.png)
Saving Themselves for Themselves: The Community-Controlled Schools Movement in Boston
The Ujima Press WIRE continues to head Black to School; writer and curator Jovanna Walker offers us a window into community-control in education, and a geography of Black-led experiments combatting segregation and provisioning positive self-image, politics, and place-based learning.
“We are beautiful people.
We will grow, learn, and become strong.
As a member of the Highland Park Free School Family, I will do my best to live by Nguzo Saba :
Umoja — Unity, to strive for and maintain unity, family, community, nation, and race.
Kujichagulia — self determination. To provide for ourselves, name ourselves, and speak for ourselves instead of being defined and spoken for by others.
Imani — Faith. To believe with all our hearts, in ourselves, our parents, our teachers, our people, our leaders, and the righteousness and victory of our struggle.”(1) — Jim Cooper and the 1975 class of Highland Park Free School
Founded in 1968 by concerned Black and white parents, the Highland Park Free School served as an experimental community-control school rooted in Afrocentric education and culture. Every morning, dozens of Black children from Roxbury, North Dorchester, and the South End would funnel into the narrow doorway of the Highland Park Free School in the Roxbury Highlands and recite these words while bonded together, holding hands, in a circle.
Dissatisfied—not only with the education that their children were receiving in Boston Public Schools, but also with the lack of agency they had in shaping the day to day operations of the schools—Boston parents came together to imagine and construct an alternative institution that could teach their children their true history and welcome parents as active participants in, and determiners of, learning processes. Parents became administrators, teachers, and policy makers within the Highland Park Free School community.
Highland Park was not an anomaly. Between the early 1960s and the 1980s, dozens of community-controlled schools and Afrocentric alternative schools emerged within the urban enclaves of Boston, specifically in Roxbury, Dorchester, Jamaica Plain, and the South End. “Community control,” a popular organizing tactic and rallying cry first echoing out in the mid-1960s across the United States (and picked up by organizers including those behind Mandela, MA), was rooted in ideals of racial autonomy and self-determination laid out by Black nationalists, intercommunalists, and everyday community members, placing governance power in the hands of parents and children. Black nationalist organizers, many veterans of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), brought Black consciousness and decolonized education models to the fore, viewing schools as the “placenta of the nation.”(2) Community- controlled schools tied themselves to larger projects of world building and, in the words of long-time Boston activist and educator Ellen Swepson Jackson, became shared acts of "saving themselves for themselves.”(3)
Pre-existing Conditions and Organizing
As Black education historian Dr. Jarvis Givens notes, “Black education was a fugitive project from its inception;” we can see this clearly in Boston’s educational history. Concerted efforts to guarantee quality education for Black children begin with Black abolitionist Primus Hall, opening up his home to serve as a classroom in 1798. Less than a decade later, classes moved to the first floor of the African Meeting House in Beacon Hill, the contemporary site of Boston’s only African American History Museum and an early hub for Boston’s Black residents.
A boom in Boston’s Black population, combined with racism, residential segregation and ongoing migratory pressures (externally, The Great Migration’s northward push; internally, southward shifts from Beacon Hill and the West End towards the South End and Roxbury) created the conditions for de facto school segregation, unequally-allocated resources, and an attendant community outcry and organizing response (4). Out of the 13 schools in Boston with a majority Black population at the time, 11 of the physical buildings were more than 50 years old, with the construction of some buildings dating back to the mid-19th-century. Four of those schools were recommended to be “abandoned for health and safety reasons,” while the rest were advised to be heavily “renovated in order to meet the present educational requirements.” This underinvestment in Black children also meant that students underperformed in diagnostic and achievement tests: Black children often fell below citywide test score averages, and were often denied from technical high schools across the city—problems which persisted until COVID-era reforms pushed by Black parents and educators. As Paul Parks (Chairman of the Education Committee for the Boston chapter of the NAACP) articulated in 1963, segregation reinforced a reality of second-class citizenship that Black Bostonians had already felt; “nothing but a radical change in the thinking of the Boston School Administration can provide the opportunities which Negroes demand.”(5)
The Boston chapter of the NAACP, led by Ruth Batson and Paul Parks, presented a list of 14 demands to the Boston School Committee on June 11, 1963; the first demand was for the School Committee to acknowledge that the Boston Public School system was segregated. Nine more demands centered on improving the school system with specific programs, while the last four pressed for educational equity—culturally-relevant curricula, and an increase in Black administrators. The Boston School Committee quickly denied all claims of segregation, and refused responsibility (6). Less than a week later, community activists from local churches, grassroots organizations, and political collectives came together to organize the first Stay Out for Freedom walkout on June 18, 1963, calling for Black and white students of consciousness to not attend school in protest. More than 3,000 student-participants in the demonstration were assigned to various Freedom Schools across the city; curricula centered Black history and tenets of self determination (predating, and perhaps inspiring, the practice of Freedom School organizing for Black political power and self-determination in Mississippi) (7).
