By Mel Freillicher
FREEDOM’S TEACHER: The Life of Septima Clark by Katherine Mellen Charron on The University of North Carolina Press, 2009
Katherine Charron’s biography does an excellent job detailing Clark’s complex personal and political evolution. I found myself fascinated by which individuals and organizations this South Carolina educator was able to network with in her battle for civil rights. Septima’s own voice is a vital part of this text, quoted in many interviews throughout her long life.
Teacher, activist, Highlander participant, then founder of multiple Citizenship Schools teaching adult literacy through social activism, in 1961, Clark helped make citizenship education a “foundation for Martin Luther King’s non-violent movement,” according to former U.N ambassador Andrew Young, who was working with SCLC.
A particularly revelatory theme is the well-supported contention: “No longer does the black church stand alone as the primary institutional base for the civil rights movement; the schoolhouse—often the very same building—becomes an equally important site.” For example, black teachers in segregated schools, almost all women, had to provide their own pedagogical materials to teach black history--countering standard texts, fanatically promoted by the Daughters of the Confederacy, called “The Lost Cause.”
Since her native Charleston refused to hire African American teachers in its segregated public schools, Septima Poinsette’s first job was at a one room schoolhouse on isolated Johns Island. South Carolina had no school tax in 1916, no compulsory attendance law and no minimum school terms. That year, the state’s annual public school expenditures per pupil ranged from a high of $48.59 for white children to a low of 95 cents for black children.
Most rural teachers worked in old, weather-beaten shacks or churches, with at least 69 students in their classroom, blacks receiving one-third the salary of their white counterparts and teaching for an average of only 3 ½ months a year. In 1916, South Carolina spent nearly $3.5 million annually educating white students and just over $400,000 for black pupils, even though almost eighteen thousand more of them were enrolled.
The majority of Johns Islanders were field hands, working on white-owned plantations. Initially, the dearth of organizations for self-improvement “combined with too many wagging tongues and superstitious minds” caused Septima to view the Islanders as “primitive.” More than anything, the lack of health education and care, especially the high infant mortality rate, appalled the new teacher. With no doctor on the island, residents relied on folk remedies. Hookworm and pellagra flourished.
Most of her students spoke Gullah. But Septima was able to adapt reading lessons accordingly—identifying her familiarity with the dialect as one of her greatest advantages. Growing up, she’d heard it spoken by many Charlestonians, particularly fish venders peddling their wares.
Gullah preserved the language and culture fashioned by South Sea Islanders’ enslaved African ancestors. Like slaves elsewhere, Islanders “learned new words—in English, Spanish, Portuguese or French—but they spoke with a West African pronunciation, and “poured their new vocabulary into the mold of West African grammatical and idiomatic forms.”
To obtain even the most minimal resources, rural teachers needed to generate community support for their schools, organizing parent-teacher associations. Happily, Septima discovered Johns Island “parents, for persons illiterate and entirely unused to modern ways, did remarkably well and were most cooperative”: attending meetings, scraping together hard-earned nickels and dimes to purchase paint, nails and lumber to improve old schools, devoting time and muscle to clearing tree stumps, making desks, and planting flowers.
In exchange, teachers were expected to aid in the business of daily life: writing letters, filling out mail order forms, figuring crop prices and wages. Adult education “was a common extracurricular duty for southern rural teachers of both races.” Septima quickly realized adults learned faster when they applied themselves to a specific and personally relevant goal. She taught women to sew two days a week after school, and when a group of men formed a fraternal organization, she helped them write speeches which they would then memorize.
In 1918, Septima was offered a position teaching fifth and sixth grades at Avery, where she’d graduated high school: a prestigious private school in Charleston with a black faculty and principal. At the start of her own 4 years of studying there, the faculty was still integrated. Several influential white women from the North used their positions to challenge segregation, accompanying students to performances at the local theater and sitting with them in the balcony reserved for black patrons.
Avery had been an academic “paradise” for Septima. Every student in the three story brick building had a seat at a desk. She valued her astronomy class as well as practical instruction in sewing and cooking, still making time for many extracurricular activities—glee club, yearbook, the girls’ basketball team, and vice president of her senior class. To pay her tuition, the fourteen-year-old took a live-in job cleaning house and babysitting for a neighbor who feared staying home alone when her husband was away for his railroad porter job.
