The Last Word: Saving our Own Communty Part II
The Freedom School Movement
By Adrian A. Council
We are grateful to the many readers who responded to the editorial, “From the Publisher’s Desk,” themed “Saving Our Own Community” in the June issue of The Positive Community (see thepositivecommunity.com). Your remarks, analysis and critiques are encouraging. Let us continue to seek positive solutions to the African American culture crisis through dialogue and the sharing of ideas.
One such idea is the Freedom School developed in 1993 by Marian Wright Edelman’s Children’s Defense Fund (CDF). Freedom Schools were developed in Mississippi in 1964 at the height of the Civil Right Movement for the purpose of encouraging young Mississippians to think about how they could change the society in which they lived. CDF’s Freedom School curriculum is culturally grounded and seeks total involvement of child, parents and community. A summer program, it is designed to augment the educational challenges of a rapidly expanding society by stimulating a quest for knowledge and wisdom among our young people through social, cultural, and historical awareness.
In coming issues we will focus on the burgeoning Freedom School Movement with articles by the Rev. Dr. Franklyn Richardson, pastor of Grace Baptist Church, Mt. Vernon, NY, among others. Through his leadership the Grace congregation began one of the area’s first Freedom Schools four years ago. Bethany Baptist Church in Newark NJ where the Rev. Dr. M. William Howard is pastor, launched their Freedom School program this year.
Surely, the way to combat relentless bombardment and exploitation of negative images in corporate media and self esteem issues facing Black people today is to shine light on the Truth, Beauty and Goodness of a loving and gifted race. Freedom Schools provide this opportunity.
Our faith affirms that progress is an inherent quality of the universe. Ultimately truth will overcome error, good will defeat evil; and the positive will ever outshine the shadows of the negative…“The Most High rules the kingdom of men.”
Speaking in Clarksdale, MS on March 19, 1968, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. uttered these prophetic marching orders to the African American people:
Every day we are going to have freedom schools…[and] black cultural events going, because they’ve [white people] made us feel that we haven’t done anything for the history and the culture of the world…We’re going to let our young people know that Shakespeare, Euripides, and Aristophanes are not the only poets that have lived in history. We’re going to let our children know that the only philosophers that lived were not Plato and Aristotle, but W.E.B. Du Bois and Alain Locke came through the universe. James H. Cone, Martin & Malcolm & American (Orbis Books 1991), p.230
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