Ready from Within: Septima Clark & the Civil Rights Movement, A First Person Narrative

by Cynthia Stokes Brown (Editor), Septima Poinsette Clark

30TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION Septima Clark played one of the most essential, but little recognized roles in the Civil Rights Movement. Born in 1898 in Charleston, South Carolina, she was a public school teacher until 1956, when she was dismissed for refusing to disavow her membership in the National Association for the advancement of Colored People. Subsequently, she worked for the Highlander Folk School, helping to set up Citizenship Schools throughout the South where Black adults could learn to read and prepare to vote. During the 1960s she worked with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and was a close associate of Martin Luther King, jr. from 1978 to 1983 she served as the first Black woman on the Charleston School Board. This is a first-person narrative of her life in the context of the Civil Rights Movement. Her story continues a major thread in the tapestry of the movement.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Memoir, Education, Biography, Autobiography, Race

134 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1990

Reviews

[Mikey B. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Septima Clark was born in 1898 in Charleston, South Carolina. During her life she constantly fought against the forces of segregation and repression. She was an activist.

There are a lot of specific descriptions of the poverty she encountered while teaching. This specificity, such as no blackboards in the classroom, gives this autobiography its originality and strength.

Septima Clark was fired from her teaching position in Charleston in the 1950s because she was a member of the NAACP. She then attended and was hired by the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee in the 1950s. Highlander was a liberal arts school and was integrated (this was against the Jim Crow laws of the South). It was the first time she met and worked with white people in an integrated milieu.

I had to laugh at this passage: Page 55 my book

Lots of white people considered Highlander a Communist place… The editor of the News and Courier in Charleston… looked at Myles’ [the leader of Highlander] house and declared that the flat roof was built that way so helicopters from Russia could come in and tell people how to become part of the Russian communistic group.

Septima Clark also discusses the chauvinism she encountered in the Civil Rights movement – this made her more aware of the rights of women. Her life was dedicated to the education of her people. Millions of Black people in the South were illiterate due to underfunded schools and the total lack of interest by the white power community in the educational process for Black people. She taught them basics, like to write a cheque (a “check” for those in the U.S.) and to learn the alphabet. This enabled them to register for voting and become concerned citizens.

This short autobiography shows how one person can make a difference.

[Dont · Rating 4 out of 5]

In this little book, Septima Clark reflects on her life as one of the founding mothers of the modern civil rights movement. The text has the feeling of a letter written to a future friend; the tone is intimate and informal. The editors chose not to resolve Ms. Clark's language but let her speak in her own musical rhythms. Like Ella Baker, Septima Clark is one of those names that should be a household word.

In a rare moment of singing her own praises, this background warrior admits to the importance of her work in founding the early Citizenship Schools in the late 1950s. She writes, "One time I heard Andy [Andrew] Young say that the Citizenship Schools were the base on which the whole civil rights movement was build. And that's probably very much true.

"It's true because the Citizenship Schools made people aware of the political situation in their area. We recruited the wise leaders of their communities, like Fannie Lou Hamer in Mississippi. Hosea Williams started out as a Citizenship School Supervisor. The Citizenship School classes formed the grassroots basis of new statewide political organizations in South Carolina, Georgia, and Mississippi. From one end of the South to the other, if you look at the black elected officials and the political leaders, you find people who had their first involvement in the training program of the Citizenship Schools."

Ready From Within makes an excellent introduction to Ms. Clark's contribution to our history as well as generously offers a sense of the person. From here, interested students of political struggle can pick up Katherine Charron's excellent and comprehensive biography, "Freedom's Teacher: The Life of Septima Clark" or Myles Horton's autobiography, "The Long Haul."

But the crucial point made by Clark is the strategic intersection between movement organizing and practices of popular education. The fact that more people today know about Paulo Freire or (God help us) Jacques Ranciere, is a testament to our own alienation from our own radical history and the life and death struggles of the freedom movement in the United States. If you care about radical education, organizing, activism, and cultural action, and you're unfamiliar with Septima Clark, then it's time to start schooling yourself.

