In 2006, Charles M. Payne (historian & sociologist working in the areas of civil rights activism, urban education reform, and social inequality), Tara Mack and Susan Wilcox (who were at The Brotherhood/Sister Sol), and Mariame Kaba (founder of Project Nia) met in Chicago to discuss rekindling the Education for Liberation Network (ELN) listserv. While attending American Education Research Association (AERA) a few years before, Charles had assembled the listserv of Black educators working on social justice, and the Chicago meeting was planned to explore strategies for generating more meaningfully interaction, learning, and building together. The idea to create a space where young people would be centered, where people of color would lead, where everyone was a teacher and a learner, and where people could start to better define what an education for liberation meant was sparked. A few weeks after the Chicago meet-up, Tara (who would become Ed Lib’s founding director) and Susan (a former Ed Lib Board member) named the event in an organic call and response when one said free minds and the other free people; and so Free Minds, Free People (FMFP) was born. (Tara and Susan still argue over the comma!)

The first conference was held in July 2007 in Chicago at Little Village High School and was sponsored by four lead organizations: Education for Liberation Network, The Brotherhood/Sister Sol, Chicago Freedom School, the University of Chicago. Three hundred people attended and the palpable energy and tangible takeaways were so valuable that folks wanted to the conference to be an annual event. Exhausted from the heavy lift, the organizers decided to implement a bi-annual format, and since that first summer FMFP has taken place in different cities across the country: Houston (2009), Providence (2011), Chicago (2013), Oakland (2015), Baltimore (2017), Minneapolis (2019), and our first Virtual (2021).