PART 2, THE RISING: WHY FORT WAYNE NEEDS A FREEDOM SCHOOL NOW
A RootFolkz Blog Series — Continuation from Last Week
RootFolkz Poetz Press
Last week we reflected on the immediacy of elders and the widening gap our youth are facing — not only in reading and comprehension, but in belonging, grounding, and access to the deep cultural guidance that only elders can provide.
This week, we widen the lens.
Because what is emerging in Fort Wayne under the Elders’ mantle is not simply a program or an intervention.
It is a response to these pressurized times, the blatantly authoritarian shape they’re taking, and their disfiguring consequences upon our young people. It’s the early formation of a modern Freedom School — one that stands in direct conversation with the struggles that birthed every Freedom School before it, from enslavement and Reconstruction brush-arbor classrooms to the Citizenship Schools of the Civil Rights Movement, from Freedom Summer to the Black Panther Party’s Oakland schools.
The political and economic pressures shaping Black life today echo those historical moments almost exactly — and the Ancestors are responding now just as powerfully as they did then—and we are their Afrikan voices in these American bodies.
Reconstruction: Literacy as Spiritual Rebirth & Political Survival
In the aftermath of emancipation, newly freed Afrikan people entered a world that was both open and treacherous. Families emerging from bondage understood immediately that literacy was not simply a tool of education — it was a spiritual rebirth, a sacred act of self-claiming in the country that had robbed them of their family names and forbidden them the dignity of reading their given names.
These first community-built schools were acts of political resistance disguised as lessons. We gathered in brush arbors, burnt-out churches, and nighttime circles after long labor in the fields. Learning to read was a way of learning to breathe again — a collective refusal to let enslavement reclaim us. Reconstruction Freedom Schools revealed the depth of Black resilience: even under threat of terror and retaliation, our communities turned literacy into a shield, a prayer, and a declaration of independence. Then, as new readers, we cracked open our Bibles and decoded the sounds the words made. Those sounds were trumpet blasts that shook the chains from our bodies and set captive spirits free.
Jim Crow & the Great Migration: Identity Carried Across Distance
During the long years of Jim Crow, when state-sanctioned violence tried to stamp out Black progress, spiritual resilience became our backbone of survival. As millions of Black families migrated north and west, they carried with them not only their Bibles and belongings but their stories, rhythms, and ancestral memory. In new industrial cities, where danger often hid behind opportunity, independent schools and church-based literacy circles became sanctuaries of cultural identity. These spaces helped children and the adults who sheltered them remember that they belonged to something bigger than race hatred’s segregated lies about them. They knew they were hueman! Through song, scripture, folktales, and self-taught reading, communities crafted educational spaces rooted in remembrance that defanged segregation and empowered huemanity — teaching that identity is not lost when geography changes. The Freedom School spirit lived in every kitchen table lesson and church basement circle where Black folk connected to the truth of their identity.
Civil Rights Movement: Teaching the Power to Challenge a World You Did Not Make
By the 1950s and 1960s, Blackfolks’ political landscape demanded a new kind of learning — one that trained young people to recognize injustice and respond to it with clarity, courage, and a fierce spirit of coordinated resistance. Freedom Schools during the Civil Rights era did not separate education from activism; they treated them as one continuous current. Transitioning from civil rights to Black Power taught young people to think critically, ask challenging questions, prepare for self-defense, and see themselves as actors on the stage of history rather than subjects of someone else’s script. Reading became a gateway to critical consciousness. Dialogue became a method of liberation. Teaching Black youth their true history became a form of resistance strong enough to shake the entire architecture of Jim Crow. In these Freedom Schools, spiritual resilience took the form of collective hope, and political resistance took the form of informed, fearless youth challenging the system and transforming themselves and a nation fearing their truth.
Black Panther Party: Education, Nourishment & the Protection of Black Childhood
The Black Panther Party understood that children cannot learn when they are hungry, unprotected, or unseen. Their community schools grew out of the lived experience of Oakland’s working-class neighborhoods — places where poverty, state violence, and systemic abandonment made survival itself a political struggle. The Panthers built schools that fed the body, disciplined the mind, ignited cultural pride, and made political education a normal part of childhood. Their model fused Afrikan worldviews, solidarity across oppressed communities, and a fierce commitment to collective care. They transformed classrooms into community defense sites — spaces that affirmed Black children were worthy of nourishment, critical thinking, and an inherited legacy. The Panthers’ Freedom Schools represented not only political resistance but spiritual guardianship — a commitment to protecting the sacredness of Black childhood at all costs.
Today: A New Generation, the Same Sacred Duty
In this moment, with economic instability, social fragmentation, and a political retreat to white-supremacist noise, our youth are blanketed with conditions that mirror every era in which Freedom Schools have risen. Today’s children face different technologies but the same pressures: civic dispossession, social misunderstanding, and political attempts to cower them and shrink their identity. The return of a Freedom School to Fort Wayne through the Jennings Center’s Identity Counts Saturday Sessions represents more than a program — it is a spiritual return to the village, an act of resistance against erasure, and a creative carrying forward of a literate legacy. By centering elders, parents, and children in one learning circle, the Sessions reclaim the ancient Afrikan truth: our identity is our first curriculum, our history is our first textbook, and our survival has always depended on the creative force of a people who refuse to forget themselves.
Closing: The Circle Returns
As the Jennings Center launches Saturday Sessions, Fort Wayne steps into the stream of a long, unbroken river of Black educational resistance and renewal. Albert G. Jennings directed the Center and held the line from 1951 to 1977. His daughter, Anita Dortch, has taken up the torch as the Center’s staunchest defender. At a particularly trying time for the Center in 2023, Dortch said:
The Center is a pillar. It’s an oasis in the community for our children. That’s why we have the term ‘ubuntu,’ which is a celebration of community. It’s the spirit of community: that ‘I am, because we are.’ It’s an old African principle, and I think it has sustained us in our community. To always work together, to support the efforts of our community.
Freedom Schools always rise when the world is unsettled.
Freedom Schools always rise when the children need anchoring.
Freedom Schools always rise when the elders return to the front of the village.
The village is building again. And the story is just beginning.