[Andrea · Rating 5 out of 5]

Septima Poinsette Clark... words cannot express how happy and humbling this tour of freedom fighters and popular educators has been making me. This is short, wonderful, and everyone should read it. Cynthia Stokes Brown helped Septima Clark bring it together, and the introduction is her narration of how they met, how this book came about. In it she quotes part of a speech given by Rosa Parks at a dinner given by the East Bay Friends of Highlander where Mrs Clark was also present:

However, I was willing to face whatever came, not because I felt that I was going to be benefited or helped personally, because I felt that I had been destroyed too long ago. But I had the hope that the young people would be benefited by equal education...

I actually did not think in terms of non-violence and Christian love in connection with the Movement (we didn't call it the Movement--we just called it survival) until Dr Martin Luther king came to Montgomery... (17)

These words shook me, regrounded me. Reminded me of the reality that all of this work was grounded in -- survival.

I felt that I had been destroyed too long ago.

This is still where change has to start, where people are at. Septima Clark might have fought hard to do things the way she thought would be best, but it didn't mean she closed herself down to change. Rather it meant opening up to a collective way of changing:

But I changed, too, as I traveled through the eleven deep south states. Working through those states, I found I could say nothing to those people, and no teacher as a rule could speak with them. We had to let them talk to us and say to us whatever they wanted to say. When we got through listening to them, we would let them know that we felt that they were right according to the kind of thing that they had in their mind, but according to living in this world there were other things they needed to know. We wanted to know if they were willing then to listen to us, and they decided that they wanted to listen to us.

...I found out that I needed to change my way of thinking, and in changing my way of thinking I had to let people understand that their way of thinking was not the only way. We had to work together to get the changes. (53-54)

She talks a lot about how she had to change her thinking about middle-class people, poor people, white people... but I'm getting ahead, because Mrs Clark fully came into her own with some help from Highlander, and this was a process the way getting rid of our prejudices is always a process.

Highlander Years

She was a teacher, and a colleague recommended Highlander to her. They offered free room and board for those attending the workshops (it's clear this was important, it's not at all clear how they funded it). Clark writes:

Myles used to open the workshops by asking the people what they wanted to know, and he would close it with, "What you going to do back home?" (30)

I liked that particular practice of questions, as much as the importance of music to the experience, and the singing that always went on there. When Clark lost her job as a teacher through the Southern push to destroy the NAACP and the mass firing of teachers who wouldn't abjure their membership, she was hired on to Highlander's staff.

An aside -- Mrs Clark remembers Rosa Parks attending her first workshop while all the time fearing that someone would report her presence there back to the community and she would lose her job, even be in danger. No idle fear. Three months after that, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on the bus.

While at Highlander, Clark was instrumental in helping set up the citizenship schools. She herself had been a teacher on Johns Island in South Carolina, so she knew a great deal about the situation there when Esau Jenkins came to talk to her and Myles Horton at Highlander about setting up a school to teach adults literacy there. He was a bus driver among other things, and had begun educating people about the constitution so they could qualify to vote while driving his route. But he couldn't teach literacy while driving the bus.

Highlander provided the funds to buy a building. They set up a cooperative grocery in the front rooms to disguise what they were doing from the white people of the island -- this also allowed them to make enough money to pay Highlander back for the cost of the building and created a loan-fund. They used this to rebuild a woman's house after it 'got burned out' (no mention of how, why), to help people through sickness and etc.

Cooperative efforts and mutual aid within communities are a running thread throughout all of these stories of social change and struggle. So is respect. You'd think that would be easy, but everyone knows it can be pretty hard for some. Like Horton, she emphasises the importance of finding someone who could teach with respect for their students:

'We wanted to find a person who was not a licensed teacher, one who would not be considered high falutin', who would not act condescending to adults. (48)

They settled on the amazing Bernice Robinson, and the schools grew and grew with wildly success. A few more thoughts on her work at Highlander and the white supremacist actions to shut down it's challenge to the establishment through charges of interracial gatherings, the illegal selling of alcohol, and communism. This hodgepodge contains the real reason, the fabricated reason, and the fear-mongering reason for Tennessee's hate, highlighting the particularly long-standing tradition of red-baiting to shut down all attempts at social change. This deep-rooted hatred of socialism has been, and continues to be, an effective demonising label for anything that troubles privilege and promises change. Clark writes:

But anyone who was against segregation was considered a Communist. White southerners couldn't believe that a southerner could have the idea of racial equality; they thought it had to come from somewhere else. (55)

Shit, imagine being so limited of vision and spirit. You'd think anyone could look around them and think shit, we must be able to do better than this. So how do we do it?

