The Journal o f Negro Education, 85 ( 2), 101-113 The 2015 Charles H. Thompson Lecture-Colloquium Presentation Why Black Lives (and Minds) Matter: Race, Freedom Schools & the Quest for Educational Equity Tyrone C. Howard University of California, Los Angeles A number of challenges continue to influence the schooling experience o f Black students. While some progress has been made for some, chronic underperformance has remained largely unchanged over the past two decades. What has become increasingly a part o f the experiences o f Black children and other students o f color has been the increasing police presence in schools. In 2015 attention was brought to the presence o fpolice in schools when a South Carolina officer violently removed and slammed a young girl from her desk for defiant behavior in a case that garnered national attention. In this work, the salience and purpose o fschool police is examined, and in response to the current state of affairs, Children’s Defense Fund Freedom Schools are offered and discussed as a way o f reimagining schools for Black children free ofpolice presence and as a way to re-center learning, literacy and culture. Keywords: Black students, literacy, policing schools In 2013 in response to a preponderance of violence and unaccounted for destruction of Black lives in the United States, in particular unarmed Black men and boys being murdered at the hands of police and law enforcement, the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement was bom. In a period of two brief years, the Black Lives Matter movement became an international, politically driven activist movement that says it campaigns, organizes, and protests against violence toward Black people. One of the primary foci of BLM has been protest around the shootings of Black people at the hands of the police and police brutality that has been rampant in this country for centuries, but has become increasingly visible over the past two decades in what is purported to be a civil and democratic society (Marable, 2007). The Black Lives Matter movement began with the use of the hashtag, #BlackLivesMatter on social media and gained increased and intense attention after the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the shooting death of African American teenager Trayvon Martin. The Black Lives Matter movement gained additional attention after the 2014 deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri; Eric Gamer in New York City, Tamir Rice in Cleveland, Ohio, and Ezell Ford in Los Angeles when supporters spoke out vehemently about the senseless murders of unarmed Black lives, that did not include any officers being held accountable for these deaths. Several other African Americans who died at the hands of police officers have had their deaths protested by the movement, including Eric Harris, Natasha McKenna, Walter Scott, Janisha Fonville, Jonathan Ferrell, Sandra Bland, Tanisha Anderson, Samuel DuBose and Freddie Gray. The Black Lives Matter movement calls itself a decentralized network, enhanced by social media, with no formal or designated hierarchy, elected leaders or prescribed structure. A perusal of the Black Lives Matter website (www.blacklivesmatter.com) states that the movement is “unapologetically Black” and has often been described as the Black millennial movement, and not a moment, and on its website it also considers itself the following: • The Black protest movement of the 21 st century • Intersectional, Intergenerational ©The Journal o fNegro Education, 2016, Vol. 85, No. 2 101