Septima Poinsette Clark turned adult literacy into a tool of political power. A public school teacher for four decades, she was fired in 1956 for refusing to give up her NAACP membership, and she went on to design the Citizenship Schools, a network of community-run classes that taught Black Southerners to read the documents, pass the tests, and claim the vote that Jim Crow laws were built to deny them.
At a Glance
- Born
- 3 May 1898, Charleston, South Carolina
- Died
- 15 December 1987, Johns Island, South Carolina
- Birth name
- Septima Poinsette
- Known for
- The Citizenship Schools (from 1957); director of workshops at Highlander Folk School; SCLC Citizenship Education Program; Echo in My Soul (1962)
- HBCU ties
- Benedict College (Bachelor’s degree, 1942); Hampton University (Master’s degree, 1946)
- Fields
- Education · Civil Rights · Organizing
- Era
- Civil Rights Era
Early Life
Septima Poinsette was born in Charleston, South Carolina, on 3 May 1898. Her father, Peter Poinsette, had been born into slavery; her mother, Victoria Warren Anderson Poinsette, took in laundry and insisted on strict standards of conduct and education for her children. Clark attended Charleston’s schools and the Avery Normal Institute, a private school for Black students founded by the American Missionary Association, graduating in 1916.
Charleston’s public schools did not then employ Black teachers, so at eighteen she took a teaching post in a Black school on Johns Island, one of the Sea Islands south of the city, where she also taught adults to read in the evenings. In 1919, while teaching at Avery, she joined the NAACP’s campaign to change the rule, going door to door for signatures on a petition; the following year Charleston began hiring Black teachers for its Black schools. A brief marriage to Nerie Clark ended with his death, leaving her to raise their son.
Life and Work
Clark taught for many years in Columbia, South Carolina, where she worked with the NAACP on its campaign to equalize the salaries of Black and white teachers, and continued her own education while teaching full time. She earned a bachelor’s degree from Benedict College in 1942 and a master’s degree from Hampton Institute in 1946 before returning to teach in Charleston.
In 1956 South Carolina made it illegal for public employees to belong to civil rights organizations. Clark refused to renounce her NAACP membership and was dismissed after nearly forty years of teaching, losing her pension. She had first attended a workshop at the Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tennessee, in 1954, and Highlander’s founder, Myles Horton, now hired her as director of workshops. Among those who attended Highlander’s desegregation workshops in 1955 was Rosa Parks of Montgomery.
With Esau Jenkins, a Johns Island businessman and organizer, and her cousin Bernice Robinson, a beautician, Clark designed a new kind of school. On 7 January 1957 the first Citizenship School opened in the back of the Progressive Club’s store on Johns Island, with Robinson as teacher and fourteen adult students. Lessons were built around what students needed to function as citizens: reading and writing, filling out money orders and forms, and the sections of the state constitution that registrars used to disqualify Black applicants. By the end of the session most of the students were able to register to vote. By 1961 thirty-seven Citizenship Schools had been established on the Sea Islands and the nearby mainland.
Tennessee officials, hostile to Highlander’s interracial work, raided the school on the night of 31 July 1959 while Clark was leading a workshop. She was arrested on a charge of possessing whiskey; she did not drink, and the charge against her was dropped, but the state went on to revoke Highlander’s charter. In 1961 the Citizenship School program was transferred to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and Clark moved to Atlanta as its director of education and teaching, working with Andrew Young and Dorothy Cotton to train local teachers who returned to open schools across the South.
The SCLC version of the program brought prospective teachers, most of them without formal teacher training, to week-long workshops, where they studied literacy methods, the registration requirements of their states, and the workings of local government, then returned home to run classes of their own; a citizenship workbook for the classes was produced in 1962. Among those trained was Victoria Gray of Hattiesburg, Mississippi, who completed an SCLC Citizenship School training program in August 1963 on a certificate signed by Clark and later co-founded the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. Under Clark’s direction the program trained hundreds of local teachers, and historians credit it with helping tens of thousands of Black Southerners register to vote. She published an autobiography, Echo in My Soul, in 1962 and retired from the SCLC in 1970.
Legacy
Back in Charleston, Clark was elected to the Charleston County School Board in 1975, the same system that had fired her two decades earlier. In 1979 President Jimmy Carter presented her with a Living Legacy Award. A second memoir, Ready from Within, edited by Cynthia Stokes Brown, was published in 1986 and received an American Book Award. Clark died on Johns Island on 15 December 1987 and is buried in Charleston.
Martin Luther King Jr. called Clark the “Mother of the Movement,” and her model of local teachers drawn from the community became a template for the voter registration drives of the 1960s, including the Mississippi campaigns that preceded the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Clark was also an outspoken critic of the male leadership of the SCLC, arguing that women did much of the movement’s organizing work while receiving little of its authority. Her papers are held at the Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture at the College of Charleston.
Septima Clark understood literacy as political power, and her Citizenship Schools showed that ordinary community members could teach one another to claim the vote that Jim Crow laws were designed to deny. Open the classroom lesson →
Key Dates
- 3 May 1898 Born Septima Poinsette in Charleston, South Carolina.
- 1916 Graduates from Avery Normal Institute; begins teaching on Johns Island.
- 1919 Gathers signatures on the NAACP petition to allow Black teachers in Charleston’s public schools.
- 1942 Earns a bachelor’s degree from Benedict College; master’s from Hampton Institute follows in 1946.
- 1956 Fired by Charleston schools for refusing to renounce NAACP membership; joins Highlander Folk School.
- 7 January 1957 First Citizenship School opens on Johns Island.
- 31 July 1959 Arrested during the state raid on Highlander Folk School; charge later dropped.
- 1961 Citizenship Education Program moves to the SCLC; Clark becomes director of education and teaching.
- 1962 Publishes Echo in My Soul.
- 15 December 1987 Dies on Johns Island, South Carolina.
Sources and Further Reading
- Katherine Mellen Charron, Freedom’s Teacher: The Life of Septima Clark (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009).
- Septima Poinsette Clark, with LeGette Blythe, Echo in My Soul (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1962).
- Septima Clark, Ready from Within: Septima Clark and the Civil Rights Movement, ed. Cynthia Stokes Brown (Navarro, Calif.: Wild Trees Press, 1986).
- National Park Service, “Septima Poinsette Clark.” Link
- SNCC Digital Gateway, “Septima Clark.” Link
- Avery Research Center, College of Charleston, “Septima P. Clark and the National Civil Rights Movement.” Link
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