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Black Leadership and Outside Allies in Virginia Freedom Schools

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2017

Christopher Bonastia
Christopher Bonastia*
Affiliation:
Lehman College and the CUNY Graduate Center ([email protected])
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Abstract

In July 1963, students from Queens College (QC) and a group of New York City teachers traveled to Prince Edward County (PEC), Virginia, to teach local black youth in Freedom Schools. The county had eliminated public education four years earlier to avoid a desegregation order. PEC Freedom Schools represented the first major effort to recruit an integrated group of outside teachers and students to educate black students in a civil rights battleground over an entire summer.

In contrast to the racial and class tensions that arose between black leaders and predominantly white volunteers in other civil rights campaigns, PEC volunteers willingly deferred to the expertise of local and outside black leaders. This paper identifies the relatively modest scope and well-defined mission of the program, the real-world experiences of volunteers, and the high quality of black leadership as factors that led to this positive outcome.

Type
Articles
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 56 , Issue 4 , November 2016 , pp. 532 - 559
Copyright
Copyright © 2016 History of Education Society 

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References

1 The United Federation of Teachers (UFT) is the New York City affiliate of the AFT. In the historical record, the Prince Edward Freedom Schools are sometimes depicted as a UFT initiative, and other times as an AFT initiative. For a list of teaching volunteers, see AFT Teacher's Roster, Prince Edward County, Virginia, United Federation of Teachers Papers, series 2, subseries 2A, box 21, folder 5, Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, New York University (hereafter UFT Papers).Google Scholar

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