Intrepid New York City English teacher Sandra Adickes spent the summer of 1964 teaching in a Freedom School in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. Photo credit: University of Southern Mississippi

The anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington earlier this week gives us the opportunity to think about the courageous and dedicated teachers, both Black and White, who tirelessly worked towards creating a more equal society in our country. One of these was Sandra Adickes, an English teacher from New York City who taught in Mississippi’s Freedom Schools during Freedom Summer.

Sandra was an energetic and idealistic thirty-year-old New York City English teacher in 1964, the year she ventured south into Hattiesburg, Mississippi, to teach in a Freedom School. The goal of the summer program was to empower the Black community to register to vote, and to help bridge some of the gap of educational neglect that had long been a tradition in that Jim Crow state. Both educators and Civil Rights activists realized that only through education and participation in the democratic process could African Americans hope to achieve their long-denied American Dream.

The enterprise was not without danger. On the first day of Freedom Summer, three workers involved in the program disappeared while investigating the firebombing of the church facility designated for their voter recruitment activities. Six weeks later, as Sandra Adickes conducted her classes in Hattiesburg, the badly beaten and bullet-ridden bodies of the three missing men were discovered buried in an earthen dam in nearby Neshoba County.

At summer’s end, Sandra’s fearless students decided—on their own—to integrate the Hattiesburg Public Library in what became, in effect, a graduation trip with an emphasis on civic reform. Sandra was arrested in the effort. Read her riveting story, and what became of her courageous students, in her book Legacy of a Freedom School. You can also find a chapter about this remarkable teacher in my book, Chalkboard Champions.