Q &A with Leroy Clemons: Nearly 50 years after Freedom Summer, education is key to change in Mississippi
Leroy Clemons, president of the Neshoba County branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), was only two years old when three civil-rights workers investigating the burning of the Mt. Zion Methodist Church in Philadelphia, Miss., were killed by members of the Ku Klux Klan. He did not learn about the triple murders of Michael Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman until he was in eighth grade. Clemons has since devoted much of his life to ensuring the children of Mississippi and elsewhere learn exactly what happened duringFreedom Summer, the 1964 campaign to register blacks to vote in a climate rife with violent resistance. Clemons later became co-founder and president of the Philadelphia Coalition, a multiracial taskforce formed in 2004 and charged with planning the public commemoration of and memorial to the slain civil-rights workers. Clemons, who helped Mississippi develop the country’s first mandated civil-rights curriculum for K-12 students, now directs community relations at theWilliam Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation.
Leroy Clemons, president of the Neshoba County, Mississippi branch of the NAACP, gives a tour of Freedom Summer sites, including this memorial to slain civil rights workers Andrew Goodman, James Chaney and Michael Schwerner. (Photo: Liz Willen)
Liz Willen of The Hechinger Report spoke with Clemons duringa recent tour of Freedom Summer sites in Mississippi. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Question: You’ve often said that education is the best lever for change, and that if you don’t know your history, you will be condemned to repeat it. Yet Mississippi’s children lag behind their peers in the rest of the United States on nearly every measure. As the 50th anniversary of Freedom Summer approaches, racial division and inequities still run deep in the state, and there’s still a large achievement gap between black and white
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