Courtesy of the Charles Glenn Photographic Collection at the Boston Public Library: Freedom Stay-Out Days and Freedom Schools
The Stay Out for Freedom became so successful that the effort was repeated the following year in February, turning out nearly 8,000 students attending more than 24 freedom schools in religious centers, meeting houses and local YMCAs. At the end of each Freedom School day, students received attendance slips and diplomas to certify their participation and engagement.
Still, activists did not believe that single-day demonstrations once a year were enough to sustain necessary organizing around education. Community-controlled schools arose in their wake, redressing unequal access to resources and proving that Black and multicultural communities believed in their children and were capable of improving their education on their own terms.
Aberration, Alternative: Autonomy
Following years of community organizing, an economically and racially integrated group of concerned parents came together to imagine and realize an alternative public school in Roxbury, including Noel Day—a co-lead organizer for the Freedom Stay-Outs. The New School for Children, the first of the “new independent schools for the poor,” opened its doors in September 1966.
With an estimated budget of $100,000, the New School sought to build an institution that was racially and economically integrated, truly inclusive of the public (8). Tuition was set at $250 per student; scholarships were available to cover all or part of the cost for families who could not afford it. The Office for the New School for Children, which sat opposite the Roxbury Municipal Court House on Warren Street, accepted applications between the hours of 9 am and 9 pm, far later than other school offices, and more than 4,000 appeal letters were sent out to families in the Greater Boston area to ensure that students and parents would know about and apply to join the school.
Noel Day would become the Chairman of the Board of Trustees, and described the New School while planning it as an act of faith (9). The New School radically shifted their approach to schooling, anticipating similar developments in charter schools and independent schools to come decades later: the school developed new equipment and classroom furniture in a design laboratory; textbooks, filmstrips, and other materials related specifically to the social and historical contexts students experienced in Boston were assembled and integrated into the curriculum (10). Black professors from nearby Northeastern University—including African American Studies lecturers Daniel Nyangani and JoAnn Brown Gray, and artists trained at the National Center of Afro-American Artists—would provide students with artistic and educational experiences at least once a week, every week (11). The New School also encouraged students to complete projects outside the walls of the school, viewing the city as a pedagogical resource. Within the same year, “a group of parents who were tired of the fruitless protests against the Boston School Committee” (12) would found the Roxbury Community School.
Sharing a similar vision to the New School for Children, the Roxbury Community School offered distinct positions for community members to be active participants in the school environment; for instance, community mothers accompanied each professional teacher (13). Administrators wanted the building to serve as a space that could meet the needs of the community. As such, it was important for the Roxbury Community School to own its own building on 1 Leyland Street in Uphams Corner, serving 132 students a year. . Local educational and health institutions offered distinct social services, including a dental screening program, frequent preventative medical presentations, diagnostic and remedial reading clinics, and speech and language assistance; these schools were among the first to develop these kinds of wrap-around support for students. Hot lunches and breakfast were provided to students daily at no-cost, and more than 2,000 hardcover volumes filled the school library. Other students outside of the school became involved, too, including a handful of high school students paid to work at the K-6 school (14).
Momentum around alternative models for education continued to build; two years later, the Highland Park Free School was founded nearby on Hawthorne Street (15). The Highland Park Free School had two distinct objectives: to provide “quality education for a limited number of children in a parent-controlled, community-based setting. And [to] develop a model for public education which could both serve as a level to effect major change in the public schools and help define public policies supportive of community-controlled education.” (16) The Highland Park Free School would go on to exceed these functional missions, aiming to provide an Afrocentric education to enrolled students and enlivening the curricula with cultural organizing.
More than 115 students from primarily low-income backgrounds, between pre-kindergarten and grade eight, were divided across five classroom units (17). Children participated year-long workshops on Black language and reading, and participate in six-week-seminar programs with the Cambridge Montessori School, including seminars on African folktales, the history of the Earth, and drama (18). Jazz ensembles and theatre and dance companies routinely hosted free performances bringing to light “current political issues peculiar to Third World people.” (19) The curriculum and revolutionary pedagogy of Afrocentric schools received criticism from some community members: a few concerned parents and community members felt children should be guided towards a critical consciousness, rather than taught didactically (20). Still, parents and formal educators of the school saw standardized test scores improve, and many of the children who graduated in eighth grade were described by coordinator Marie Lindahl as “self-confident, brave children who can bounce back from whatever difficulties they meet in the outside world,” going on to attend competitive public and private schools across the state (21).