As a teacher training institute, Avery’s pedagogical approach reflected broader trends popular at the turn of the twentieth century, particularly the philosophies of John Dewey and Harvard psychologist, William James. Dewey’s emphasis on “learning by doing,” the backbone of Septima Poinsette’s training, emphasized the close relationship between curriculum and students’ life experiences; rote learning and physical punishment were discouraged.
Septima originally joined the Charleston branch of the NAACP in 1916, during an ultimately successful campaign to hire black teachers in its segregated public schools--the last Southern city holdout, once New Orleans capitulated. Each NAACP victory engendered its own backlash.
After the 1916 campaign, for example, the white school board redoubled its efforts to control black education: in 1919 the Board of School Commissioners formally adopted a salary schedule that differentiated between black and white teachers. The state’s NAACP did not challenge this reactionary measure till 24 years later.
Only single black women could teach in the city schools; those already married had to work in the rural county system. Also, the school board appointed a former white principal as the first supervisor of Negro schools, justifying the new expense by observing this action “demonstrated to black principals, teachers, and students that the white people still have an interest in the schools and an authority” over them.
In the short run, the Charleston NAACP emerged stronger and more determined after WW1. Then Red Summer arrived in that city: the bloodiest single season anyone could remember, perhaps since the end of the Civil War. Although from the turn of the century, isolated race riots had exploded in which white supremacist mobs attacked entire black communities, in 1919 between April and October, 250 black men, women and children died in 25 urban race riots. By December, whites had lynched 78 blacks—ten of them wore military uniforms, 11 were burned alive at the stake.
One Saturday night in May, a fight between a black man and two whites quickly escalated into a riot in which an estimated two thousand sailors fanned out across the peninsula to “get the negroes.” Some armed themselves with cue sticks and balls procured from pool halls; others raided shooting galleries, grabbing rifles, pistols and ammunition.
White patrons of a popular Charlestown restaurant watched in horror as the mob pulled a black man from a streetcar, beat then shot him. Elsewhere, a black man had his kneecap shot off; others sustained wounds from gunshots, flying bottles and bricks. The mob also shot a thirteen year-old boy, paralyzing him. The hospital serving African Americans was soon overwhelmed.
Local police contacted naval training camp officials. By midnight, a detachment of marines began patrolling the city, but more than three hours passed until the situation was under control. Before dawn, two black men lay dead, at least twenty-seven people—seventeen of them African American—wounded; authorities made 50 arrests. Paternalistic city fathers subsequently tried to assert the need to protect their Negroes.
But something unexpected and “infinitely frightening” happened: a few black Charlestonians had fought back. Soon afterwards, the long struggle for voter registration began. Less than a month after the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, in a single day, 168 black women in South Carolina registered to vote. The very next day, a new prerequisite was added: proof of having paid $300 in property taxes.
In 1929, Septima enrolled in a program for African American teachers in Columbia, the state capital, then comprised of nearly 40% black population: the majority worked as manual laborers and domestics. Only 2.3% of white Columbians could not read, but 22.2 percent of its adult black population was illiterate.
Septima’s teacher, C.A. Johnson, the principal of Booker T. Washington, the best black school in the state, serving grades one through eleven, was so impressed he offered Septima a job teaching 3rd grade. At age 31, she relocated; at a considerably higher salary, she was able to attend university in Columbia to get a Bachelor’s degree. (In 1946, she received a Master’s from the Hampton Institute.)
Recognizing the importance of vocational training, C.A. Johnson provided courses in domestic and manual arts, but like Avery’s administrators during Septima’s schooldays, he resisted pressures to turn the institution into a manual labor training ground: Latin, literature, and geometry were offered, and Johnson helped secure college scholarships for his students.
Like many of his peers, Johnson was chiefly concerned with black teachers, not the state, being in position to evaluate students and steer them into either academic or vocational tracks. Several years before regional accreditation of black schools began in the early l930s (a trend emanating from Washington), Johnson stated, “We ask that we be rated by the same standards used in rating the white schools”: arguing a different scale would legitimate lower funding, and sanction substandard teacher training.
After growing up within Charleston’s rigid social hierarchies, living in the heart of Columbia’s black business district, known as Little Harlem, and during WW11 as Congo Square, was refreshingly liberating. Septima had access to professionals and business owners; nearby were two private colleges affiliated with churches as well as 2 small hospitals that treated African Americans. Many activists who played a critical role in the interwar freedom struggles passed through this area daily.
