broken up into two prongs procedural procedural. SPEAKER_07: Little three year old procedural and substantive. SPEAKER_06: 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 and Lawrence 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. I mean that is as clear as Bell. As clear as Bell. SPEAKER_07: Future future law professor. SPEAKER_06: I'm losing it here. Thank you Keith from Philly. SPEAKER_07: Thank you Keith. That was a I mean I emailed him immediately was like a lot of people have written in thanks to everybody wrote in and gave it a shot. But I emailed him back and was like Keith this is the first one I've fully gotten. SPEAKER_06: Yeah Keith and I think if you stroll on over to your refrigerator you will find a frozen Snicker bar waiting on you. Yeah. Because we snuck into your home in the middle of the night. Or as Chuck would say a frozen one. SPEAKER_07: If you want to get in touch just 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. SPEAKER_09: For more podcasts My Heart Radio visit the I Heart Radio app. Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. SPEAKER_07: Amazon wants to help you share joy this holiday season. And as we all know the holidays are all about these joyful moments. That's right. SPEAKER_06: I remember when my family drove up to Helen Georgia when I was a kid and bought one of those very first Cabbage Patch Kids for my sister. This was way ahead of the nationwide craze. This may have been one of the first hundred or so of these dolls that were ever made actually. And of course it was a huge hit. She still has it all these many years later to this day. And you know what? I hope one day the gods will smile on me and I can find something like that for a loved one before it breaks out. It's these types of moments that Amazon helps create during the holidays. SPEAKER_07: However you share joy make it happen with Amazon. At Brilliant Earth their mission is to cultivate a more transparent, sustainable, compassionate and inclusive jewelry industry. They believe in creating jewelry you can feel good about wearing without ever compromising quality and conscience. And for the holidays give joy. It feels good to buy from a brand that cares about sustainability and how they're making their product. There's something to be said about feeling good in the jewelry you're wearing. Like how 98% of their gold and 97% of their silver is from recycled sources. So give the gift a sparkle. Start your holiday shopping at BrilliantEarth.com. SPEAKER_06: subject to availability and other restrictions.