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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. I hope you enjoy it. We love our episodes on the civil rights era, and this is a real good one. Check it out now. What were the Freedom Schools?

Welcome to.

Stuff You.

Should.

Know, a production.

Of iHeart Radio.

Hey.

And welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and there's Jerry over there. I don't know if I said it or not, but I'm Josh Clark, and this is Stuff You Should Know. I'm pretty excited about this one. Freedom. Freedom Schools.

We would be the best singing duo ever, if that's how it worked. I would just go big and you would just loo-read it.

Yeah, exactly. Is that what I'm doing? Is Lou Reed it? I don't even know my.

Own heritage. Sort of speak singing.

Okay.

You know?

Yeah.

That's what Lou Reed did. Yeah.

Maybe go to the refrigerator, baby.

Yeah, remember that great song? Get out about the fridge.

Right. Give me one of those frozen Snicker bars. 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, I am placing it in the freezer.

Yeah. 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. I knew nothing about her except Nico sat in with The Velved.

Underground for a while. And then my amazing vocal talents.

Yeah, that was good. That's what clued me to the idea that she was a German.

There's a movie about her later years that I want to see that came out this year or something.

I think it's called Taken, Liam Neeson played That's right. Chuck, we're talking about Freedom Schools, as we already said, and then we got silly. Now we're getting back to it, okay?

That's right, because this is not a silly topic. No. It has a COA at the beginning. Should we talk about that? Yeah, I think we should. This is about the Freedom Schools, which, as you will very soon find out, were in Mississippi during the civil rights movement.

I mean, in probably the most dangerous place in the country, during the most dangerous point in the civil rights movement. That's where this story.

Takes place. 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 used the word Negro, and it's obviously not a word that people use anymore, but some of the curriculum class titles feature that word. 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 heads up. We were just sticking to the vernacular of the times being used in context.

Yes, within reason, of course. Sure.

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, Do you know that that separate but equal thing that we said back in 1896 was constitutional. 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 or next year. They just said, I think something like in a deliberate and speedy manner or something like that. Mississippi said, Oh, well, you didn't tell us when we had to do it by.

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 school segregated and not only segregated. 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. That was just the state average. Sometimes it was way worse.

You're talking about budgets, spending budgets.

In Tunica, they spent $172.80 per white pupil on average in 1962.

Is per year?

It was in that year. Per school year? Yeah. $172.80. They spent $5.99 per black pupil. Wow. Yeah, and that's just how it was. You went to school in sharecropper schools or what they were called if you were a black kid and you got a terrible education by comparison. White kids schools usually ran for about six months out of the year. 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're expected to be out in the fields working and just knowing your place, basically.

Yeah. And 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 and 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 this is the only history yours does.

Not matter. Exactly. 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, and that they were far worse off after the war of Northern aggression freed them, 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. 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. Things haven't changed at all. We're being kept down by Jim Crow air laws, and we're going to agitate for change. In response to that, there was a lot of violence against that agitation for change. From the KK, from the state police, from local sheriffs, from the local sheriff's red-neck brother. You could get yourself killed just by going to register to vote.

Yeah, and if the police were not inciting or committing the violence themselves, they certainly would turn a blind eye to anything that was going on and not do.

Police work. 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, no, I'm sorry, he was with SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinator Committee in Mississippi. And he said, I've got an idea. We're going to call it Freedom Summer.

Yeah, and the Freedom Summer. And by the way, big shout out to Dave Ruez. 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. 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. 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, 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 enforce a showdown between these two entities.

Yeah, and 1964 is key. It wasn't just 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. This is basically like, let's get black folks registered to vote so they can go in there and unseat these Dixiecrats, these southern Democrats who were still very much segregationist.

In Mississippi, for the Democratic convention, their delegation, the Mississippi delegation was all white.

Yeah, and that was another big goal was to create a separate black delegation for that national convention. Right.

So to get this to force the showdown between local authorities and federal authorities, 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 college students. Kids to old folks like us.

Exactly.

Youngsters. But they weren't sending down 12-year-olds.

No, nothing like that. But 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.