There are some light moments in here. For all her radical politics, she's that fierce church/mother figure in her disapproval of alcohol (and by extension all that goes with it), though you love her just the same. I love it too, so much, every time she mentions Stokely Carmichael's 'black power boys'. That phrase will never leave me. You can love her for it, because she always stayed in conversation with those black power boys. Saw them sharing a struggle, even if she disagreed with everything they said.

Then there's that memory of Harry Belafonte (swoon) coming to Highlander and teaching them 'Michael Row Your Boat Ashore', and a return to harsh reality when she talks about singing it to keep her spirits up after being arrested as part of that effort to destroy Highlander. One thing Myles Horton never quite got into was the racism Septima Clark faced every time she set foot in Sewanee, the nearest town to Highlander. She had to do without so much while she worked and lived there -- like shopping at the store, or being welcome in church. Such ugliness. You realise this, and then it is followed by her arrest while Horton is away. She's fierce all right, but I can't imagine her not terrified when the cops took her the long way round to jail.

That must have made it easier when she, Horton and King decided to spin-off the citizenship schools to the SCLC to ensure they weren't affected (and a few more reasons, they were already getting bigger than Highlander wanted to manage). Clark moved with them, though remained tightly connected to Highlander.

SCLC years

So she moved house (though never fully left the street she grew up on in Charleston -- but more about that in the next post) and started a centre called the Dorchester Cooperative Community Center in McIntosh, Georgia. There they held five day trainings for people from local communities who wanted to go back and open up citizenship schools. They also increased recruitment of teachers. They had only three qualifications: teachers had to be respected in the community, had to be able to read aloud, and they had to be able to write their names in cursive writing.

Back then in the South, whites made sure your signature didn't count unless it was your name in cursive. I don't know why that detail alone makes me so angry.

Clark describes a back and forth and a flexibility, people wanting literacy teaching for various reasons beyond voting. They tailored programs to local needs -- like teaching people to write checks. They got a grant so were able to compensate poor tenant farmers for their time studying and allow them to come.

Even then we didn't have too many to come. There was so much pressure from the whites in the community that too many of them were afraid. Those who came had to feel that we could get away with it or that we didn't mind if we had to die. (65)

More grounding.This was about power, and whites never did yield power easily.

'But before we could send anyone to Congress, the white people tried some of everything.' (71)

White supremacists killed thirty people engaged in the civil rights work of registering people for the vote from northern Virginia to Eastern Texas. You want more grounding? Clark remembers arguing with white volunteers, who would sneak out after work to see the town and run back home scared after threats or worse. She would tell them:

"Well, I tried to tell you not to go out at night. it's bad enough to try to go out in the day, you know." (72)

I don't know how well I'd do myself in that kind of claustrophobic environment and under that kind of pressure. I guess you never know until you're in it. Septima Clark understood as well as anyone that the people she worked with in these towns were facing this for life, not just the little while they were stepping outside their own reality to volunteer for a cause. But she didn't much care for the high-falutin' folk who refused risk, not when she saw so many others stepping forward... She talks a lot about class, about middle-class preachers and teachers too afraid to risk their standing, and in preacher's cases their traditions of accepting gifts from white businesses in return for their mediations with Black community. It was mostly the other members of the community who pushed through, some giving their lives to do so. But together they managed to form 897 citizenship schools between 1957 and 1970. In 1964 alone there were 195, and Fannie Lou Hamer and Hosea Williams both entered the movement through their participation in them.

Even more than class, Clark talks about the sexism:

I was on the executive staff of SCLC, but the men on it didn't listen to me too well. They liked to send me into many places, because I could always make a path in to get people to listen to what I have to say. But those men didn't have any faith in women, none whatsoever. they just though that women were sex symbols...That's why Rev. Abernathy would say continuously, "Why is Mrs. Clark on this staff?" (77)

I feel that tickle of rage here. Imagine anyone not respecting this woman. Imagine it. She went right ahead and spoke her mind anyway, and she didn't hold back any punches.

