SNCC education encompassed a broad range of activities and ages that stressed a radical curriculum and local control. SNCC organizers were exposed to education grounded in the principles of the black freedom struggle through Ella Baker, one of the organization’s illustrious advisors. Her tutelage reflected the principles of the struggle embedded in the long movement through initiatives like the Citizenship School program and movement centers such as Highlander Folk School. Once SNCC implemented its own programs beginning with the Freedom Schools in 1961, they implemented more direct educational approaches of schooling for activism. The curriculum, as well as the parent and community engagement it fomented, influenced the Head Start program that shaped anti-poverty education beginning in 1965. A race-based curriculum and demands for local control buoyed by a shifting ideology that questioned the merits of desegregation also influenced Black Panther Liberation Schools. At the same time, SNCC activists underwent their own self-directed education, illustrated by organization meetings such as the Waveland Retreat, which produced Casey Hayden and Mary King’s “Sex and Caste: A Kind of Memo,” an integral document of the women’s liberation movement in the 1960s. These varied approaches proffered an educational vision that challenged predominant approaches to education, which focused on desegregation plans that abetted white supremacy and divested in public education for students and families of color.
