This summer my big sister Olive Wright Covington passed away. Olive was a beloved daughter, sister, mother, grandmother, aunt, church and community leader, mentor, and friend, and throughout her life, she was respected and loved as a gifted and passionate educator. The Children’s Defense Fund is especially grateful for her service in laying the foundation for the flagship CDF Freedom Schools® program.
Olive left our hometown of Bennettsville, South Carolina to attend Fisk University in Nashville, and after graduation returned to South Carolina, where she began her professional life teaching in schools at every level. She then moved to Washington, D.C. with her husband and two daughters, Joy and Maggie, where she taught in the D.C. Public Schools for eight years. Alongside her work in the classroom, she began developing and leading teacher training programs. After she retired she moved back to Bennettsville, and there she began a new phase of “retirement” supporting CDF Freedom Schools’ early development.
The CDF Freedom Schools movement has its roots in the Civil Rights Movement and the Freedom Schools founded by Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) volunteers during the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer project. Olive helped design the vision for the new generation of Freedom Schools programming that would serve children’s needs 30 years later. The church parsonage in Bennettsville where I was born and raised became the incubator and curriculum laboratory for the CDF Freedom Schools pilot program. Marlboro County, South Carolina, along with Kansas City, Missouri, and seven other sponsors, hosted the first official CDF Freedom Schools sites in the summer of 1995.
Olive understood the deep need for opportunities like this in communities like ours. Many local children had nothing to do between May and August when school was not in session. Elementary school students wound up babysitting younger siblings; teenage pregnancy rates were high; and children who were eligible for nutritious breakfasts and lunches from the federal school meals program during the school year were going hungry. Meanwhile, many local students who’d gone on to college were not coming home during the summer because there weren’t enough work opportunities, so younger children were missing the chance to get to know those older students from their neighborhood and church communities as mentors or role models. Olive was able to help make the connections between those needs and the potential of the CDF Freedom Schools program, which is staffed by trained college-aged “servant leaders” and in some cases teachers and serves children in communities across the country where quality academics.