Teaching in urban elementary schools also afforded Septima broader social contacts and professional involvement with civic organizations advocating on behalf of black children and expanding career options for black women: most notably, the all-black Palmetto State Teacher’s Association, the South Carolina Federation of Colored Women’s Clubs (affiliated with the National Association of Colored Women). Together with local women’s clubs, they created “national networks of support that extended back into rural communities and educated both black children and adults.”
The uphill battle was to make separate but equal actually equal. When Septima first started at Johns Island, she had blackboards with no chalk or erasers, a few dog-eared textbooks, none of which matched, and homemade benches without back support for students. The state’s standard issue equipment included a water bucket and dipper, one table, one chair and an axe with which the teacher or older students could cut firewood.
Northern white philanthropy had long served as the most substantial financial resource for southern black education. Established in 1917, the Julius Rosenwald Fund erected schools for black children. The Slater Fund, founded in 1881 to promote industrial education, ran seven to nine months for grades eight through twelve. The General Education Board subsidized African American teachers traveling to Tuskegee or Hampton Institutes for summer school sessions to enhance their credentials.
World War 11 “marked a watershed” for Clark. South Carolina’s NAACP campaign to equalize teacher salaries meant directly challenging her employer, the white state. Beginning in the early 1940s, increased white surveillance of black education—a response to black teachers’ demands for equal salaries, black students’ fight for access to higher education, and activists’ battle for the ballot—replaced decades of white neglect.
During the war, NAACP membership declined, and Septima became increasingly involved in fundraising and organizing for women’s organizations tackling social problems: working with underprivileged orphans, a home for delinquent girls was founded. Charged with raising health awareness through education, and allied with the South Carolina Tuberculosis Association, in 1933 alone, twenty unemployed teachers visited 203 schools, reaching 1,266 teachers and 54,383 students.
The Brown v. Board of Education ruling convinced Septima the momentum of local postwar activism could be harnessed to federal opportunities to dismantle Jim Crow. She took a stand for school integration: an unpopular choice with most white Charlestonians and with many of her black colleagues, afraid of losing their jobs and of the imposition of a standardized racist curriculum.
U.S. District Judge for Eastern District of South Carolina, J. Waites Waring, helped pave the way for the Brown victory: declaring unequivocally in a vigorous, 21-page dissenting opinion in Briggs vs. Elliott,” segregation is per se inequality.” Ending segregated seating in the courtroom, and appointing a black bailiff, Waring advised Thurgood Marshall, who represented the plaintiffs, to throw out an existing NAACP complaint and file a new one attacking the South Carolina statutes that mandated segregation.
Septima’s growing intimacy with Judge Waring and his outspoken wife, Elizabeth, was a significant motivator, and aid in conceptualizing varied strategies for integrating the Community Chest, and women’s clubs, like the YWCA, and League of Women Voters. Despite objections of Charleston’s white YWCA branches, Elizabeth Waring spoke to the black chapter, praising them for embracing the civil rights movement as part of national and international trends. Septima was particularly grateful when the Warings drove through town on Election Day, effectively forestalling the customary violence against black voters.
A shocking couple for Charleston’s staid white society, Judge Waring had divorced his wife of three decades to marry Elizabeth, a Yankee socialite, twice divorced herself. She and her ex-husband had been the Warings’ bridge partners. The judge continued living in his first wife’s family home while she moved into a carriage house around the corner!
Having become pariahs in white society, the Warings began socializing with members of the black community. Septima quite enjoyed their company, though received some criticism for reinforcing stereotypes that blacks sought integration chiefly to mix socially with whites.
Before the Warings moved to New York, they and their friends endured a number of cross burnings, always ignored by the police. Only after several large bricks were hurled into their house did the U.S. Marshal’s Office assign guards to protect the Warings day and night. The South Carolina Assembly passed a resolution to buy the couple a one-way ticket out of the state. A statewide petition supporting the judge’s impeachment eventually garnered more than 20,000 signatures.
State legislators had been preparing for the Brown decision for a good three years before it was handed down on May 17, 1954. Investing broad powers to oversee schools in the hands of local district trustees, they repealed the compulsory attendance law, suspended all state funding if any child transferred into a school as a result of a court order, and provided appropriations only for schools, colleges, and recreational facilities that remained segregated.
