Septima Clark and the Citizenship Schools

Rosa Parks is the name most people associate with Highlander Folk School. The woman who built the program that may have registered more Black voters across the South than any other single initiative of the Civil Rights Movement was Septima Poinsette Clark of Charleston, South Carolina.

Clark came to Highlander in the late nineteen-fifties after South Carolina dismissed her from her teaching position following the discovery that she was a member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, at that time an illegal affiliation for a state employee in South Carolina. She had been teaching in public schools for forty years.

At Highlander, Clark developed what she called the Citizenship Schools: a model of community-based adult literacy that began on Johns Island, South Carolina, in nineteen fifty-seven. The idea was straightforward. Most Black adults in the rural South who wanted to vote were blocked by literacy tests. The tests were not designed to measure literacy; they were designed to fail. Clark's approach was to teach reading and writing in a community context, using materials drawn from local life rather than textbooks, and to train local women as teachers who could replicate the program in their own communities.

The results were documented. Thousands of adults who could not previously pass the literacy tests registered to vote. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference, recognizing what the Citizenship Schools were producing, adopted the model in the early nineteen-sixties and scaled it to fourteen states. Septima Clark trained teachers across that network.

Highlander organizers called her the Mother of the Movement. She is less famous than the moment her work helped make possible. She was still teaching in her eighties.