Local Leadership in the Early Civil Rights Movement: The South Carolina Citizenship Education Program of the Highlander Folk School

Abstract

Between 1953 and 1961 Myles Horton's Highlander Folk School developed the Citizenship Education Program (CEP) beginning in the Sea Islands of South Carolina. Within the program from 1957 onwards Septima Clark and Bernice Robinson developed Citizenship Schools centered on literacy classes. By slowly developing local leaders, like Esau Jenkins, the CEP evolved as an educational framework for social mobilization, which was later used by the Civil Rights Movement as a whole. In the summer of 1961, since the Folk School faced closure by Tennessee state authorities, Highlander transferred the CEP to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Between 1961 and 1970, hundreds of civil rights activists from across the South attended the SCLC's Citizenship School teacher training courses at the Dorchester Center near Savannah in south-east Georgia. Moreover, in the mid-1960s the Southwide Voter Education Project enabled civil rights activists from across the region to study the political organization that the CEP had spawned in Charleston county as a model for their own community work. Given its widespread influence, the CEP's work was a vital aspect of the Civil Rights Movement itself and constituted Highlander's chief contribution to it.