But as far as getting the federal authorities to pay attention, that first descriptor is the most important one, white. Yes. Because again, they knew in Mississippi, no federal authorities were going to pay attention to that. 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 and maybe get some integration going or civil rights going. They've just been left hung out to dry by the federal authorities so many times that they were totally right in that assumption.

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. They need to do it on the ground, grassroot style. What they were really looking toward was the future. They knew that getting kids involved was the key. 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 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.

With a voice. 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. These freedom schools were meant to do the exact opposite to teach them their self-worth, but also to say, 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 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. Absolutely. It's still going on now. We'll see the Children's Defense Fund revived the Freedom Schools back in the '80s, and I think they still have them. It does still have a tinge of subversion, sadly, teaching black kids in America their self-worth.

Yeah.

That's sad.

All right, that's a great preamble. Should we take a break? 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. Learning things with Chalk and Chalk. Chalk. All the things. Stop. You. Should. Know.

In the new Amy and TJ podcast, Amy Robach and TJ Homes, a renowned broadcasting team with decades of experience delivering headline news and captivating viewers nationwide, are sharing their voices and perspectives in a way you've never heard before. They explore meaningful conversations about current events, pop culture, and everything in between. Nothing is off limits.

This was a scandal.

That wasn't.

And this was.

Not.

What you've been sold.

The Amy and TJ podcast is guaranteed to be informative, entertaining, and above all, authentic. It marks the first time Robach and Holmes speak publicly since their own names became a part of the headlines.

This is the.

First time that we actually.

Get to.

Say.

What.

Happened and where we are today.

Listen to the Amy and TJ podcast on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Mary Kay McBrare, host of the podcast The Greatest True Crime Stories Ever told. I write about true crime, which means I live inside the research wormhole, but I'm not necessarily interested in the headline grabbing elements, the blood and the gore, all of that. I'm more interested in the people behind these stories and what we can learn by looking at their experiences. You can meet me every week on The The Greatest True Crime Stories Ever told where I dig into crimes where a woman is not just a victim. She might be the detective, the lawyer, the witness, the coroner, the criminal, or some combination of these roles. I delve into the good, the bad, the difficult, and all the nuance I can find because these are the stories we need to know to understand the intersection of society, justice, and the fascinating workings of the human psyche. Listen to the greatest true crime stories ever told on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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Okay, so Freedom Schools, again launched and proposed by SNCC? Sncc. Sncc leader, Charlie Cobb, in December '63. And they had three... The original idea was let's get 11th to 12th because they're just on the cusp of being in the real world, arguably already were in the real world. You know what I'm saying? Sure. And they had three stated purposes that they wanted to accomplish: supplement, what they aren't learning in high school, simple enough. Number two, give them a broad intellectual and academic experience during the summertime to bring back to students in the classrooms, I guess, in the fall.

Then.

Form the basis for statewide student action like here's how you can boycott something. Here's how you can raise awareness. Right. Like teach them how to be grassroots activists.

And also one of the things that they wanted to teach them that we'll see is this is how things work. 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 part of it.

That's right. So it all starts with volunteers.

Right.

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.

Yeah, I think something like 1,000. I saw as much as 2,500. There are a bunch of people answered this call. Northern mostly white college students came down to Mississippi for this Freedom Summer, not just the Freedom Schools.

Yeah, I think 280 of them ended up being teachers out of about 700 or so who volunteered for the.

Freedom Summer. 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.

Yeah.

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.

Yeah, it also said they would live basically in the homes of local black families. I wonder if they paid them rent.

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, and 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.

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. But 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 busses in Selma in the Deep South. There were three gentlemen, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, two white men, and another colleague, James Cheney, a young black man that worked with Core, they went missing in Longdale, Mississippi, and were basically taken and murdered. This is a few months before the Freedom Schools were to launch, and you're going down there knowing that these men disappeared under mysterious circumstances.

I'm pretty sure it was a week before, basically, because it happened. 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 had gone missing and then were later found murdered.

Some people did back out and were like, I can't take this risk, but it seems like most of them pressed on.