The all-white Citizens’ Council was established in the Mississippi delta in July, 1954. Quickly following, South Carolina sprouted a total of 56 CC chapters in less than 6 months, drawing members from the upper and middle classes, with significant backing from political leaders. (Senators Strom Thurmond and Olin Johnston thought it best not to join, but publicly affirmed their support for the organization.)
Respectable civic leaders and businessmen literally had considerable investments in preserving white political and economic power. The editor of the Charleston News and Courier described Citizens’ Council members as “among the best people” in the state. Participation by their wives ensured the success of the covered dish supper and oyster roasts which served as pretext for more serious business.
Joe Brown, president of the Charleston NAACP branch, dubbed them “the tuxedo gang of the Ku Klux Klan”—disavowing violence, preferring to rely on economic and political intimidation. On the other hand, an anonymous hooded Klansman told an interviewer, “Since those nine buzzards on the Supreme Court have abolished the Mason-Dixon line, we had to establish the Smith & Wesson line…We’re arming as fast as we can.”
Klan rallies in South Carolina drew new recruits in alarming numbers: on a single evening, 123 people joined at one rally; 800 joined in Camden on another occasion. State highway patrolmen directed traffic to and from the gatherings. A fifty-two-year-old white music teacher in Camden was flogged for “voicing pro-integration sentiments.” The beaten man’s pastor stated, “Fear covers South Carolina like the frost.”
For many black Southerners, Charron comments, “self-defense would remain a legitimate tactic well after Martin Luther King Jr. became the nation’s spokesman for nonviolent resistance.” Black veterans had returned from WWII with extensive weapons training. At a discussion in Septima’s house in 1955, one man observed, “’In the last Civil War we didn’t know anything about ammunition and guns,’” and a woman declared, “’If anyone shoot at me one time and don’t get me, they dead.’”
About the Klan’s efforts to intimidate a Miami NAACP leader who organized a successful campaign to get streets paved and garbage collected in a black neighborhood, one person reflected, “’Negroes were out there with their guns and their knives when the Ku Klux Klan come through, and they knew it, and they move on through and nothing happened because they didn’t dare get out.’”
Editorializing in the Lighthouse and Informer, the state’s largest and most politically charged black weekly, John McCray wrote, “Everybody knows what to do about a mad dog running loose, or a rattlesnake. The solution is to cancel on sight anybody crazy and wicked enough to cover themselves and maraud at night for evil intent.” African Americans should defend themselves with “violence equal in strength to that of the Klan.”
Previously, in October 1949, McCray (who’d been valedictorian of his class at Avery) and a white reporter independently made the accusation that an alleged rape of a white woman was actually a case of consensual sex. Both men were charged with criminal libel, but only McCray was put on trial. While serving two months on a chain gang, his newspaper continued to publish, and he even penned a column critical of the judge who sentenced him.
Later, McCray edited regional editions of America’s most prominent black newspapers, including the Pittsburgh-Courier, and the Chicago Defender, and remained a columnist for South Carolina periodicals when he joined the staff of Talladega College. In 1998, 12 years after his death, McCray was posthumously inducted into the University of South Carolina College of Journalism and Mass Communications Diamond Circle which honors extraordinary contributions to the profession.
Charron describes the mid-1950s Cold War “idioms of democracy and freedom” as double-edged: the brutality of racial relations could be expressed on an international stage. However, white supremacists also invoked Cold War anticommunist rhetoric to combat civil rights organizations. Highlander Folk School and its founders were frequently investigated by McCarthy. (At the movement’s zenith, when Septima was working with SCLC, the FBI apparently viewed her as “grandmotherly,” dismissing her as “an old lady, insignificant and nonthreatening.”)
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On the personal level, Katherine Charron’s biography vividly paints Septima’s home life and upbringing in post-Reconstruction Charleston where she was born in 1898. Twenty two years before her birth, white Democrats had seized control of the state’s constitutional convention and formally disenfranchised thousands of poor Carolinians, both black and white. But reestablishing a racial caste system proved difficult, and those efforts continued into Septima’s adolescence.
When she was fourteen-years-old, Charleston passed a law segregating seating on streetcars. Such segregation had previously been undone after an 1867 sit-in to protest mistreatment, including that of black legislators while traveling: racial discrimination in public transportation and housing was then banned.
This study is unstinting in its description of the caste system within the African American community itself, based on lineage and skin color. More than a few families were related to aristocratic whites, “and such connections were well-known, if whispered.” Genealogical information “provided a blueprint of who had access to power and how much.” Black Charlestonians made distinctions based on their ancestors’ status as free or slave, and on “caste”—the lightness or darkness of one’s skin.
