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Septima Poinsette Clark (May 3, 1898 – December 15, 1987) was an African American educator and civil rights activist. Clark developed the literacy and citizenship workshops that played an important role in the drive for voting rights and civil rights for African Americans in the Civil Rights Movement. Clark’s argument for her position in the Civil Rights Movement was one that claimed “knowledge could empower marginalized groups in ways that formal legal equality couldn’t.”
Clark graduated from high school in 1916. Due to financial constraints, she was not able to attend college initially, so she took a state examination at the age of eighteen to allow her to teach. As an African American, she was barred from teaching in the Charleston, South Carolina public schools, but was able to find a position teaching in a rural school district, on John’s Island, the largest of the Sea Islands. She taught on the islands from 1916 to 1919 at Promise Land School and then returned to Avery from 1919 to 1920. She was able to return to school part-time in Columbia, South Carolina to complete her B.A. at Benedict in 1942 and then she received her M.A. from Hampton. During this time, she taught children during the day and illiterate adults on her own time at night. During this period she developed innovative methods to rapidly teach adults to read and write, based on everyday materials like the Sears catalog.
Clark recalls the gross discrepancies that existed between her school and the white school across the street. Clark’s school had 132 students and only one other teacher. As the teaching principal, Clark made $35 per week, while the other teacher made $25. Meanwhile, the white school across the street had only three students, and the teacher who worked there received $85 per week. It was her first-hand experience with these inequalities that led Clark to become an active proponent for pay equalization for teachers. In 1919 her pay equalization work brought her into the movement for civil rights. In an interview with Robert Penn Warren for the book Who Speaks for the Negro?, Clark explains how these experiences with her education, as well as her early experiences with growing up in a racist Charleston and teaching in the slums, prompted her to want to work towards civil rights.
In 1918, Clark returned to Charleston to teach sixth grade at Avery Normal Institute, a private academy for black children. She joined the local branch of the NAACP, and she was guided by branch president Edmund Austin in her early political activity.
Despite the orders of her principal, Clark led her students around the city, going door-to-door, asking for signatures on a petition to allow black principals at Avery. She got 10,000 signatures in a day, and in 1920 black teachers were permitted. In 1920, Clark enjoyed the first of many legal victories when blacks were given the right to become principals in Charleston’s public schools, under the education board of aldermen of Charleston. In 1945, Clark worked with Thurgood Marshall on a case that was about equal pay for white and black teachers led by NAACP in Columbia, South Carolina.
The spread of Citizenship Schools
Clark is most famous for establishing “Citizenship Schools” teaching reading to adults throughout the Deep South, in hopes of carrying on a tradition. The creation of citizenship schools developed from Septima Clark’s teaching of adult literacy courses throughout the interwar years. While the project served to increase literacy, it also served as a means to empower Black communities. Her teaching approach was very specific in making sure her students felt invested in what they were learning. She connected the politics of the movement to the personal experiences and needs of the people. In this way, Clark’s strategy aligned with Paulo Freire’s critical pedagogy.
She was not only teaching literacy, but also citizenship rights. Clark’s goals for the schools were to provide self-pride, cultural-pride, literacy, and a sense of one’s citizenship rights. She was recruiting the rural communities to get involved with the movement. Citizenship schools were frequently taught in the back room of a shop so as to elude the violence of racist whites.
The teachers of citizenship schools were often people who had learned to read as adults as well, as one of the primary goals of the citizenship schools was to develop more local leaders for people’s movements. Teaching people how to read helped countless Black Southerners push for the right to vote, but beyond that, it also developed leaders across the country who would help push the civil rights movement long after 1964. The citizenship schools are just one example of the empowerment strategy for developing leaders that was core to the civil rights movement in the South. The citizenship schools are also seen as a form of support to Martin Luther King Jr. in the nonviolent Civil Rights Movement.
The project was a response to legislation in Southern states which required literacy and interpreting various portions of the US Constitution in order to be allowed to register to vote. These laws were used to disenfranchise black citizens. Citizenship Schools were based on the adult literacy programs Clark and Robinson had developed at Highlander. They required a week’s worth of training in a program that was ultimately designed by Clark. Septima Clark hired her cousin Bernice Robinson, to be the first teacher. Bernice was also a Highlander alumna. In addition to literacy, Citizenship Schools also taught students to act collectively and protest against racism.
The leadership schools ultimately spread to a number of Southern states, growing so large that, upon the recommendation of Myles Horton and Clark, the program was transferred to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), in 1961 though initially Martin Luther King Jr. was hesitant about the idea. Transferring the program to the SCLC was also a result of financial troubles at Highlander Folk School in Tennessee. With the increased budget of the SCLC, the citizenship school project trained over 10,000 citizenship school teachers who led citizenship schools throughout the South, representing a popular education effort on a massive scale On top of these 10,000 teachers, citizenship schools reached out and taught more than 25,000 people. By 1958, 37 adults were able to pass the voter registration test as a result of the first session of community schools. Before 1969, about 700,000 African Americans became registered voters thanks to Clark’s dedication to the movement. Clark came to national prominence, becoming the SCLC’s director of education and teaching.
Clark was the first woman to gain a position on the SCLC board. Andrew Young, who had joined Highlander the previous year to work with the Citizenship Schools, also joined the SCLC staff. The SCLC staff of citizenship schools were mainly women, as a result of the daily experience gained by becoming a teacher.
Clark would struggle against sexism during her time on the SCLC, as had Ella Baker, with the bulk of sexism emanating from Martin Luther King Jr. Ralph Abernathy also objected to her, as Clark said:
“I can remember Reverend Abernathy asking many times, why was Septima Clark on the Executive Board of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference? And Dr. King would always say, ‘She was the one who proposed this citizenship education which is bringing to us not only money but a lot of people who will register and vote.’ And he asked that many times. It was hard for him to see a woman on that executive body.”
Clark claimed that women being treated unequally was “one of the greatest weaknesses of the civil rights movement.”
Septima P. Clark died December 15, 1987. In a eulogy presented at the funeral, the president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) described the importance of Clark’s work and her relationship to the SCLC. Reverend Joseph Lowery asserted that “her courageous and pioneering efforts in the area of citizenship education and interracial cooperation” won her SCLC’s highest award, the Drum Major for Justice Award.