Right. Yeah, absolutely. I think some people's resolve was doubled by that thing, too. But their disappearance and ultimately their deaths proved that idea that the civil rights activists in Mississippi needed these white Northern volunteers to come down because James Cheney, he was a local Mississippi activist. He was a black guy. Michael Schwarner.

And-.

Goodman. Goodman, both of them were white. Because they went missing along with Cheney, 150 FBI agents and 200, what are they, sailors from the local naval station- Jags. -showed up to search for these guys. Michael Schwarner's widow said, This never would have happened if my husband had been a black man. Yeah, for sure. But all this was happening because he was white.

I do... This is rife with a lot of quotes that a lot of them were not going to read, but I did want to read this one from Howard Zenn. This is the message at this orientation that you talked about at the Western College for Women in Oxford. You're showing up, you're like, I want to volunteer. I want to do the right thing. They sit you down in auditorium and say this, You'll arrive in Ruleville, which is a place, and it's 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 stuck.

Out to me, too. Howard's in mind? I thought so. The first day of school, there may be four teachers and three students. The local Negro minister will phone you to say you can't use his church basement after all because his life has been threatened. 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. It seems like that's really what happened.

It was very prescient. 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.

I think originally they were going to target, like I said, 11th and 12th graders, 20 schools, about 1,000 students. But when school day started, parents heard about this and brought everybody basically.

They did. Something like, I've seen as much as 2,500, but at least 2,000 students were enrolled in Freedom Schools in Mississippi this summer.

Yeah, and they doubled the number of schools plus one to 41.

To 41. I think Hattiesburg had six different schools. Meridian had a school with 200 students. That was the biggest one. They originally intended, like you said, 11th and 12th graders, maybe as young as middle schoolers, possibly. But really, that was it. It ended up being elementary school kids. I believe there was an 80-year-old enrolled at one of the Freedom Schools. It just became a sensation in Mississippi among the African-American community. There was a New York Times article. They sent a reporter down to cover this. The reporter was in Holly Springs. There was a school teacher from Chicago named Aviva Futorian.

She said- They were probably like, Are you from outer space?

Kind of sounds like it. The silver jumpsuit she was wearing didn't help. But she said that they were teaching under a sweetgum tree. This became like a... That was another reason why that Oxford quote from Howard's Inn is so pressing. A lot of times they didn't have any place to actually meet. They had to meet outside or on somebody's front porch or.

Something like that. Because someone might say, like he said in the quote, Hey, use my church basement. But then when the KKK found out, they may burn across it in that churchyard. Then that preacher has to say, I'm sorry, I can't take the risk.

Well, so Schwarner and Cheney 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. They went to go find out what happened, and that's when they went missing.

Yeah. So message sent loud and clear. School was outside, which is every kid's.

Favorite thing. Right. Then as we'll see, there was at least one school that got firebombed and burned to the ground after school had already started. I don't think it was after hours. Right. But the next day, the school met in the yard next to this burn down building that they've been meeting in the.

Day before. Yeah, pretty amazing. Yeah.

There was a lot of, I mean, this wasn't just going to school. There's a whole state full of white people who violently did not want you to be learning this stuff.

Yeah, they were just as organized on the defense of this. Right. Or I guess the offense, which would that be? They weren't defending it.

No.

To go on the offensive?

Sure.

I just got mixed up in my head.

Yeah.

You got to find that. All right. 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.

They're going to tear it up, but we're going to get it down at least.

The final one had sections for, like I said, reading, writing, arithmetic, the three Rs, 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 and never learned. I'm sure parents told them stories and stuff, but as far as going to school, they had never encountered anything like.

This before. I mean, depending on the age of their parents, too, their parents might have never never heard anything like that before either. Yeah, that's a good point. The citizenship curriculum was broken into seven units, and each one built upon the last unit. 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. I haven't read all of them, but I went and read the fourth one called the power structure, unit four. I would strongly recommend, I think the student nonviolent coordinating Committee's digital archive has it digitized.

Yeah, that's the one you sent me, right? Yeah.

But go read it. It's called unit four, introducing the Power Structure. 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. 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. It's the most disgusting thing I've ever read, but it's also one of the most eye opening. It was designed for 11th and 12th graders back in the 60s, and it still rings 100 % true today.