In 1790, members of the city’s free black community had established the Brown Fellowship Society, only admitting light-skinned persons, similar to their counterparts in the North with whom they maintained contact. Darker-skinned free blacks responded by creating equally restrictive groups such as the Humane Brotherhood. Perceiving themselves “as a people in the middle,” sustaining relationships with aristocratic white residents allowed free blacks to distinguish themselves from slaves in their midst.
Obsessed with her family’s social status, Septima’s mother invoked rigid rules regarding her children’s upbringing. She herself was free born, but Septima’s father wasn’t: barring their daughters from black Charleston’s most exclusive circles, though marrying a former slave didn’t automatically lower Victoria Anderson’s station. Exactly which white family had owned him made a difference, as did the distinction of whether he worked in the house or fields.
Septima’s grandmother, an illiterate widow who took in laundry, nevertheless managed to send all three of her daughters to school. After her death, remaining family members moved to Haiti to live with their older half-brothers who worked in a cigar factory in the independent black nation. This allowed the girls to complete their education which Septima believed helped to make her mother “the proud soul she was all her life.” But life in Haiti also “sharpened Victoria’s personal biases, including her caste-conscious distaste for dark-skinned people.”
The segregated housing patterns prevailing in New South cities like Atlanta never took root in antebellum Charleston, and the Clark family always lived in a racially mixed neighborhood, including African Americans, native white, Irish, Italian, and German families. The children rarely played together.
Victoria was furious about the neighborhood’s few interracial couples—specifically, white men who fathered children with black women but were excluded by law from marrying them. Viewing these “kept” women as living in sin, she did not allow her children to associate with what she considered their illegitimate offspring.
For most of her married life, Victoria Poinsette “struggled mightily with the frustrations that accompanied managing her desire for a middle class lifestyle on a working class budget.” Taking in white people’s laundry, she remarked, was “infinitely preferable to cleaning their houses or serving them tea.” Septima described her mother as “haughty,” “high strung,” and “emotional.” Family members always joked mama Vickie had “fire in her hands,” meaning she didn’t hesitate to punish her children physically.
Her word was law. Once, when young Septima attempted to correct her mother in the presence of an aunt, Victoria slapped the girl hard enough to knock out one of her teeth. Later that night, Septima’s stubborn refusal to include “God bless Mama” in her nightly prayers triggered another whipping.
Victoria insisted her daughters act like ladies in public: they didn’t leave the house without wearing gloves, didn’t eat while walking down the street or holler hello to their neighbors. “Having the right manners and morals rendered other limitations less acute,” Charron comments.
Marshaling her own family pride to stand up to white authority, when the family dog scratched a white child whose mother called the police, Victoria refused to let the officer into her house, demanding “Don’t you put your feet across the sill of my door.” On another occasion she accused a policeman of trespassing as he pursued a suspect into her backyard.
Septima later said, “My mother did many things like this. I appreciate them because I really feel that it helped me to stand in front of the Klansmen and White Citizens’ Councils, of large groups that were hostile, I never felt afraid.”
Peter Poinsette, Septima’s father, was much more easygoing. As a teenage slave, he’d served at his “master’s” side in the Civil War. As an adult, Peter worked as a waiter and caterer for upper class white establishments. For a time, he opened his own luncheonette, sanctioned by the white elites. But the business soon failed, and Poinsette alternated between waiter and custodian jobs.
On evenings when his wife attended various club meetings, such as the United Tents of America, a women’s organization for which she was treasurer, Peter Poinsette encouraged his children to try to find something noble in everyone. Septima took these lessons to heart, “and never looked down on anybody.”
While Victoria would refuse to talk to those she considered beneath her, her husband, who never learned to read or write, would speak to everyone and often went out of his way to help strangers. “I can never forget,” Septima Clark asserted, “nor do I wish to—those little incidents when my unlearned, humble serving father expressed in his simple way his love for people, all people.” When it came to the children, however, he deferred to his wife’s judgment, never talking against her.
Religious training ranked high on the Poinsettes’ priority list, though family members worshipped in different churches. As a teenager, Septima chaired her youth group, taught Sunday school and helped to raise four thousand dollars to purchase a new church organ. Experiences endowing her with a service-oriented ideological framework, Charron remarks, became invaluable in the teaching profession.
