The African American Museum’s library is filled with decades of Black history from rare books like The Negro In Our History to The Souls of Black Folk.
This summer, the library is the classroom for the museum’s Freedom School program, which invites community members to learn about prehistorical Africa to the 1619 slave trade and the Black Arts Movement of the ’60s and ’70s.
The program harkens back to the freedom schools launched by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement. The education programs followed a legacy of efforts from secret “pit schools” for African slaves in the 19th century to the citizenship schools created by educator and activist Septima Clark in the 1950s…