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. 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 society. 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 or things that you see that these white people have, which I'm sure you covet things. That's what people do. So I'm sure that was a natural inclination. I want the stuff that they have. But it's so important to say that the stuff isn't what matters.

Well, not only just stuff in general, but they walk the students through it in this curriculum where they say, 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? The purpose of this curriculum wasn't to teach black kids to hate white kids. As a matter of fact, it actually teaches them to understand white people more. 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 contribution to society. Wow. So it's saying don't hate white people. They're being duped by this, too. Right. But they're patsies in this power structure, too. They just happen to not be the group that's being stepped on. Right. But they're still being used and abused.

Yeah, school children in particular for context. And, well, it's interesting, too, when you just talked about they wanted the same things, not necessarily stuff as the white students. One of the most popular classes, because 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. Right. I mean, that was the point in school is 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? What are you guys going to feel good about yourselves for knowing that 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 cases.

Sounds like a good model for schools, period.

Yeah, it sounds like one of those like Waldorf schools or a Montessori school or something like that. It sounds very much like one of those schools.

Like Childhood. Yeah.

But, I mean, the point was to not to drill them with what the adults thought they should learn, but to raise up their self-worth and self-esteem and whatever that took is what they taught them.

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. 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 Hattieburg, 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, advanced stuff.

It really is. There are also newspapers were really big at the Freedom Schools, and they 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 Schools student run newspapers were the biggest source of civil rights news in the entire state. Amazing. And that they were the state's first taste of alternative news ever. But almost all of the 41 schools had their own newspapers. And in some communities, 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.

Yeah, I was a newspaper staffer. I think you were too probably, right? Sure. Or you just starting your own papers? Sure. But I was a newspaper staff in high school, and there's something about putting together a publication that even I see little kids doing for fun, and I remember doing for fun. It doesn't surprise me that the newspaper was every school had their own, and it seems like they were really into it.

I could see your little family newspaper. You're like, Extra, extra, Mom puts too much hot sauce and eggs this morning.

They ruined. 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 the Beach Blotter. They put together their own little magazine for the week. That's very cute. I just remembered. I'm like, Man, kids are just drawn to putting together newspapers and magazines. These kids and 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 a cool part of this whole thing.

Yeah, I know. It's super cool.

As was the theater. There was a traveling group called the Free Southern Theater that would perform a play called In White America. They would go around to Freedom Schools and perform this play. There were music groups. The great, great folk singer and activist, Pete Seger, went down there, of course, and toured the Freedom Schools. It was like, here's how you play a G chord and sing about things that matter. Pretty great.

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. Sure. Or did. Yeah. Rip.

Should we take another break?

Yeah.

Okay, we're going to take a break, everybody. Sit tight and we'll be right back.

In.

The new Amy and TJ podcast, Amy Robach and TJ Homes, a renowned broadcasting team with decades of experience delivering headline news and captivating viewers nationwide, are sharing their voices and perspectives in a way you've never heard before. They explore meaningful conversations about current events, pop culture, and everything in between. Nothing is off limits.

This was a scandal.

That wasn't.

And.

This was not.

What you've been sold.

The Amy and TJ podcast is guaranteed to be informative, entertaining, and above all, authentic. It marks the first time Robach and Holmes speak publicly since their own names became a part of the headlines.

This is the.

First time that we actually.

Get to say what.

Happened and where we are today.

Listen to the Amy and TJ podcast on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Mary Kay Mcbrae, host of the podcast The Greatest True Crime Stories Ever told. I write about true crime, which means I live inside the research wormhole, but I'm not necessarily interested in the headline grabbing elements, the blood and the gore, all of that. I'm more interested in the people behind these stories and what we can learn by looking at their experiences. You can meet me every week on The The Greatest True Crime Stories Ever told, where I dig into crimes where a woman is not just a victim. She might be the detective, the lawyer, the witness, the coroner, the criminal, or some combination of these roles. I delve into the good, the bad, the difficult, and all the nuance I can find because these are the stories we need to know to understand the intersection of society, justice, and the fascinating workings of the human psyche. Listen to the greatest true crime stories ever told on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