Romance escaped Septima during her high school years. “I guess,” she came to understand, “when you just work and go to school and come home and be with your parents, that’s the most dangerous situation. You need to have wider experience.” But the end of WW11 brought a daily influx of black servicemen into Charlestown harbor.
Community leaders asked teachers to host them at the segregated United Service Organization. Meeting Nerie David Clark there, who’d served as a navy wardroom cook during the war, Septima invited him to church services; surprisingly, he showed up with four other sailors in tow.
Much to Septima’s delight—and her mother’s horror--he turned up again several months later, on a three-day pass. Not only was Nerie from North Carolina, not from a respectable Charleston family, but he was considerably darker than Septima, and had only a 6th grade education. “Somebody must have put some voodoo on you, because you never cared about boys before,” Victoria expostulated.
To escape her family and the rigidity of the community, in the fall of 1919, Septima took a job in a three-teacher rural school in a fishing village where Nerie found her. After a futile attempt to ask her parents’ permission, the couple married without ceremony: alienating the Charleston community which believed in people “marrying within groups”; her brother Peter romanced and wed a girl from a prominent local family.
The Clarks’ union was not a success. Nerie shipped out quite often; not working for periods, Septima lived on his service pay. When their baby daughter died twenty-three days after her birth, Septima had to bury her alone. A midwife attending the home delivery “hadn’t noticed that the baby didn’t have a rectum and that the stools were coming through the vagina, until it got very sick and had a fever.”
Sinking into a “numbing depression,” she felt she was being punished for having disobeyed her mother. Victoria sent her son on his bike to find his sister and bring her home. But “she never forgave me,” Septima Clark maintained. “She was strict like that.”
Soon, she moved to western North Carolina to live with her in-laws: “key people,” Septima stated, in a small black community, who did not subscribe to the limited social mores of Charleston, holding “more advanced ideas of what being a Christian really means.” She taught for a while, until her husband earned his honorable discharge. But he had trouble finding a job that suited him.
“He was, after all, a black man who had traveled around the world and who aspired to the good life,” Charron comments. Nerie decided to return to the country club in Dayton, Ohio where he’d worked as a waiter before the war. Septima seemed to welcome the move, though she had never lived in such a large city. Life in Dayton, she recalled, “made me see that there are people in the world who have different ideas…and I started looking for the differences.”
Septima gave birth to a healthy son named Nerie after his father. However, “’While I was still in the hospital, I learned that my husband had been divorced from one woman and was virtually living with another right there in Dayton.’” Within several months, she took her infant son back to her in-laws’ house, and in the fall she was teaching again, in a nearby small village.
Called back to Dayton just a few months later, her husband lay dying of kidney failure. Nerie Clark Sr. passed away ten months to the day after his son’s birth, three days before his thirty-sixth birthday. Agonized, Septima vowed to never marry again.
After her father died, she returned to Charleston, leaving her son with his grandparents who had more room, and greater financial stability than her own family. Nerie Jr. grew up there, living with his working mother only occasionally.
In 1956, the governor of South Carolina signed into law a bill that barred all city, country and state employees from belonging to the NAACP. The Charleston City School Board fired Clark for refusing to conceal her membership, even though she had consistently earned the highest marks and compliments on every annual teaching evaluation.
Inadvertently freed to tackle the fundamental problems facing the black Southerner—how to improve the quality of schools, healthcare, job opportunities and wages, and increase voter participation—the next, and most public, phase of Septima’s work began with her articulating citizenship pedagogy while teaching adult literacy at the crucial Highlander Folk School.
Fifty-six years old when she first enrolled in a Highlander workshop, Septima had previously participated in elegant soirees with the Warings and their white friends but had never lived among white people. "I was surprised to learn that white women would sleep in the same room that I slept in,” she commented, “and it was really strange, very much so, to be eating at the same table with them.”
Interracial living fostered personal bonds rather quickly. Workshop discussions continued in shared rooms, during meals, and over chores like washing the dishes. She was amazed to learn of class prejudices dividing the white community. “The low income whites were considered dirt under the feet of the wealthy whites, just like the blacks were.”
During her Highlander stay, she wrote two pamphlets. A Guide to Community Action for Public School Integration suggested involving members of parent teachers associations, YWCA’s, United Church Women, the League of Women Voters, and NAACP—to all of which Clark belonged—and “outlined steps that had been tried in various communities.”
