Chapter 7: “We Declare Independence from the Unjust Laws of Mississippi”: The Freedom Schools, Head Start and the Reconstruction of Education during the Civil Rights Movement

Roscoe Jones and Joyce Brown led the Freedom School students that penned the declaration of independence noted above at a student-led conference in Meridian, Mississippi, during the Freedom Summer campaign of 1964. The timing of the declaration coincided with the historic desegregation of public schools in Mississippi. Beginning with a handful of schools in August of 1964, grassroots civil rights activists and the judiciary and executive branch ordered the reconstruction of the public school system by dismantling the dual and segregated school system in the Magnolia State. At the same time, the grassroots movement exemplified through the Freedom School model proffered a different vision of what education should look like as it was being reconstructed. Moreover, within one year of desegregation, local and federal organizers developed Head Start programs across the state of Mississippi to provide an early childhood education and to employ local people as part of the “War on Poverty.” Local and young people like Jones and Brown, and the thousands of families connected to Head Start, shaped and were shaped by a movement that reflected a long struggle for quality education. The shift at the federal level to desegregate schools, coupled with the ongoing and decentralized push for a quality education through the Civil Rights Movement from the 1940s through the middle of the 1960s, constituted a fundamental reconstruction of public education in Mississippi that continues to frame the provision of education today.