Oral history with Sandra Adickes

              An Oral History with Sandra Adickes
This oral history is provided through a cooperative project of USM Libraries and USM's Center for Oral History and Cultural Heritage It is presented here for reference purposes only. Interviews in this collection are protected by copyright and PERMISSION TO PUBLISH MUST BE REQUESTED from the Center for Oral History and Cultural Heritage. Please call ( 601) 266- 4574 for more information.
Biography
Dr. Sandra Adickes was born in New York City on July 14, 1933. She earned a B. A. in English from Douglass College in New Brunswick, New Jersey; an M. A. in English education from Hunter College of the City University of New York; and a doctorate in English and American literature at New York University. In 1960, Dr. Adickes began teaching public school in Harlem in New York City. In 1963, Dr. Adickes was an English teacher in an East Harlem high school. That summer, through a project sponsored by the United Federation of Teachers ( UFT), Dr. Adickes got involved in freedom school efforts in Prince Edward County, Virginia, where she taught African- Americans whose public schools the county had closed when the Brown v. the Board of Education decision mandated integration in 1954. During that summer of 1963, Ivanhoe Donaldson, an organizer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee [ SNCC], recruited Dr. Adickes to teach in freedom schools in Mississippi during the summer of 1964-- a time that has come to be known as Freedom Summer. The Mississippi freedom schools were designed to challenge the inequities of Mississippi's segregated school system by providing an academic curriculum that included African- American literature and history. Dr. Adickes lobbied the UFT for sponsorship of the Mississippi Freedom Summer freedom schools; she raised funds; she persuaded publishers to contribute books; and she recruited teachers. During Mississippi's Freedom Summer, Dr. Adickes was a teacher at the freedom school in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, for a six- week session. On the last day of class, August 14, 1964, Dr. Adickes accompanied some of her students in an effort to integrate Hattiesburg's public library. After leaving a Kress store where a waitress had refused to serve her because she was a white woman accompanying African- Americans, Dr. Adickes was arrested and charged with vagrancy. Dr. Adickes and her attorney, the Honorable Eleanor Piel, sued Kress for denying Dr. Adickes' civil rights and conspiring in her arrest. The case, Adickes v. Kress, went all the way to the United States Supreme Court, and, in 1970, resulted in a decision in Dr. Adickes favor, plus a cash settlement. Dr. Adickes contributed the cash settlement to the Southern Conference Education Fund, which was dispersed for education to people who had been active in the civil rights movement. Dr. Adickes has continued her activism through the anti- war movement, the women's liberation movement, and confronting racism, sexism, and homophobia in the classroom, advising her students: " The issues we addressed continue to divide our society; don't romanticize, organize."
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