San Francisco Freedom School
Summer Program
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All Summer sessions are held in the Parish Hall of St. Francis Lutheran Church (Church and Market, SF) in July and August
Our Mission:
Through film, text, and eyewitness testimony, the Freedom School offers hope
in a time of despair, and authenticity in an era of distortion and deception.
We provide activists, educators, students and adults with an opportunity to
analyze how social movements happen. This is done through studying the Civil
Rights move-ment as a case study of how ordinary people, not just famous leaders,
contri-buted to ending segregation in the South. This allows participants in
the Freedom School to renew their commitment to, rekindle their passion for,
and find greater clarity in how to promote social justice in the Bay Area today.
Who we are
A group of people of different color, class and age who want to understand what
it means today, to – as the 1964 Freedom School curriculum put it –
be “active agents of social change.” We believe that fundamental
change can happen when regular people act collectively. We were inspired by
the Freedom Schools that were part of “Freedom Summer,” a project
of the Southern Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi in 1964. We offer a Freedom
School, on 7 Saturdays during the summer, from 10am to 4pm.
Our Program:
Films: We watch documentaries and docudramas to learn the historical
context and understand the issues.
Guest Speakers: Veterans of the Civil Rights Movement talk to us about
their experience and what their participation in the Freedom Struggle meant
to them. Or we hear others with experience on the topic of the day.
SFFS principles (pdf)
Task completion versus problem solving -- primer
(pdf)
Transcripts from SFFS 2005
Summer program (guest speaker's portion)
[for information on who the civil right veteran speakers are listed
below--all but July 23--
go the "speakers list" on the CRM
vets web site and then scroll down to "California"]
July 9: Setting the Stage
-- Jean Wiley (SNCC, Maryland, Alabama) and Don Jelinek (LCDC, SNCC, SRRP, Alabama,
Mississippi)
July 16: Local Leadership -- Mike Miller (SNCC, Mississippi)
---transcript forthcoming
July 23: Power Structures -- Mark Sanchez (SFUSD board
member) and KimShree Maufas (education activist, SF)--- transcript forthcoming
August 6: Key Concepts of Nonviolent Direct Action --
Bruce Hartford (CORE, SCLC, Alabama, Mississippi)---transcript forthcoming
August 13: Community Mobilization -- Chude Allen (Freedom
Summer, Mississippi) and Jimmy Rogers (YM-YWCA, SNCC, Alabama) --- transcriptforthcoming
August 20: Arts and Protest -- Wazir Peacock (SNCC,
Mississippi & Alabama)--- transcript forthcoming
SFFS Co-founders
Kathy Emery: high school history
teacher for 16 years, PhD in Education, wrote teaching materials for teaching
edition of Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States
(New Press) and co-author of Why is Corporate America Bashing our Public
Schools (Heinemann)
Sherri Sawyer: education advocate;
Board member (Small Schools for Equity and YWCA SF/Marin)
Sandra Mitchell: education advocate
Sylvia Braselmann: senior scientist
at a biotech company, ABD Masters in history at SFSU and editor of the web
version of the original Freedom School Curriculum