Hesitant when Myles Horton asked her to join the Highland staff in 1955, partly because Tennessee had a very small black population, she would have no church to attend regularly, and even conducting daily business could be problematic. The local bank, for example served black customers only if a white person vouched for them, while more hostile locals held that “Negroes were not allowed on the mountain.”
Clark’s new positions were administrative: first, director of workshops, planning and running (but not teaching in) all summer residential programs. In 1958, her title changed to director of education, and she began managing all educational fieldwork, attending to the details of residential workshops, extension work, and preparing financial reports.
Designing the Citizenship school program, Clark rightly predicted adult literacy training would lead more African Americans to the voter rolls. Having already begun this work on Johns Island, site of her first teaching position, her curriculum included documents pertinent to the daily lives of her students, such as information about the political parties, the history of Highlander, South Carolina taxes and social security benefits.
Under pressure from right-wing politicians, in 1960 the school’s charter was revoked. When the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the case, the Highlander Folk School ceased to exist. Expecting as much, Myles Horton had already obtained a charter for the Highlander Research and Education Center, moving his operations to Knoxville. As he maintained from the beginning, “Highlander is an idea. You can’t kill it and you can’t close it.”
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Conveyed to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Septima’s adult literacy program was renamed Citizenship Education Program (CEP). Clark “stepped into the lifeboat of SCLC in what proved a difficult transition.” Her health suffered, and the relationship with Horton reached its nadir. The transfer shed light on the gap between Highlander’s democratic conception of leadership and the occasional reality of its practices. Mostly, Clark was angered by lacking a voice in the decision-making process that affected her personal and professional life. Wounds took a long time to heal.
In many ways, though, working for SCLC, with its faith-based approach, suited Septima more than Highlander’s avowed secularism. Further, women’s demands that male leaders not dictate how the program was run, coupled with men’s general lack of interest, meant Citizenship Schools became another site in which black women exercised leadership roles.
From the beginning, SCLC barely remained solvent: plagued by poor administrative practices and financial problems, such as habitual delays in reimbursing teachers for costs they incurred. Field workers were regularly informed they would have to cut expenses. Financial shortfalls also affected the relationship between the organization and its funding foundations.
Still, during the first year after SCLC assumed responsibility, Clark, Andrew Young and others trained 291 CEP teachers who conducted 263 classes for 2,550 adults. A total of 13,288 black southerners registered to vote that year as a result of community canvassing and voter registration drives organized by CEP graduates.
Sensitive to class divisions within the movement, Septima did not refrain from criticizing her coworkers, especially when staff fell five months behind, past the December holidays, in paying teachers working for her. She had particular difficulties with Andrew Young. “Andy was a highly middle-class boy,” she later remarked. “We had to teach him how to work with our low-income people.”
Once, she chastised Young for arriving at a destination by plane: on his way to get a snack, bypassing folks who’d just gotten off the bus. The bus riders had not eaten, she reminded him, nor should he unless food was available to all. Her anger was often incurred when SCLC administrators chartered planes to travel but would not budget money to cover food costs during travel for CEP recruits.
Beyond learning about the technicalities of voting and registration, black women used CEP training to articulate their concerns, particularly about women’s health and birth control—in context of a history of involuntary sterilization, personal experience, and current events. When future CEP teacher and Mississippi civil rights leader, Fannie Lou Hamer, entered Mississippi’s Sunflower City Hospital in 1961 for the removal of a uterine tumor, the doctor performed a hysterectomy without informing her and without her permission.
Hamer later asserted 60% of black women in that county had been victims of postpartum sterilizations without their consent. Following a 1960 court order requiring New Orleans schools to desegregate, the Louisiana state legislature introduced a bill which would have made unmarried parents who gave birth to a second child subject to a one to three year prison term. In lieu of prison, mothers could “choose” to be sterilized.
The bill didn’t pass but, as always, poor women remained vulnerable. Over the next decade, sterilization became a common procedure for women who obtained medical care in federally funded programs. In 1973, a federal court estimated a staggering 100,000 to 150,000 women had been sterilized annually since 1964, often under the threat of elimination of welfare benefits or because doctors refused to deliver their babies unless mothers agreed to sterilization afterward.
Federal government intervention provided an unexpected springboard for spreading citizenship education across the South. Images of burned busses occupied by CORE activists on Freedom Rides fueled the Kennedy administration’s attempt to shift the focus of civil rights activism to less confrontational—and less embarrassing—activities.
