Shaw Freedom Schools

The leadership is there. If you go out and work with your people, then the leadership will emerge.

We don’t know who they are now; we don’t need to know. But the leadership will emerge.

Bob Moses, SNCC Civil Rights Organizer

Please scroll down to read more on the 2005 Freedom School

SAVE THE DATE!!

The 2006 Shaw Freedom School will take place on Saturday, June 10. It will be all day event with skills building and consciousness raising workshops, community dialogue, and special speakers.

2006 Sponsors

Department of Housing & Community Development (DHCD)

National Cooperative Bank Development Corporation (NCBDC)

About the 2006 Shaw Freedom School...

JOIN US!!! As we explore our human rights in the District of Columbia and how to create laws that protect them!!

Workshops offered will include:

This Land is Our Land: Our Right to Community
Working for a Living: Our Right to Employment
Fighting to Learn: Our Right to Education
You Can't Take My Home: Our Right to Housing
Community Benefits Agreements: Ensuring Our Neighborhood's Future
Organizing Our Community Across Language and Race

There will also be a performance of Quique Aviles' and Michelle Bank's poignant piece 24 Hours.

24 Hours combines story telling, monologues, and poetry to look at 24 hours in the life of DC. Written and performed by Quique Aviles and Michelle Banks, 24 Hours provides a glimpse into the other DC - the one the tourists don't see. The scenes are based on the daily realities of neighborhood and community life. In the piece, common, everyday city folk come to life with a sense of truth and dignity.

24 Hours was originally created for the 2000 Smithsonian Folklife Festival and performed at the National Mall as part of the Washington DC section of the festival. Quique Aviles and Michelle Banks founded the LatiNegro Theatre Collective in 1985, after graduating from the Duke Ellington School of the Arts. For almost 10 years, LatiNegro used theater to a tool for addressing social issues affecting young people in DC and brought its work to DC area schools, jails, youth programs, and community centers.

This is the city

This is the place

This is the garden

Full of kids, mothers, birds

Harvesting days of joy and anguish

Picking squash, collard greens

This is where we dance, cry, ponder

Bury our dead...

-Excerpt from 24 Hours

Freedom School Schedule & Details

Saturday, June 10, 2006

10:00 AM to 4:00 PM Freedom School

4:00 PM "24 Hours" Performance

5:30 PM Community Dinner Celebration

Immaculate Conception School

711 N Street NW (near the corner of 7th & N St NW)

Mt Vernon Square metro

Across from the Convention Center

*Breakfast, lunch and a celebration dinner will be served!

*Childcare will be available throughout the day.

*There will be simultaneous translation in Spanish, Cantonese and English.

Click here for a flier in English

Click here for a flier in Spanish

Click here for a flier in Cantonese

What is a Freedom School?

Photo: “Freedom Schools students discuss,” by Herbert Randall, 1964

In the summer of 1964, during the Southern Civil Rights Movement, forty-one Freedom Schools were opened in Mississippi. These schools were part of Freedom Summer, a project of SNCC, CORE, SCLC, and the NAACP. The goal of the Freedom Schools was to empower African American youth in Mississippi to become agents of social justice and critical democracy.

The Freedom Schools were based on the task of helping release young students from the passivity that schools and society had fostered in them, and in turn, providing them with the skills and experiences that would encourage them to build leadership for a movement designed to change Mississippi. Using question-posing techniques (the same techniques as Popular Education and popular theater), the Freedom Schools were a progressive and radical education project. For example, discussion and critical thinking triggers included:

What does the majority culture have that we want?
What does the majority culture have that we don't want?
What do we have that we want to keep?

Such questions helped move teaching and learning to the larger realm of social, economic and cultural oppression rather than only the achievement of the vote.

The Southern Civil Rights Movement also launched the Citizenship Schools (crafted by Highlander) for adults seeking to register to vote. Designed to teach basic literacy skills and to help build conviction around human rights, these schools provided a safe action space for adults to learn, share stories, discuss issues, prepare to vote, and become agents of change in their own communities.

Both schools shared the same principles—to teach confidence, voter literacy and political organization skills as well as academic skills. In Mississippi, the curriculum of both schools was directly linked to the formation of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, recognizing that the schools marked the beginning of an extended period of social learning and capacity building, rather than as a decisive test of citizen participation.

Bernice Robinson teaching in an early

Citizenship School; Sea Islands, SC

Both the Freedom and Citizenship Schools were deeply inspired by the ideals of participatory democracy that laid the foundation for the social movements of the 1950s and 1960s. The life experiences and world view of the students were reinforced through the curriculum and served as the basis for developing knowledge and capacity. “The overall theme of the school,” Charlie Cobb (SNCC organizer) wrote, “would be the student as a force for social change in Mississippi.” The Freedom Schools’ major contribution was to implement a curriculum based on the asking of questions whose answers were sought within the lives of the students.

For more information on the Freedom Schools, Citizenship Schools or SNCC visit:

http://www.educationanddemocracy.org/ED_FSC.html

http://www.ibiblio.org/sncc/index.html

http://www.ncsu.edu/chass/mds/ellahome.html

http://www.highlandercenter.org/a-history2.asp

Why a Freedom School in DC?

Though many things are different between the Deep South in the 1960's and Washington, DC today, the need for lower-income people of color to become a force for social change is ever-present. Serious changes are taking place in the political, social, and economic climate of the District. Very few of these changes directly benefiting long-time, lower-income residents—many of them actually undermine residents' ability to access their basic human rights to security, community, and a sustainable life for themselves and their families.

As importantly, our residents who are so affected by these changes almost never have a seat at the decision-making table. Once again, there is a strong need for capacity and skills building so that everyday people can create and implement a vision for change.

2005 Shaw Freedom School: Where Will you be in 2007?

Over 100 Shaw and local residents and activists—African American, Latino, Chinese, and Caucasian—attended the day-long Freedom School on June 11 and participated in workshops, discussions, a gentrification tour, and in supporting ONE DC's (formerly Manna CDC) new Performance Challenge.

The Freedom School also hosted the first full presentation in Shaw of 'Capers: A Solo Play About Forced Relocation and the Human Right to Housing, by Anu Yadav. This is an award winning play which chronicles the experiences of residents of Arthur Capper/Carrolsburg as their homes are slated for redevelopment.

We wish to thank the following supporters who partnered with us or helped us put this vision to work...