I think there is something among the Kings that makes them feel that they are the kings, and so you don't have a right to speak. You can work behind the scenes all you want. That's all right. But don't come forth and try to lead. That's not the kind of thing they want. (78)

Of course, she didn't see herself as a feminist at the time, but looking back she saw the intertwining of the women's rights movement and the civil rights movement, one did not come out of the other.

This is a slim volume, too slim for such a life! And curiously split in two parts, the second dealing more with her growing up and her family. So I'll talk about that in a second post.

[Story Circle Book Reviews · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ready from Within—think about that title. It describes the core values of Septima Poinsette Clark. Nothing deterred her from her goal to educate fellow Black citizens and further their opportunity to vote. Her work and her name have been overlooked in the history of the modern civil rights movement.

By today’s standards she’d be considered name dropping to impress you with the people she knew, who supported and influenced her life. She quietly explains how she met Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Jr., Andrew Young, and Barbara Jordan, to name a few. In 1918, she joined the NAACP and quietly supported non-violent resistance for the rest of her life.

Her courage was tested as an early member of Highlander Center, a grassroots organization still active today. It led her to personally train hundreds of teachers for Citizenship Schools. “…Citizenship Schools made people aware of the political situation in their area.” Citizenship School teachers didn’t use textbooks. They directly instructed people to read election laws and to write their names in cursive writing.

This first-person account is written in the style of the oral history valued in the Black community. As if in a conversation, Clark speaks directly to the reader as she unfolds her life story. It’s a gentle explanation of her persistence to ensure her vocation. “I just thought that you couldn’t get people to register and vote until you teach them to read and write. That’s what I thought, and I was so right.”

Highly recommended, especially to readers interested in the history of the Civil Rights Movement, who will find a synopsis in this little book. The engaging and encouraging style will have the reader doing internet searches to learn more about the Highlander Center, Citizenship Schools, and more. This timely book is celebrating its 30th anniversary. Septima Poinsette Clark continues her vocation as she educates readers.

Story Circle Book Reviews thanks Eileen Harrison Sanchez for this review.

[Drick · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cynthia Stokes Brown conducted a series of interviews with Septima Clark in 1979 when Ms.Clark was 81 years old. In her own words Ms. Clark tells her life story especially her efforts to start the Citizenship Schools that taught people how to pass the literacy tests that would enable them to vote. Having served as a teacher in mostly rural schools for 40 years, at the age of 59 after being fired by the Charleston, SC school board for being a member of the NAACP in 1956, she went to work for Highlander Folk School that enabled her to begin the work she is best known for: the Citizenship Schools. However her concern for education, poverty and empowering people did not start then, but was a theme throughout her life, that was fulfilled in her work in the Citizenship schools. She speaks very candidly about issues such as the harshness of poverty and the sexism of the early Civil Rights Leaders, even as she speaks gracefully of the people in her lives. While this is not a difficult read, it takes you back into her life and gives a picture of what life in the segregated South was like, both the joyful and the tragic, the heroic and the hideous.

The book was not published until 1990, which is the only sad thing about it. Septima Clark died in 1987, and though she may have seen a manuscript she did not live to get the credit she deerved for empowering African-Americans to read and to vote.

[Ashby · Rating 4 out of 5]

This oral history provides a unique first-hand history of educational opportunities (or lack thereof) for Black Southerners, using Septima's perspective as a public school teacher, grassroots organizer, and popular educator. From her childhood in the early 20th century to her retirement in the late 1960s, white supremacy created roadblocks again and again for the education of Black Americans. Septima shares her experiences as a rural school teacher, fighting for employment opportunities in Charleston, and her dismissal from the school system for her involvement with the NAACP.

She shares honest experiences of being an older woman among the young men who were the front faces of the Civil Rights Movement. After fighting against white supremacists throughout her teaching career, she continued to fight to be heard as a woman in the Civil Rights movement.

This first-hand narrative was one of the first perspectives I've read from that time period and gave me a more comprehensive view of the state of education for Black southerners. I'm grateful that she left these reflections for us.

