Origins
Despite the Supreme Court's ruling in the Brown case striking down segregated school systems, in the mid-1960s Mississippi still maintained separate and unequal white and "colored" school systems. On average, the state spent $81.66 to educate a white student compared to only $21.77 for a black child. Mississippi was one of only two states in the union that did not have a mandatory education law and many children in rural areas were sent to work in the fields and received little education at all. Even the curriculum was different for white and black. As a typical example, the white school board of Bolivar County mandated that "Neither foreign languages nor civics shall be taught in Negro schools. Nor shall American history from 1860 to 1875 be taught."
In late 1963, Charles Cobb, a Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) activist, proposed the organization sponsor a network of Freedom Schools. The concept of Freedom Schools had been utilized by educators and activists prior to the summer of 1964 in Boston, New York, and Prince Edward County, Virginia, where public schools were closed in reaction to the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision or, in the case of Boston, as acts of protest against discriminatory school conditions.
Read more about this topic: Freedom Schools
Famous quotes containing the word origins:
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—Katharine Hamnett (b. 1948)
“Grown onto every inch of plate, except
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“The settlement of America had its origins in the unsettlement of Europe. America came into existence when the European was already so distant from the ancient ideas and ways of his birthplace that the whole span of the Atlantic did not widen the gulf.”
—Lewis Mumford (1895–1990)