In the
summer of 1954, educator Septima Clark and small businessman Esau Jenkins
travelled to rural Tennessee’s Highlander Folk School, an interracial training
center for social change founded by Myles Horton, a white southerner with roots
in the labor movement. There, the trio united behind a shared mission:
preparing Black southerners to pass the daunting Jim Crow era voter
registration literacy tests that were designed to disenfranchise them.
Together with beautician-turned-teacher Bernice Robinson, they launched the
underground Citizenship Schools project, which began with a single makeshift
classroom hidden in the back of a rural grocery store. By the time the Voting
Rights Act was signed into law in 1965, the secretive undertaking had
established more than nine hundred citizenship schools across the South,
preparing tens of thousands of Black citizens to read and write, demand their
rights—and vote. Simultaneously, it nurtured a generation of activists—many of
them women—trained in community organizing, political citizenship, and tactics
of resistance and struggle who became the grassroots foundation of the Civil
Rights Movement. Dr. King called Septima Clark, “Mother of the Movement.”
In the vein of Hidden Figures and Devil in the Grove, Spell
Freedom is both a riveting, crucially important lens onto
our past, and a deeply moving story for our present.
Elaine
Weiss is an
award-winning journalist, author, and public speaker. In addition to Spell
Freedom, she is the author of Fruits of Victory: The Woman’s Land
Army of the Great War; and The Woman’s Hour: The Great Fight to Win
the Vote.