Pour in some funding, first from the seminary and then from other sources. Whip up some music, from rap to blues to the Hallelujah Chorus, and some field trips. Blend in some history from the past, call it Freedom School. Stir vigorously, sprinkle with prayer and bake for five weeks in the summer.
This is Charmayne Davis’ recipe — she’s a 2001 graduate of Louisville Seminary — and here’s how her inspiration stew tastes on a summer morning in the sanctuary of Grace Hope church in Louisville.
Freedom School is what?
Red Hot!
R-E-D with a little bit of H-O-T!
Red Hot!
Red Hot!
The children — about 80 of them, from ages 6 to 14 — are chanting and singing and whooping up some energy, led by a cadre of college-student interns. This is called harambee time, from a Swahili word, Davis explains, for “Let’s pull together.” When they arrive, “some are happy, some are sad,” she said, and harambee is a time to set the tone for the day, to get the children in the spirit of what’s to come.
They listen as a guest reader from the community reads poems about dreams — a child, dreaming about falling, then wondering what dogs dream about when they lie on their sides, paws wild with twitching. Then they answer back:
Good job! Good job!
G-double O-D
J -O-B
Good job! Good job!
What’s happening at Grace Hope is the result of Charmayne Davis’ own big dreams. In the summer of 2000, she was a student at Louisville Seminary, working on a master’s in Christian education. Davis, an ordained African Methodist Episcopal preacher from Nashville, Tenn., was studying at Louisville Seminary through a partnership arrangement. For the past several years, Louisville has been designated as a regional training seminary for the African Methodist Episcopal, Christian Methodist Episcopal and African Methodist Episcopal Zion denominations.
Two years ago, while taking a course on child advocacy, Davis visited the Alex Haley Farm in Clinton, Tenn., for a week-long immersion experience at an annual gathering of people committed to child advocacy in congregations. There, she learned of the Freedom School model developed by the Children’s Defense Fund’s Black Community Crusade for Children — a program that can be replicated throughout the country and which stresses conflict resolution, social action and the development of reading skills. On a recent sultry morning, for example, Stephen Butler, a 24-year-old sports administration student from the University of Louisville, was introducing a group of 13- and 14-year-olds to the poetry of Langston Hughes.
I am a Negro:
Black as the night is black
Black like the depths of my Africa.
The day before, they’d read a poem about blues while listening to the music of Ray Charles. Butler talked to the teen-agers about the Harlem Renaissance and how to read poetry aloud, where to pause, how to use the cadence to give a poem emotion. Often, teenagers don’t think of reading as fun, Butler said. “I know I didn’t coming up,” he said. “I didn’t comprehend too well what I read” and “When they think reading, they think work, they think textbooks.”
When she was younger, “I wasn’t exposed to books that had anything to do with my culture,” except during Black History Month, said Cortney Hawkins, 19, an education student from Kentucky State University. At Freedom School, students read books written by African Americans about the lives of African Americans — everything from a medical doctor writing about the importance of mentors to fiction about a group of kids who took over management of an apartment building from an absentee landlord.
That’s not to say, however, that there’s some kind of immediate transformation of attitude. In Butler’s group, for example, one girl fell asleep during a discussion about Langston Hughes and others struggled to find anything to say about what the poems meant. Davis speaks of one boy who had to be moved from his group because he was fighting with another child. But she worked with him — asking him to suggest a solution to the problem, to tell her what was bothering him. He was given another chance and placed with some older children, and quickly showed he could read at their level. “We had so many miracles last year,” Davis said. “I can’t wait to see the ones we have this year.”
The roots of today’s Freedom Schools lie in the civil rights movement, when college students came south to Mississippi during the pivotal Freedom Summer in 1964 to teach about voter registration and literacy. They taught people how to read, and “how to handle adversity — now we call it terrorism, racism at the time,” Davis said. “How to handle it when people are insulting you.”