Join the Elvis Durant in the morning show for a special gathering at iHeartLand and State Farm Park. It's a holiday celebration with fun talks, plus a very special Elvis Durant in the morning show poem twice the night after Christmas. Don't miss this special event. Starting Monday, December 18th at 7:00 p. M. Eastern at State Farm Park in iHeartland in Fortnite, available for a limited time. Afterwards, stick around and check out all the exciting things State Farm has to offer. Say hi to Jake from State Farm on the big screen and try to beat Jake's score at the park or mini game. Visit iheartradio. Com. Com/iheartland to start playing today.

Like I said, Chuck, this experiment in pushing Mississippi into the civil rights era was not well received by the white power establishment. I think it varied from one community to another, 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. 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. Female volunteers were sexually assaulted.

It.

Was a really violent, dangerous place to be doing what they were doing at the time.

Yeah, there was one town, McComb, Mississippi, there were more than a dozen bombings in two months, more than twelve bombings in a two-month period.

Twelve and a half.

They were called the bombing capital of the world at the time. Again, local police turning a blind eye.

I get the impression that they actually qualified as the bombing capital of the world.

Yeah, it wasn't just a thing written in a Freedom school paper.

Right. It wasn't like an offhanded comment. They may have qualified as the bombing capital of the world.

Yeah.

It's crazy. And even if there wasn't direct violence, there was indirect violence.

Intimidation. Intimidation, people would probably drive by and-.

Say the worst things.

Right, exactly. So it was a struggle to just make it through the summer, 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. They attempted to do that and actually got a meeting at the Credentials Committee of the DNC, but were ultimately turned down.

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.

Wow. That's a country song in motion right there. For sure.

That was a place where they stopped us and the drug dogs got on.

Oh, got you. In Meridian, huh?

Yeah, and I was like, Oh, interesting. I never thought about Greyhound busses. It's probably a great way to transport drugs, but probably not.

Hey, speaking of country music, have you seen that Ken Burns documentary?

Not yet. I've heard it's great. Oh, my. Is it good?

I'm into country music now.

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 on it.

Yeah, I'm looking forward to seeing that. It's good. These kids, these delegates went down there. They wrote their own political platform for the MFDP. It's amazing. 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.

Right. It wasn't like, hey, let's get these kids sitting at the DNC. The Mississippi Democratic Freedom Party was made up of adult activists, but the kids from the Freedom Schools helped write their platform. They also formed from this delegation that met at the end of the summer, the Mississippi Student Union. This actually brought to fruition one of the other stated goals of Freedom Schools, which was creating the next generation of activists. Because when Freedom School was over and Sharecropper School started back again, or even integrated schools around the state. All of a sudden, there were kids wearing one man, one vote buttons, which could get you expelled and actually did get some kids expelled. But there were little civil rights activists showing up to school aware now of the situation they were dealing with and ready to.

Take it on. Yeah, 25 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 25 of these graduates of the Freedom Schools did so. Yeah.

So it was a big deal. They managed to create the next generation of activist leaders. But one of the other 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, if you teach everybody how to struggle for themselves, how to fight for themselves, how to stand up for themselves, you don't have to wait around for a once in a handful of generations person like Martin Luther King Jr, to come along and lead the way. 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 the next leaders. They needed leaders, sure, but also to make everybody who came to the Freedom School aware and ready for action.

One of the sad legacies was 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. 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. The last one, and this is just very sad and shameful, the last speaker, and Dave describes her as the most dangerous to that Democratic establishment was a former sharecropper named Fannie Lou Hamer.

Did you see her testimony? Yeah. She was brave as they come.

She was as brave as they come. Brave and pissed. Yeah, but her testimony was interrupted on national TV by President Lynden 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 ad libbed, had today is the nine-month anniversary of the assassination of JFK. Black people all around the country and white liberal progressives are going, What's a nine-month anniversary? Are you.

