Freedom Schools

And so the training here is also getting those teenagers ready to pursue a career in education.

So the high school and college students that are leading these sessions are part of something called the Freedom Schools Literacy Academy.

What is that? Thank you.

Yeah, so it's basically a summer program, but also a year-round training to get Black students interested in education.

Yeah, I think there's an interesting question of like, what does innovation really look like in education? And is that one of the areas that we could be looking into? But so far, that has not, you know, at a large scale really panned out in the charter school or the voucher school movement.

What role has the Children's Defense Fund taken on in this pipeline?

Yeah, I mean, from the very beginning, like a lot of his work is based on the work that the Children's Defense Fund was doing years ago, right? They started these freedom schools where they brought students in who were losing access to these Black educators in the post-Brown era and sort of creating outside incubators of Black joy and Black genius and all of that stuff, right? And so his idea is like, let's take that freedom school model and let's add in high schoolers to make it also...

you know, a place where we're training that next generation.

So that led me down to deep research what our ancestors had did.

So I was looking at the Freedom Schools of the Civil Rights Movement, the Liberation Schools of the Black Power Movement coming out of the Black Panther Party, and all of these models for how education could be used for liberation work.

And that's where the idea of the Black popping up doing workshops teaching uh young folks at their high schools their middle schools how they could use art to affect some positive change in their community

yeah and it just grew progressively from like you know a backpack full of art

I know L. Joy Williams has done her thing in New York.

And then with a freedom school, freedom schools are you've done freedom schools in Philly.

And our

objective is to get the freedom dropped.

Can y'all see Dr. Carr in the back? Now see, it sent me my hoodie.

This is an institution that began with the convergence of the right people and the right person at the right time.

We have been doing Philadelphia Freedom Schools, which is just the latest iteration of the long freedom school movement.

That movement, which extends, you know, we start Philadelphia Freedom Schools at the origin of humanity.