On a hot and languid morning in the city, as police made their usual patrols on littered streets with boarded-up buildings, a jubilant scene bloomed inside the gymnasium of Thirman L. Milner School.

Hip-hop thumped from a portable speaker at half court, the post-breakfast soundtrack for dozens of Hartford children who freestyled dance moves with shoulder leans and leaps into the air, fists raised to the ceiling minutes of unabashed joy that cut through the gym's stuffy humidity.

The elementary students were here for a summer literacy program called Freedom School, and for many there was nowhere else they'd rather be.

When the school's namesake arrived in his tan suit and offered a "good morning," the response for 83-year-old Thirman Milner, who was Hartford's first African American mayor, came to the beat of a drum.

"G-O-O-D M-O-R-N-I-N-G!" the kids chanted, before translating the greeting to Spanish. "Buenos dias!"

Midway through the six-week Freedom School program, a national initiative in its second summer at Milner, students had become well-versed in Afrocentric call-and-response, in affirmation and exultation, in letting their guard down enough to dream. They had taken field trips to farms, museums and bowling alleys, and picnicked near the pristine roses of Elizabeth Park, less than three miles from Milner's concrete courtyard.

Mark Mirko / Hartford Courant

Milner is a chronically low-performing neighborhood school in the North End. During Freedom School, children are told that they can be good readers and that they are worthy.

Messages of self-empowerment, and of helping one's community, are in the songs they sing and the culturally relevant books they read. As a guest reader that morning, Milner, the ex-mayor, brought a children's book version of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have A Dream" speech.

"It builds their confidence up to make them believe in themselves that they can do anything," said Tamara Jones Roberts, one of the Milner mothers who took cellphone photos of their children dancing in the gym. The free spirit is part of a morning ritual called "Harambee!," which the program translates to "let's pull together" in Swahili. Students at the Milner site range from kindergartners to those who just finished third grade.

"Sometimes, outside of school," Roberts said, "they don't get that positive energy."

The network of Freedom Schools was founded by the Children's Defense Fund and the Black Community Crusade for Children in the 1990s, rooted in social justice tenets dating back to the civil rights movement. Now the Children's Defense Fund oversees sites in more than 25 states across the country, including three Freedom Schools in Connecticut all in north Hartford, where the programs preach a love for reading as an antidote to the blight of poverty.

Educators for Freedom Schools say the immediate goal is to stem summer reading loss, although the bigger vision revolves around literacy as power and disrupting the school-to-prison pipeline that disproportionately hurts black and Latino students.

"We don't want them to slip off in the summer," said Danny Baker, 23, of Hartford, one of the college students helping out children at Milner's Freedom School. "We want them to know that learning is a year-round thing ... . And I tell my students that they are the best, so don't let anybody tell them they're less than that."

Mark Mirko / Hartford Courant

A Hartford church group hosted an early version of the summer program in the mid-'90s, recruiting college students known as "crusaders" who helped students with their academics and self-esteem.

It would be another two decades before the current model took root in Connecticut's capital. Marian Wright Edelman, founder and president of the Children's Defense Fund, gave a speech at the University of Hartford three months after the Dec. 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown.

Addressing hundreds in the audience, Edelman "challenged us to start Freedom Schools to have a more peaceful environment, so that's how it started," said Marge Swaye, a former director of literacy and language arts for the Hartford school system who helped set the wheels in motion.

The Women's League Child Development Center on Main Street, near SAND School, became a Freedom School site last summer and hosts 50 elementary students with $62,000 in funding, Swaye said. Milner's program is sponsored by Christian Activities Council, a community organizing group down the street from the school that raised $100,000 from a mix of public, church and philanthropic sources for the full-day program that regularly draws about 75 students who attend for free.

"It's designed to infuse a social-action component into literacy," said Cori Mackey, executive director of Christian Activities Council. "It really fits our mission of developing leaders."

Phillips Metropolitan CME Church on Main Street also hosts a Freedom School in a modified program, said Swaye, who is looking to expand to more Hartford schools and community groups.

The Hartford school system provides breakfast and lunches, as well as certified teachers in the case of Milner, which is designated as one of the district's Early Start summer schools. While not all of the Freedom School students at Milner attend the school during the regular academic year, many of them do and school leaders say it is critical to improve their reading skills by third grade.

Third-grade reading is a fundamental benchmark in education: Research has shown that children who fall behind at this pivotal point are less likely to graduate from high school, perpetuating the cycle of poverty. Year to year, test scores show that few Milner third-graders are proficient in reading.

Experts say this achievement gap is why summer literacy initiatives are especially crucial for children in poor neighborhoods, who are more prone than wealthier students to losing reading skills during the extended break. Upper-income families have more resources to invest in camps, lessons or arrange for other structured activities that often weave in literacy, such as writing a script for a play at summer camp, said Catherine Augustine, a senior policy researcher at the RAND Corporation.

Milner teacher Susan Hunt-LaKose, who usually teaches fifth grade during the year, said her Freedom School students had just read "Destiny's Gift" by Natasha Anastasia Tarpley, the story of a local bookstore on the verge of shutting down because rent is too high. An African American girl named Destiny, who loved hanging out at the store, rallied the community to try to save it.

"All you heard was, 'This reminds me of ... ,'" Hunt-LaKose said of her students. "It empowers them, even from a young age, to know that they make a difference."

Program leaders at Women's League and Milner said they assessed a sample group of students last summer, and found that at the end of the program, the vast majority had maintained or improved their reading level. Hunt-LaKose, in her second Freedom School summer, said the book selections with themes such as immigration and overcoming racism are enticing for kids because they can connect the reading to their everyday lives.

In a Milner classroom, students were asked what special talents they could use to help their community. Cesar Feliz, 7, who will be entering third grade soon, spoke of living his truest self.

"I'm just me. I'm my own person, and I will always be that person, and I will always be myself," Cesar told his teacher. "I am not a weapon I am me."

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