At times in this country, “you couldn’t get an education because of the color of your skin,” she said. “Now you don’t get an education because of drugs or abuse,” because of poverty and lack of opportunity. Many children “are not used to people saying, ‘What do you want? What do you think?’ and then listening to their answers,” Davis said. These children, however, are being introduced to adults who send the message that they matter, and that reading matters. Guest readers have included elected officials, a judge and neighborhood leaders. And Freedom School requires the children’s parents or other relatives to be involved, to volunteer their time, to share their talents, to learn a little of what the children are being taught about the world of books.
Once she heard of the idea, Davis was hooked. She did a project on Freedom School for her child advocacy class, then a more extensive version for her senior thesis. She lined up funding — last year from the seminary in dollars and in-kind donations (“toilet paper, paper towels, Popsicle sticks, everything,” Davis said) and, this year, raising the necessary money from other sources, including Grace Hope church, city government, the Presbyterian Community Center in Louisville and the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).
“We were happy to be part of the midwifery of the program and, like good parents, we are ready now to let it flourish on its own,” said Dianne Reistroffer, who’s dean of Louisville Seminary and was teaching the child advocacy class when Davis was a student. The seminary views the program as an educational partnership — it can provide students as interns, for example — and Davis has established a nonprofit organization called the Sankofa Project, with Reistroffer on the board, to seek funding for the Freedom School and expansion of the project.
“Charmayne has been absolutely masterful in making this transition,” Reistroffer said. “She’s very outgoing, she’s very warm and has a real heart for children. She’s a tremendous leader. She has the kind of energy and creativity that just attracts people.”
Davis still has big dreams: she’s networking with others, with the goal of raising money and planting other Freedom Schools in Louisville, working with community organizers and across denominational lines.
According to the project’s mission statement, “the Akan (Ghanian vernacular) word, Sankofa means ‘one must return to the past in order to move forward.’ The symbol of Sankofa is that of a bird whose head is faced in the opposite direction of its body. This is emphasizing on the fact that even though the bird is advancing, it periodically makes it a point to examine/return to its past, since this is the only way for one to have a better future. Some also interpret Sankofa to mean, no matter how far away one travels he/she must always return home. However Sankofa is interpreted, the basic and important meaning still lies; one’s past is an important aspect of one’s future. So in order to make the best of one’s future, one must visit the past.”
Davis said the Grace Hope congregation “has been very supportive,” although some parishioners were uncertain about the idea of giving children the run of the building. For a time, welcome banners in crayon hung from the walls above the wooden pews with the crimson cushions. “They let us jump around in their sanctuary,” Davis said. “We promised we would leave this energy in here, so it would be all right.”
While Freedom School is more about reading than about overt faith, a belief in something bigger — in community, in making a contribution, in honoring the gifts that one has been given — is clearly a component. Davis speaks of the interns, such as Kevin Moore, a 21-year-old computer science teacher from Morris Brown College in Atlanta, as “servant leaders” for the children of Freedom School.
“I don’t really think the books are what they learn from,” Moore said. “They learn from working with each other,” and from the interns — young black adults, who dress cool and act cool yet who can represent for these children the possibility of a college education and a future that might be bigger than what they’ve already seen.
“I find it harder to be a teacher as an African-American male,” Moore said. “It takes a long time for kids to warm up to you,” maybe longer than if he were a woman. “A lot of these children, their father isn’t in the house.” If they have an older brother, “he’s out experiencing the wild life at an early age . . . I believe they’ve been hurt.”
While he doesn’t proselytize to the children — “I’m a Christian, I’m a minister as well,” Moore said — he doesn’t hide the fact that his faith is important to him. “I want them to know that there are no limits to what an African-American guy is like; there’s no stereotype, you can’t put him in a box,” Moore said. “I want the barriers to come off.”
Elisa Freeman is director of youth services at Presbyterian Community Center, which offers programs for young people in the neighborhood near Grace Hope. The interns, she said, can show the children that “they can go beyond the community they’re in now” — they can go to college, they can have a career, they can volunteer to help others.
Davis said she hopes these children will end the summer “knowing that they have value, knowing that they’re important, that God loves them and we love them. And knowing to trust their instincts and to trust their feelings . . . Because so many times we tell children they don’t know. And they do know. They can do anything. If they can see it, they can achieve it.”