Establishing the Voter Education Project in 1961, the Justice Department worked to get all the major civil rights groups under its umbrella: in exchange for abandoning direct action, they could expect financial assistance. Along with SNCC, CORE, and the NAACP, SCLC targeted black-majority districts and hired five full-time field secretaries to get voter registration drives underway in eight southern states.
Clark harbored misgivings about how SCLC handled the drive. Her own group did not receive federal funds, as the Voter Education Project did whose administration, she believed, was disorganized—implementation and follow-up chaotic. Further, adult literacy education was not the Voter Education Program’s primary goal.
Just ten days after “Bloody Sunday,” when the media documented white police and state troopers viciously attacking a group of black marchers in the shadow of the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, the Johnson administration introduced the Voting Rights Act in Congress. The legislation suspended literacy tests and called for the appointment of federal registrars in areas where less than half the voting age population was registered.
“Dr. King sent six of us in to teach the people how to write their names in cursive so they could register,” Septima recalled. But the five other members left, fed up with resistance by local ministers and members of the black professional class. Staying by herself in Selma for three months “until I could find someone who listened,” Septima then coordinated others to help organize handwriting classes. In August, 7002 persons were registered.
CEP-trained women seized opportunities within Johnson’s War on Poverty to establish community health and childcare centers, job training and educational programs as well as to seek paid employment for movement work they’d already been performing with little remuneration. Many CEP teachers and alumni focused on the needs of African American children through the Head Start program, launched nationwide in the summer of ’65, when 32 states did not offer kindergarten classes.
The Child Development Group of Mississippi initially operated the nation’s largest and best funded Head Start program, employing 1,100 people and serving 6,000 children. Administrators specifically concentrated staff recruiting among those who had grassroots civil rights experience. After the session officially ended and before the Group secured its second grant, workers continued to operate classes without pay for 3,000 children, providing food and transportation at their own expense.
Retiring from SCLC in 1970, Septima won election to Charleston County School Board, the first woman, and lone African American: the same body which fired her for belonging to the NAACP sixteen years earlier. After five children died in five separate Charleston house fires, she joined the city’s clubwomen to raise money to build a day care center and hire a qualified teacher. As a member of the Advisory Council for the Aging, following several tragic accidental deaths, Clark lined up a series of volunteers to check on older people.
Traveling to a large meeting of the National Organization of Women in Washington D.C., Septima’s involvement with the Black Women’s Community Development Foundation brought her to a symposium in Chicago, along with many movement veterans, including Ella Baker and Fannie Lou Hamer, as well as the heads of the Domestic Workers Union and the National Welfare Rights Organization.
“The gathering attracted people who would define the black feminist agenda throughout the decade,” Charron declares. Tempers occasionally flared as women of all ages discussed topics ranging from “adamant opposition by the infiltration of a Marxist Leninist ideology into the Black community” to images of African Americans in the mass media to the “black man question.”
More important, as a summary noted, the symposium served as a forum in which black women from across the nation came together and did not have to “tuck their true feelings and beliefs in the pit of their stomachs or a remote corner of their brains” as they hammered out “a program for action on the next stage of Black development.”
Toward the end of her involvement with Highlander, Septima’s reputation had enabled her to meet a number of leaders, including A. Philip Randolph, president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, officers of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, former first lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, and visitors from Europe, Africa, and the Nigerian royal family.
In her later years, Septima received wider recognition. Charleston named a day care center after her. She received The National Educational Association’s 1976 Race Relations award, an honorary doctorate of humane letters from the College of Charleston, and the Order of the Palmetto, South Carolina’s highest honor for civilians. Jimmy Carter presented her with the Living Legacy award in 1979.
As age took its toll on her body, family members moved Septima Clark to the Sea Islands Health Care Center on Johns Island, a facility established by graduates of the Citizenship Schools, where she passed away at age 89, on December 19, 1987.
Mel Freilicher retired from some 4 decades of teaching in UCSD's Lit. Dept./ writing program. He was publisher and co-editor of Crawl Out Your Window magazine (1974-89), a journal of the experimental literature and visual arts of the San Diego/Tijuana region. He's been writing for quite some time. He is the author of The Unmaking of Americans: 7 Lives, Encyclopedia of Rebels, and American Cream, all on San Diego City Works Press.