Underground Schools That Built the Civil Rights Movement

In the summer of 1954, educator Septima Clark and small businessman Esau Jenkins traveled to rural Tennessee’s Highlander Folk School, an interracial training center for social change founded by Myles Horton, a white southerner with roots in the labor movement. There, the trio united behind a shared mission: preparing Black southerners to pass the daunting Jim Crow era voter registration literacy tests that were designed to disenfranchise them.

Together with beautician-turned-teacher Bernice Robinson, they launched the underground Citizenship Schools project, which began with a single makeshift classroom hidden in the back of a rural grocery store. By the time the Voting Rights Act was signed into law in 1965, the secretive undertaking had established more than nine hundred citizenship schools across the South, preparing tens of thousands of Black citizens to read and write, demand their rights—and vote. Simultaneously, it nurtured a generation of activists—many of them women—trained in community organizing, political citizenship, and tactics of resistance and struggle who became the grassroots foundation of the Civil Rights Movement. Dr. King called Septima Clark, “Mother of the Movement.”

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Elaine Weiss is an award-winning journalist, author, and public speaker. In addition to Spell Freedom, she is the author of Fruits of Victory: The Woman’s Land Army of the Great War; and The Woman’s Hour: The Great Fight to Win the Vote. Elaine lives with her husband in Baltimore, Maryland.

Moderating the talk will be Robin Morris, Associate Professor and Chair of History at Agnes Scott College in Decatur, Georgia where she teaches courses in modern US history, Southern history, and public history. She holds a PhD in History from Yale University, an MA in Southern Studies from University of Mississippi, and a BA from Queens University of Charlotte. She is also an Atlanta area native and is a proud graduate of DeKalb County Public Schools.

Morris authored Goldwater Girls to Reagan Women: Gender, Georgia, and the Growth of the New Right which traces women’s political activism from the foundation of the Georgia Federation of Republican Women in the 1950s through the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1980s. Prior to graduate study, Morris was an educator at the Levine Museum of the New South in Charlotte, North Carolina and a middle school social studies teacher in Tunica, Mississippi.

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