Freedom School Data

In 1964, the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO), a group of civil rights organizations working together in Mississippi, embarked upon their largest project to date: Freedom Summer. COFO envisioned the summer as an opportunity to bring attention to the unceasing violence that white Mississippi officials continued to inflict upon civil rights organizers. Freedom Summer brought hundreds of mostly white volunteers, many of whom were college-aged, into the state to help carry out civil rights organizing and to gain publicity for the movement.

One of the major projects for volunteers was known as Freedom Schools. Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) members designed the curriculum in the winter and spring of 1964, basing it on the lives of the Black Mississippians with whom they worked.

Many of the students who enrolled in Freedom Schools and the volunteers who helped run them cited the schools as a life-changing experience that led them to long-term involvement with the civil rights movement.