Mae, on the other hand, grew up on the San Diego, CA area. She was a foster child and succeeded academically despite attending underfunded schools due to the dedicated community that formed around the school. This led her down the path of community organizing.

“I used education as a means of a way to facilitate social change along with others whom I share values with,” Mae said. “And so I really have been a youth activist since I was in high school. And when I went on to college at UC-Berkeley, I really got my chops up in being the Black Student Union co-chair and organizing on campus for affirmative action and against different racial issues. And so it was there in my African American Studies degree that I was like, ‘Oh, the best way for me to do change for the world and in my community was education.’ And so I went on into graduate school thinking that I would stay in community-based organizations as a youth worker. Also being an organizer and activist in college, a lot of things that you do is mentor younger organizers and activists. I love doing that around political education and different organizing tactics and strategies. And so, I kind of got mentored into thinking about a Ph.D.”

Mae earned her Ph.D. in community-based research and youth activism and organizing for educational change. She got a job as a program officer for the Spencer Foundation in Chicago before gravitating to UW-Madison.

“UW-Madison happened to be hiring at the time in Education Policies Studies around someone who does community-based research and particularly works with young people,” Mae said. “And they had a tenure line for an integrated case, which is service and teaching and research that all integrate as a public scholar, community-engaged scholar.”

It was right up her alley.

The idea for the Soulfolk Saturday School came about through research Stovall conducted out of her research lab, the Soulfolk Collective.

“We did 75 interviews with Black Madison residents about their experiences of being Black in Madison, what brought them here, what’s keeping them here and also where are the places that are Black affirming,” Stovall said. “Then we created an online archive of places. There’s a map of Madison and the places that people talked about. You can hear clips of them. And we donated several of the stories to the Wisconsin Historical Society so that you can hear the full interviews. And in the pre-work to that project, I did some pilot interviews of talking with Black, mostly faculty to get a feel for that type of interactive interview. There is a theme of Black parents in particular just really wishing that there was more Black affirming schooling. And one of the people actually said, ‘We actually need a freedom school in Madison. We know that the outcomes for Black youth in Wisconsin is pretty abysmal, the worst in the United States.’”

While creating the Soulfolk Saturday School was important for the Black community, in Stovall’s estimation, it was also personally fulfilling to her.

“I do think that is my calling,” Stovall said. “But I also think that I really believe in the legacy and the mission of freedom schools. And so it allows me to be a part of building on this legacy, but also get back to some of my roots and gifts as a teacher.”

Stovall volunteered with the Black education summits sponsored by Blacks for Political and Social Action of Dane County where she heard the need expressed for a more Black-affirming curriculum. She also volunteered for Delta Sigma Theta Sorority’s Delta Gems at La Follette and Vel Phillips high schools.

“Hearing how Black girls in those high schools are experiencing their learning and their identity development and they are constantly talking about the lack of Black educators, about how they want to learn more than just about slavery and Martin Luther King also led me to found the school,” Stovall said.

And while Stovall was big on the history side of the Freedom School Movement and understood its impact, she had little experience on the community organizing side of the movement. She joined forces with Mae to form the school. Together their different areas of study and life experiences would come together to form the whole of a freedom school. And they relied on the history of freedom schools in the Milwaukee area during the 1960s at the Wisconsin Historical Society to be their guide.

“The first step was to go and find original lesson plans,” Stovall said. “We found through the Wisconsin Historical Society all of the original lesson plans. And we also looked at other ideas from Mississippi and even New Jersey that had some intact lesson plans. At first, we wanted to make sure that we were beholden to the spirit of the Freedom School Movement, even the structure of the day in having music and time to learn about aspirational leaders, having time for art and creation, all of these ideas came from the original Freedom School Movement.”

Stovall and Mae also wanted to make sure that what they were creating was also relevant to the needs of Black students and so they held a focus group with 16 students from four Madison high schools.

“We learned what they wanted to learn about,” Stovall said. “We both understood what they are already learning about Black history, Black culture and Black studies and also what they would like to learn, but also things that are not ‘academic,’ but are really important to them as human beings. We learned a lot about what would motivate them to give up a whole Saturday and do six days of school. We’re taking both the history as well as what the students themselves asked for and we’re developing the curriculum based on that.”

They have also worked closely with MMSD.

“MMSD has been a great partner in this,” Stovall said. “They love the CDF program. We were able to volunteer there this summer a little bit and make sure that we are really building off of the elementary program. But at this time, MMSD doesn’t have plans to expand to high school. That’s why it was really important for us to step in and make this seem like a continual program for MMSD.”

