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

2007 SUMMER Curriculum

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)

2006 Summer Curriculum

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