Septima P. Clark Expressway

This expressway carries the name of a Charleston woman that Doctor Martin Luther King Junior called the mother of the civil rights movement. Septima Poinsette Clark was born here in eighteen ninety-eight. Because of her race, the city would not let her teach in Charleston, so she went to Johns Island, teaching children by day and illiterate adults by night, using everyday tools like the Sears catalog to teach reading.

In nineteen fifty-seven she founded the first Citizenship School, helping Black Southerners gain the literacy they needed to register to vote and claim their legal rights. Between nineteen fifty-seven and nineteen seventy, more than twenty-eight thousand people passed through these schools across the South. In two thousand ten, South Carolina named this road in her honor, recognizing an educator who quietly built the foundation of a movement.