Rob Kall:
And what did you do at the Freedom School that made that happen?
Staughton Lynd:
Well, it's interesting, because people say "Well, Staughton, what was in
your curriculum?" And there was a
curriculum. (laughs) I carried about thirty copies to the
orientation in Ohio in the trunk of my Rambler, and I had to have the wheels
aligned after I got there. I mean, they
were big substantial paper products that had been assembled after a conference
in New York with a lot of luminaries.
But what I told the Freedom School teachers was, "Use it as a security
blanket." That is, "When you and your
kids run out of ideas about what to do next, well, here's some stuff about what
happened in the 19th Century, and the struggle against slavery, and
how to analyze the power structure of your community," and so on.
Those were all
components in the written curriculum, but the life of the thing, the genius of
the thing was improvising around a core of activity, "Freireian" activity,
directed to winning the right to vote for Black people in Mississippi.
Rob Kall:
But what did you teach that made them comfortable, unlike the other
members of that class that you are referring to?
Staughton Lynd:
Bear in mind, I was an administrator; I was driving from school to
school rather than staying with a particular school for days at a time. I think what it amounted to was, for example,
African-American History, which these kids (all of them black) had never been
allowed to encounter in segregated schools in Mississippi. And so we would talk about the gentleman who
was a representative in the Mississippi State Legislature during Reconstruction
after the Civil War, and who, sadly enough, was gunned down in the streets of
his hometown. But we gave them a sense
of their not being alone, that things were not always exactly the way they are
today, and they might even change!
As you may know,
the kids wrote a lot of poetry. There
were schools where they put on plays.
Meantime, Martin Duberman's In White America, and old play, was
circulating around the State. They
studied typing, they studied French. The
atmosphere was: "Well, this door has been closed to you for a long time. Take a peek inside, and let us know what you
think you'd like to do most."
Rob Kall:
Well, I think one of the thing's about your message in the book is that,
as an activist - as with somebody who accompanies, who wants to help change
happen - people don't come to you, you go to them, you stand next to them, you
sit next to them, you work with them, you get to know them, you treat them as
equals, with equal power, and with both having experience and resources to
bring to the table. Right?
Staughton Lynd:
That is correct. Let me say a
little bit more about it. That, if
there's anything that Alice and I added to the general notion that you find in
Archbishop Romero's or in Doctor Paul Farmer's writing, it is that Middle Class
kids (as Alice and I both were) are going to be able to do this best if they
bring something to the table that people need.
In other words, it's a heck of a lot easier if you are a doctor, a
lawyer, even a Freedom School teacher from a Northern university, because the
people with whom you're speaking are going to say, "Oh! I'd like to find out what you think about
this problem I'm dealing with."
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