The school will be held for six hours every Saturday from January to May 1^st at the Black Center. While the day will contain lessons in African American history with the basic content coming from Stovall’s university history class so that they will earn college credit, the rest of the curriculum has been designed with the students in mind.

“Students asked for things like, ‘Can we have an hour of the school to do our own work and perhaps have tutors from UW-Madison come in and work with us,’” Stovall related. “The students will also have an academic coach who will help them with executive functioning and meeting academic goals. But then we are also thinking about the creativity, having workshops that allow them to create art, music, painting, podcasts and soul food cooking. They really want to learn soul food cooking. But then also, going back to the social-emotional stuff, the students will have access to a mental health counselor. We’ll give them a certain number of hours of individual or group counseling or therapy. They will have work on physical movement, so we’ll do things from African dance to yoga, but also meditation and peace circles. There will be time to think about mindfulness as well. We’re going to see them and their families. We’re going to have a community breakfast in the spirit of the Black Panther Free Breakfast movement. Every day, we’ll start out that way. We’re going to invite the local community to join us for a hot catered meal. And we’re working with the Perry Family Free Clinic. So any students who are under or uninsured will get access to healthcare for the semester, both physical and mental health services.”

The students will also be learning to be researchers through Mae’s component for which they will each be paid $1,000.

“Creating the curriculum allows me to do all of the things that I felt was in my purpose to do or been trained to do in a myriad of ways,” Mae said. “We’re at this time where civic education, civic engagement is being attacked on all levels. And then you have these viewpoint universities popping up. You have this truth history. You’re seeing the banning of books at astronomical levels. You’re seeing tenure lines, tenure being revoked because of the classes that are taught. You’re seeing African American Studies, African departments being shut down. It’s happening at so many of our peer institutions. And then you have this opportunity to teach historically Black and Brown tradition of what actually is civic education and civic engagement. And it’s really about pouring into this world to make it advance and be better. How do we learn about society and our systems and our structures that both inhibit people from being able to live their full lives in the ways that they see fit, but also where there are openings, histories of resistance and organizing and political education that really substantiates for people behold in their core that we have to lean on each other, work with each other in order to survive all of the things. I think especially having enslaved ancestry, I can’t help but think about the ancestors who were enslaved and still had a dream of being free and then saying that actually education is liberation if we teach it in this way. It’s a beautiful opportunity.”

Stovall and Mae are working closely with MMSD to implement the school.

“We are working with both the multicultural student coordinators and the restorative justice coordinators at the schools to help give the information to families of Black youth,” Stovall said. “And La Follette, East, Vel Phillips and Capitol High are the four schools we are going to pilot. We would like a cohort of six students at each of the schools. We’re planning on two touch points. We’ll go in there once per week to have a cohort meeting, just with the six and then we’ll also see them on the Saturday. The coordinators will help us identify informational meetings for families to come and ask questions. And then we will take applications. I was surprised — Naomi was not surprised — but we asked students in our focus groups if they would go and all of them said yes. Some students were graduating and said they were mad because they couldn’t do it. We got such an enthusiastic response from our focus groups that we are very hopeful that we will get our first 24.”

The team views the spring semester 2027 program as a pilot that will lead to a sustained effort.

“We know that a semester of support is both not enough in terms of what they get in a semester, but also what happens afterwards,” Mae said. “I think it is important for the larger community to know that we’re not naive to think that this is going to change the whole world because we have one semester with these young people. But it’s also understanding this deep investment in our young people in these kinds of ways and the ways that they are saying they want and need, but also the networks of community that they need. It takes a village. And so a lot of what our program is intended to do is to also build what is called critical social capital, other places or spaces to go to where young people need support or have questions or have housing insecurity, a lot of things that I experienced as a young person. And it was through community resources and community families that allowed me to grow. And so I think that is the big thing that I hold here, it’s not that we think it is a one hit and it’s going to be amazing. But this kind of investment is something that needs to be sustained and let’s show you how it goes and we’re going to stay in touch.”

“We also want to do this again in 2029, bigger and bolder,” Stovall added. “But it’s going to take an actual long-term funding to be able to do this. That’s why we are calling this a pilot. We have the amount that we need to make this run. But we are already thinking about how do we make this something that is part of the Madison Way. We just need to be very clear and grateful that people made this happen. But we’re going to need to think more strategically about how to keep it going. It’s something that is very much at the top of our minds.”

For the sake of the community and the future of the children, Stovall and Mae hope that the Madison community gets behind allowing Black students to experience their academic freedom and be a part of change in the Madison area.