Despite the high community engagement and expansive curriculum, funding troubles cut short the longevity of each of these schools. The New School for Children and Highland Park Free School received philanthropic grants from the Ford Foundation, but both institutions worked to garner funding from community members, artists, and professionals to ensure community accountability, self-determination, and sovereignty. Many middle-class Black and white children attended the New School, creating financial cross-stabilization for the first three years of the program; but the Highland Park Free School, which was tuition-free to maintain access for working class and poor Black families, consistently struggled to keep their doors open. There were constant financial constraints that impacted the quality of resources and the maintenance of community spaces within the school. In order to save operations, community representatives and organizers from the three prominent schools came together to form the Federation of Boston Community Schools (22). The federation eased some financial burdens and offered paths forward for transparency and community-based solution-finding, but all three schools would ultimately close their doors in the 1970s and 80s.
Legacy
The community-controlled and Afrocentric alternative schools of Boston were laboratories for educational innovation and multicultural sovereignty—these institutions demonstrated that communities could create and define educational institutions that served their needs and aspirations. Difficulties in sustaining funding and refining pedagogical practices do not signify inherent failures. The frameworks that these community members and educators in Boston created and nurtured have paved the way for other private African-centered and community-led schools in Boston—Angela and Joe Cook, Roxbury-rooted Black parents wanting better for their child, Paige, established Paige Academy one year before the Highland Park Free School closed, in September 1975. Operating on an educational philosophy of cultural resonance and Nguzo Saba, Paige Academy is still open today. The Che Lumumba School, operating out of UMass Amherst, is another tail of this legacy.
Community-control, while controversial in implementation, continues to influence how schools orient themselves toward Black, Latinx, wealth-extracted communities today. The present-day Community Schools movement, founded thirty years ago, owes a debt to the wrap-around support and holistic approach to schooling developed first via community-control advocates, and articulated by Progressive Era school reformer John Dewey at the start of the twentieth century. Community Schools operate now in Philadelphia, New York, Chicago; coalitions to support Community Schools exist in at least twenty-seven states. Over the past five years, Boston Public Schools has developed and launched a program reminiscent of the community-centered pedagogy of the 1960s, to address contemporary issues in public schools across the city and implement their own version of Community Schools. Boston Community Hub Schools seek to engage extant resources in a community, including local businesses and nonprofit organizations, to create better conditions for learning inside and outside of school buildings. Inspired by Freedom Schools, Community Hub Schools claim to prioritize a “culture of belonging and safety”, as well as “collaborative leadership” and “family engagement.” (23) Under this model, experienced educators control classroom instruction, while family liaisons work to increase family involvement in students’ educational lives, and social workers work directly with students to meet their needs in and out of school. Community Hub School Coordinators then work across all levels to meet the needs of the school community, which includes the student, family, and outside community. With the larger community in mind, Community Hubs prioritize working with local vendors, including restaurants, DJs, and barbers, to stimulate the local economy and connect students with opportunities and culturally-relevant programming. As of the 2024-2025 school year, there are twenty Community Hub Schools across the city, primarily in Roxbury and Dorchester; the program’s goal is to expand district-wide, to every school.
Community Hub Schools are guided by the Community Schools Forward framework, six key principles ranging from community-connected classroom instruction to integrated systems of support. Developed by the Brookings Institute, National Center for Community Schools, Coalition for Community Schools, and the Institute for Educational Leadership (IEL), the framework does not fully uptake ideas and learnings concretized in community-controlled schools: Community Hub Schools position teachers and the classroom as central to learning, with community liaisons as auxiliary supports, reaffirming an educational hierarchy that community organizers and families worked to dismantle in the Roxbury Community School, Highland Park Free School, and the New School for Children. Community aides, guest university lecturers, and local performers and artists were just as essential to the academic success of Black children as full-time teachers—distinct roles in traditional public schools were blurred in community-controlled schools to ensure that all community members felt empowered to resolve community issues and to make decisions in their schools. Further, community-controlled schools practiced a kind of devolution of power to community members not found in Hub schools: all programs and services within community-controlled schools were determined by Community School Councils, a group of locally selected neighborhood residents. The Council would then be responsible for various aspects of running the school, but most importantly, for assessing the needs of its own local neighborhood and materially responding to those needs with programs; not so in Community Schools, still principally governed by principals, superintendents, and boards of education. Still, Community Hub Schools are a step in the right direction, and perhaps represent a conciliation toward a movement led by Black parents and educators—proving that their protracted struggle was rooted in the right concerns, and that self-determination and making our own models surface insights unavailable to traditional structures.