Kidding me? Not just liberals and civil rights activists, but the news, too, saw right through it. Oh, sure. And it actually backfired because Johnson interrupting Fannie Lou Hamer became news itself. 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. And the reason why her testimony and the idea of a Mississippi Democratic Freedom Party was a threat to the Democrats was because if you got rid of the Dixiecrats, if you forced integration on the South, 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. So reconstruction comes along and all of the Southerners went Democrat and they formed the Dixiecrats. Right? 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, and it's still the case. 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. No, it's 100 % true. But I mean, okay.

Let me put it this way. Atlanta is as blue as blue gets.

How many Atlantas are there in the south?

No, that's what I'm saying. It's like anywhere else, the urban centers are where.

The Blues are. But I mean, like the Northern and Southern suburbs, they're all red. Atlanta is like a little island of blue and a thing of red. It's just weird to think that that's the legacy of this time.

Still. Yeah. Yeah. So some of these students ended up to go on and do great things. I think, dare I say, many of them went on to do great things on a smaller scale, but some were 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.

Which I mean back then, though, 28 was like 50 today. Really? Sure. You know, aging's really regressed since then.

We talked earlier about the fact that 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. Kindergarten would go there during the day. They would have adult classes at night. In the 1980s is when the Children's Defense Fund created its own version of the Freedom Schools all those years later. They now operate in 87 cities across 28 states with their main focus being literacy.

Yeah, it's pretty great.

But they still honor their African heritage because the school day begins with a harambi, traditional African welcoming celebration with songs and chants.

That goes a little something like, Go on over to the fridge. Have you noticed like it's transformed into singing? It was.

Talking before. You're ditching your Lou Reedness.

I guess so. About growing them. Well, if you want to know more about Freedom Schools, there's a lot of it archived out there on the internet. You could do a lot worse than starting out at the student nonviolent coordinated 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.

This is the gentleman who wrote in. We had a few people that wrote in trying to explain our confusion on due process.

Oh, is this the guy? This is the guy.

Okay, good. Which one was that in? That was in...

It was in Perifelius.

Perifelius. Because we were talking about people going to prison for gay sex in their own home, consenting in Texas in the.

21st century. 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?

It's a three.

Year old way of saying. Procedural and substantive. Did I say that right?

Substantive.

Procedural due process is exactly what Josh was talking about. Provides you notice and opportunity to be heard before rights are taken away from you. Substantive due process is what the court was referring to in Lawrence. The 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.

Future law professor.

I'm losing it here. Thank you, Keith, from Philly.

Thank you, Keith. I emailed him immediately. There's like a lot of people have written, and thanks to everybody who wrote in and gave it a shot. I emailed him back and was like, Keith, this is the first one I've fully gotten.

Yeah, Keith. I think if you scroll on over to your refrigerator, you will find a frozen snicker bar waiting on you because we snuck into your home in the middle of.

The night. Whereas Chuck would say a frozen one. If you want to get in touch with us 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@iheartradio. Com.

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In the new Amy and TJ podcast, news anchors Amy Robach and TJ Homes explore everything from current events to pop culture in a way that's informative, entertaining, and authentically groundbreaking. Join them as they share their voices for the first time since making their own headlines.

This is the first.

Time that we actually.

Get to say.

What happened and where we are today.

Listen to the Amy and TJ podcast on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Mary Kay Mcbraer, host of the podcast The Greatest True Crime Stories Ever told, where I dig into crimes where a woman is not just a victim. She might be the detective, the lawyer, the witness, the coroner, the criminal, or some combination of those roles. These are the stories we need to know to understand the intersection of society, justice and the fascinating workings of the human psyche. Listen to The Greatest True Crime Stories Ever told on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

Join the Elvis Durant in the morning show for a special gathering at iHeartLand and State Farm Park. It's a holiday celebration with fun talks plus a very special Elvis Durant in the morning show poem twice the night after Christmas. Don't miss this special event starting Monday, December 18th at 7:00 p. M. Eastern at State Farm Park and iHeartland in Fortnite, available for a limited time. Afterwards, stick around and check out all the exciting things State Farm has to offer. Say hi to Jake from State Farm on the big screen and try to beat Jake's score at the park or mini game. Visit iheartradio. Com/iheartland to start playing today.