Freedom Libraries

In early 1963, Bob Moses and other members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) established the first freedom library in Greenwood, providing Black Mississippians with access to reading materials in the face of widespread segregation. This initiative inspired SNCC and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) to expand the concept, leading to the creation of freedom libraries and community centers across the state. Despite challenges, including violent opposition, the number of libraries grew during the 1964 Mississippi Summer Project. These libraries became crucial community hubs, fostering literacy, empowerment, and social change, with their influence spreading beyond Mississippi.

In October 1963, Moses placed a call for book donations to the Greenwood Freedom Library in Harper’s Magazine, which resulted in donations from thirty-six states and Washington, DC. The growth of the first freedom library inspired SNCC staffers to see the idea as a pivotal aspect of their work in Mississippi. By December, SNCC workers discussed creating dozens of freedom libraries across Mississippi. When the Greenwood Freedom Library evolved informally into the Greenwood Freedom Community Center, some suggested following the model in other places as a base on which to build community centers that could host activities and events.

As SNCC was developing the Greenwood Freedom Library, Dave Dennis, an organizer for the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) was building a freedom community center in Canton. Dennis had worked with Moses at the original Greenwood Freedom Library and now promoted the more expansive freedom community center concept to the national leaders of CORE. By December 1963, with seven thousand books shipped to Dennis in Canton, the CORE Books for Mississippi Project began soliciting other supplies, including mimeograph machines, records, phonographs, typewriters, and movie projectors. CORE leaders in Canton hoped to provide literacy and tutoring programs, vocational training, classes in history and voter education, and plays. Though supply drives were successful and CORE’s National Action Council pledged financial support, Dennis struggled to secure a permanent location for the center through February 1964. Harassment by local police and city officials, a perennial threat to freedom libraries and Black organizing in Mississippi, caused Dennis to shift the project’s focus to Meridian where CORE volunteers Rita Schwerner and her husband, Mickey Schwerner, from New York, had begun work on the Meridian Freedom Library.

Rita and Mickey arrived in Meridian in January of 1964 as CORE volunteers assigned to create the Meridian Freedom Library project. By March of 1964, the library had received books transferred from SNCC’s Greenwood Freedom Library and CORE’s former Canton Community Center, as well as additional shipments from universities, colleges, publishers, libraries, and individual northern supporters. The library held more than ten thousand volumes. As the library’s contents increased, Rita pressed the CORE national office and donors to consider quality over quantity, favoring new books that were of interest to patrons rather than old, discarded books of little interest.

By early 1964, the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO), the Mississippi civil rights confederation that included CORE, SNCC, the NAACP, and Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), had laid the groundwork for its 1964 Mississippi Summer Project. That summer, the project brought hundreds of volunteers into the state to expand voter registration efforts and add dozens of new freedom libraries and freedom community centers to local COFO projects. In addition, COFO opened freedom schools across the state for children and adults. The schools provided free public education while also educating students politically and raising their awareness of the potential for social change in Mississippi. Existing freedom libraries continued operations, while each new community center and freedom school also featured a freedom library. Freedom libraries expanded to more than fifty locations across the state.

Freedom libraries were an important part of local communities, and significant efforts continued throughout 1964 to ensure reading materials matched the interests of those local students and community members using the libraries. Freedom libraries and their accompanying freedom schools did not immediately shut down when Freedom Summer ended in August of 1964. At least thirty freedom libraries across Mississippi were still operating in the fall of 1964 and some new libraries even opened. COFO planned to continue operating the libraries through at least 1965. Yet, by the spring of 1965, divisions and disagreements within COFO multiplied, and by that summer COFO had disbanded. After COFO’s disbandment, SNCC and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party provided some support for the freedom libraries, but the level of support for the freedom libraries never again rose to that seen during Freedom Summer.

Although freedom libraries were now in decline in Mississippi, their launch had reverberated beyond the state. In August of 1964, former Mississippi SNCC organizer John Churchville founded Philadelphia, Pennsylvania’s freedom library and cultivated it as a space to read Black authors, listen to Black music, and empower Black people more broadly. Closer to Mississippi, in Selma, Alabama, the Selma Free Library was one of two freedom libraries founded in the state. The Selma Free Library, founded in 1965 by northern and southern student volunteers held almost twenty thousand volumes, making it one of the largest libraries in Alabama at the time. In 1965, SNCC organizers in Arkansas launched their Arkansas Summer Project and founded their own freedom libraries in Gould, Helena, and Forrest City. The proliferation of freedom libraries outside Mississippi demonstrated their potent appeal as spaces of community building and Black empowerment.