The University of North Carolina Press

480 pp., 6.125 x 9.25, 31 illus., 5 tables, appends., notes, bibl., index

Cloth

ISBN  978-0-8078-3332-2

Published: November 2009

Freedom's Teacher

The Life of Septima Clark

By Katherine Mellen Charron

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Septima Poinsette Clark's gift to the civil rights movement was education. In the mid-1950s, this former public school teacher developed a citizenship training program that enabled thousands of African Americans to register to vote and then to link the power of the ballot to concrete strategies for individual and communal empowerment. This vibrantly written biography places Clark (1898-1987) in a long tradition of southern African American activist educators, women who spent their lives teaching citizenship by helping people to help themselves.

Freedom's Teacher traces Clark's life from her earliest years as a student, teacher, and community member in rural and urban South Carolina to her increasing radicalization as an activist following World War II, highlighting how Clark brought her life's work to bear on the civil rights movement. Katherine Mellen Charron's engaging portrait demonstrates Clark's crucial role--and the role of many black women teachers--in making education a cornerstone of the twentieth-century freedom struggle. Drawing on autobiographies and memoirs by fellow black educators, state educational records, papers from civil rights organizations, and oral histories, Charron argues that the schoolhouse served as an important institutional base for the movement. Clark's program also fostered participation from grassroots southern black women, affording them the opportunity to link their personal concerns to their political involvement on the community's behalf. Using Clark's life as a lens, Charron sheds valuable new light on southern black women's activism in national, state, and judicial politics, from the Progressive Era to the civil rights movement and beyond.

About the Author

Katherine Mellen Charron is assistant professor of history at North Carolina State University. She is coeditor of William Henry Singleton's Recollections of My Slavery Days.

Reviews

"A compelling story, beautifully written, Freedom's Teacher traces a life that intersected with key elements and players in the unfolding civil rights movement. Charron's powerful work also demonstrates the ways in which Septima Clark drew on rich traditions in black history to influence and shape her people's quest for freedom and social justice."
--Elizabeth Jacoway, author of Turn Away Thy Son: Little Rock, the Crisis That Shocked the Nation

"When Martin Luther King Jr. received his Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, he insisted that Septima Clark accompany him to Stockholm. King recognized the critical role Clark played in the civil rights movement. Perhaps more effectively than anyone else, Clark blended legal and direct action. In this important contribution to the history of the civil rights movement, Charron presents a powerful and moving portrait of Septima Clark and highlights some of the ways African American women defined the role of citizenship schools. Charron offers a fresh perspective and challenges our understanding of this critical period. Remarkable for its precision, intelligence, and heart, this thoughtful narrative demonstrates the enormous diversity of the movement."
--Orville Vernon Burton, Burroughs Chair of Southern History and Culture, Coastal Carolina University

"Freedom's Teacher is at once an intimate biography of a civil rights leader and a sweeping reconsideration of the civil rights era. By placing the schoolhouse alongside the church as a key site of struggle, bringing to visibility a hidden history of black women's educational activism, and demonstrating the subtle interplay of race and gender, Katherine Charron allows us to see both women's leadership and the freedom struggle in a revelatory new light."
--Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill