"I train the people to do their own talking": Septima Clark and Women in the Civil Rights Movement

Abstract

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Septima Poinsette Clark is a name that should be as familiar to us as Rosa Parks. Both women contributed significantly to the African American freedom struggle, and striking similarities exist in their stories. Each had a long record of participation in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP); each challenged segregation and was arrested as a result; and each worked with Martin Luther King. In fact, four months before Rosa Parks's infamous arrest, she attended a workshop at the Highlander Folk School, an interracial adult education center in Monteagle, Tennessee, where activists gathered to devise solutions for problems in their communities and where Clark served as Director of Education. Yet, unlike Parks, Clark never captured the national media's attention for her Civil Rights activism. This certainly offers one explanation for her relative obscurity. Another lies in Clark's age. Born on May 3, 1898, in Charleston, South Carolina, she was nearly sixty years old when the classic phase of the Civil Rights Movement began, which has eclipsed her role in narratives that focus on youth, such as those in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (NAACP). Finally, there is the nature of Clark's work in the Movement: using education to empower grassroots people, particularly African American women, so they might become leading citizens in their communities. Septima Clark spent forty years as a public school teacher and civic organizer in the Jim Crow South, teaching citizenship by helping people to help themselves. In the mid-1950s, she drew on her experiences to develop a citizenship education program that directly linked self-help to politics by teaching African Americans to read and write so they could pass the literacy tests required by southern states to register to vote. Beyond adding their names to the voting roils, however, students also discovered how to transform their relationship to the wider society. Teachers relied on charts, for example, to explain the structure of local and state government as they led discussions of what citizens do; they taught people how to create a household budget, balance a check book, and apply for Social Security benefits. As students learned of citizenship responsibilities that included establishing local voting leagues, paying taxes, and lobbying for improved municipal services, they came to understand citizenship as more than an individual legal right they possessed. Indeed, African American adults who passed through the classes acquired both the knowledge and the skills to apply their citizenship on behalf of the broader community. In editing these oral history interviews, we have chosen excerpts that highlight telling moments in Septima Clark's personal development and that underscore her activist approaches. Foremost, conditions in the rural and urban segregated schools in which Clark taught sensitized her to the need to advocate on behalf of African American children and to expand professional options for African American women. In both the World War I and World War II eras, she enlisted in NAACP campaigns that pursued these goals. The personal tragedies that followed her earliest political involvement yielded setbacks, but relocating to Columbia, South Carolina, in the interwar years helped Clark to overcome them as she learned how to function within a larger network of African American women. The necessity of her seeking employment in the summertime reminds us of teachers' precarious financial situations as well as her motivation for supporting salary equalization. In South Carolina, federal judge J. Waties Waring ruled in favor of African American teachers in these suits; he also opened the Democratic Primary to African American Carolinian voters in 1948. Waring's decisions on behalf of African American plaintiffs, and the circumstances of his divorce and then second marriage, made him an iconoclast in Charleston. …