Community-controlled schools demonstrate that we can create institutions that serve all of our needs. There is a rich and vast history of community-led efforts to save our children and ensure their academic success. Looking towards community-controlled schools allows us to further imagine what opportunities exist for alternative education and world-building in pursuit of Black sovereignty.
Endnotes:
“Say Brother: National Edition; Desegregation; 112,” 1975-12-31, WGBH, American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), Boston, MA and Washington, DC, accessed September 26, 2026, http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-15-9hh6c57b.
Russell Rickford, We Are an African People: Independent Education, Black Power, and the Radical Imagination (Oxford University Press, 2016), 4.
Ellen Jackson, “Speech, Ford Hall Forum with Jonathan Kozol,” 1967, Phyllis M. Ryan Papers, Box 3, Folder 39, Northeastern University Archives.
Paul Parks, “A Statement on the Education of Negro Children in the Boston Public Schools,” May 22, 1963, Freedom House, Inc. Records, Box 38, Folder 1309, Northeastern University Archives. https://hdl.handle.net/2047/D20707971, 1.
Parks, “A Statement on the Education of Negro Children in the Boston Public Schools,” 3.
Zebulon Vance Miletsky, Before Busing: A History of Boston's Long Black Freedom Struggle, (University of North Carolina Press, 2022), 109.
Ruth Baston, The Black Educational Movement in Boston: A Sequence of Historical Events: A Chronology, (Northeastern University School of Education, 2001), 91.
Noel A. Day, “Letter from Noel A. Day about New School for Children and Call for Donations,” 1966, Freedom House, Inc. Records, Box 38, Folder 1314, Northeastern University Archives. https://hdl.handle.net/2047/D20708029.
Noel A. Day, “Letter from Noel A. Day,” 1966
Newspaper clipping from Bay State Banner, "Community school to open in fall," 1966, Freedom House, Inc. Records, Box 38, Folder 1314, Northeastern University Archives.
“African American Studies’ Professors,” The Onyx: The Black Voice of Northeastern University (Boston, Massachusetts), November 1979. http://hdl.handle.net/2047/D20387941, 5.
Roxbury Community School, “Roxbury Community Schools,” 1966, Frank J. Miranda Papers, Box 1, Folder 16, Northeastern University Archives, http://hdl.handle.net/2047/D20128483, 1.
Roxbury Community School, “Roxbury Community Schools,” 2.
William E. Williams, “Document and Letter about Roxbury Community School Development,” 1971, Freedom House, Inc. Records, Box 39, Folder 1344, Northeastern University Archives, http://hdl.handle.net/2047/D20630418, 5.
Baston, The Black Educational Movement in Boston, 307.
Baston, The Black Educational Movement in Boston, 369a.
Baston, The Black Educational Movement in Boston, 370.
Metropolitan Planning Project, “Metro Ways to Understanding, a Plan for the Voluntary Elimination of Racial and Ethnic Isolation in the Schools of the Boston Metropolitan Area (1 of 3),”Metropolitan Council for Educational Opportunity, Inc. Records, Box 25, Folder 36, Northeastern University Archives, http://hdl.handle.net/2047/D20205779, 137.
“Theatre: Upcoming,” The Boston Phoenix (Boston, Massachusetts), November 23, 1976. https://hdl.handle.net/2047/D20689246, 38.
Rickford, We Are an African People, 90.
Baston, The Black Educational Movement in Boston, 371.
Baston, The Black Educational Movement in Boston, 342.
“Boston Community Hub Schools,” Boston Public Schools, accessed September 28, 2026, https://www.bostonpublicschools.org/academics/boston-community-hub-schools.
Bio: Jovanna Walker (she/her) is a Black queer museum educator, curator, and organizer born and raised in Boston, Massachusetts. Her curatorial practice is rooted in an undying love for African diasporic people and a prioritization of knowledge produced with/in counterpublics. She is currently a second-year Public Humanities graduate student at Brown University, where her research and practical experiences investigate the possibilities of utilizing museums and other institutions as venues for fugitivity, freedom dreaming, and co-collaboration in the pursuit of decolonization and collective liberation.
