Julie Kabot, Dorothy Singletary and Andreesa Coleman Journey To Freedom

Julie Kabat participated vicariously in the events of Freedom Summer through letters from her brother Lucien “Luke” Kabat who taught Freedom School students in Meridian, Mississippi. Luke was a medical student at Stanford University who died in 1966. In 2023 the University Press of Mississippi published Love Letter from Pig, Julie’s affectionate memoir about Luke and his experiences as a civil rights worker. Julie has toured internationally as a composer, singer, performer, and storyteller. She worked for over forty years as a teaching artist in public schools.

Dorothy Singletary is Andressa Coleman’s younger sister. She tagged along with Andressa to the community center where Luke Kabat taught in the summer of 1964. “The volunteers were different (than white people in Meridian),” she remembered. “They would actually play with you and not call you names.” Luke helped her read aloud. “He told me to slow down, slow down. I was stumbling because I went too fast.” Dorothy later moved to Albany where she worked for many years as a day care and Head Start teacher.

Andreesa Coleman is one of nine children, seven sisters and two brothers, in the close-knit Thompson family of Meridian, Mississippi. In the summer of 1964, she attended the Meridian Freedom School where she was taught by Luke Kabat. “The volunteers were the first white people we ever met who would interact with you,” she reminisced. She has vivid memories of the day Luke brought a cow’s heart to class to demonstrate how it circulated blood to the body. When she moved to Albany, Andreesa worked as a daycare teacher and then a health therapist at the Capital District Psychiatric Center.

The Journey to Freedom project has recorded the stories of women and men from the Capital Region of New York who participated in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. Many traveled to the segregated Deep South. Others were active in their home communities. All worked to advance social justice. Their stories highlight the powerful impact that regular folks can have in effecting change, and the importance of documenting the histories of everyday heroes.

Siena College professor Dr. Paul Murray and co-producer educator Donald Hyman worked with videographers Kirk Daniels and Zebulon Schmidt to record and make publicly available the histories of 15 activists. Attendees of this webinar will learn the history of this project, its development process, and ways they can undertake similar projects in their home communities.