Although state funding had been essentially equalized by 1963, local school districts in Mississippi continued to spend four times as much money in white schools as they spent in black ones. Sometimes the number went even higher. For example, the "Holly Bluff school system spent $191.17 each year per white student and only $1.26 for each black student."

     In 1964, to address this gross inequity, the Congress of Racial Equality – CORE, with the assistance of volunteers from SNCC and NAACP, established 30 Freedom Schools in towns throughout Mississippi. Volunteers taught in the schools and, in addition to teaching the three R's, these schools also taught African and African American History, classes on citizenship and voting procedures, and political science, among a host of other things.

     One activist noted that the freedom schools were needed because most black children "didn't see the inside of a school till the last of December, because you'd be out there picking cotton, pulling corn, and what have you." These students hardly received adequate educations  

     Freedom Schools were often targets of white mobs. So also were the homes of local African Americans involved in the campaign. That summer 30 black homes and 37 black churches were firebombed. Over 80 volunteers were beaten by white mobs or racist police officers.

     Vicksburg activist Charles Chiplin told of one experience with the Freedom School in his town. He explained that "white folks particularly knew that at a freedom school, black folks would be teaching things that were contrary to what they had taught us in their history books." As a result, "they bombed the Baptist Academy" where the Freedom School was located. Chiplin mentioned that one of the Freedom School teachers barely survived this bombing because his mother persuaded him to stay at her house and eat. He noted that that very night, the building was bombed, "and where he would have slept on a cot, he would have been killed. So he was eternally grateful to Rosa Chiplin for saving his life."

     Although the organizers and participants suffered economic and physical reprisals, "the schools captured the imagination of Mississippi blacks" and enhanced their self-esteem and sense of dignity. The city of Hattiesburg became home to the "largest freedom school program in the state, with more than 600 students showing up on the first day of registration." During the summer of 1964 over 3,000 students attended these schools and the experiment provided a model for future educational programs such as Head Start.