[Joseph Robbins · Rating 4 out of 5]

"As we go along, it's going to take that hundred years for attitudes to change. They will change. There will be warm spots in the hearts of many whites, who will see what we need to do for people-low-income people, whites and blacks, Cubans, and all others. We've got to learn to work with all of them. I don't expect to ever see a utopia. No, I think there will always be something that you're going to have to work on, always. That's why, when we have chaos and people say, 'I'm scared. I'm scared. I'm concerned,' I say, 'Out of that will come something good.' It will, too. They can be afraid if they want to, afraid of what is going to happen. Things will happen, and things will change. The only thing that's really worthwhile is change. It's coming." - Septima Clark

[Pam · Rating 3 out of 5]

Eye-opening and a quick read, this a first person account of Septima Clark, an important figure in the civil rights movement.

[Christin Edge · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ready From Within, a first person narrative of Septima Clark and the Civil Rights Movement, emerged from American history major and author Cynthia Stokes Brown after a personal account with segregation that sparked a journey to uncover the leaders, motives, and untold stories surrounding this movement that sparked change within the country. As a child, Brown struggled to define the boundaries within the “jails of color” that prohibited her from friendships and social endeavors. This book begins with an introduction by the author to establish the purpose and introduce an often overlooked name that played a vital role in the Civil Rights Movement--Septima Poinsette Clark from Charleston, South Carolina. As many often assume, the Civil Rights Movement was carried upon the shoulders of famous names like Rosa Parks and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Although these are noteworthy individuals, Septima Clark played a heavy, non-violent role by empowering the oppressed with the opportunity to gain voter registration through education. The author establishes premise from the introduction that this account was provided to her in 1979 by 81 year old Septima Clark who claims her retrospective interpretation of events is also shaped by the Women’s Liberation Movement. This historical account begins at the end of World War II and later provides a glimpse into Clark’s childhood. Although segregation had been declared illegal in the public school setting upon the outcome of Brown vs. Board of Education; many schools remained segregated. Southern communities found ways to stifle the voice of individuals who were not part of the “white” community. One example shared in the book involves voting registration laws. Individuals would be required to read parts of the Constitution in order to prove themselves worthy of voter registration. This immediately filtered many African Americans from the polls due to their lack of literacy. It was Septima Clark who realized education was the key agent to change. If African Americans were properly educated, they could pass voter registration requirements in order to amplify their voice toward the overturn of segregation. As she claimed at the end of her story, she “always roots for the oppressed” and dedicated her life to the action of change within the Civil Rights Movement and the Women’s Liberation Movement.
Throughout the life account of Septima Clark, the unifying theme of “change” emerges. In specific regard to the Civil Rights Movement, the central idea of change is developed into a theme that education--not violence--equals change. This theme is manifested in Rosa Parks’ choice to hold her seat, the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and Clark’s denouncement of Stokely Charmical’s Black Power Boys that swayed toward a violent approach to change. Septima Clark uncovered that the strategic way to overturn the segregated south was to empower individuals to pass the voter registration requirements by providing literacy education. From the Highlander School to local Citizenship Schools, Clark devoted her life to the cause of progressive change.
As an educator in South Carolina, this book was extremely enlightening,easy to read, and easy to connect visual images with the locations mentioned throughout our state. This work reinforces the power education has to create change.

[Rebecca · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read in preparation for Living Legacy Pilgrimage in South Carolina and Georgia.

This book provides another thread in the interconnected web.

From the Introduction:
5 But who set us free? Who figured out what steps to take to turn a whole social system on its head? How did they do it? . . . i wanted to find out how they decided what to do first. I wanted to know if the actions they took had the consequences that they intended.

19 “As Mrs. Parks talked, the story of the civil rights movement began to fall into place for me. Mrs. Parks had been able to do what she did because of Myles Horton and Septima Clark and E.D. Nixon. Events had not happened in a random way; they were hooked together through the relationships that people had established with each other. There had been no single leader.”

Non-Violent Resistance
71 [around 1963] “I felt very good about going, about talking to people. I knew that people had gotten to the place where they saw the type of meanness that was being shown throughout their little towns. They hadn’t noticed it before, but now they were ready from within to do something about it."
76 “I look back at the period of the late fifties and sixties as being a watershed period in American history. We underwent a tremendous upheaval of change, and we did it with very little destruction. The movement itself was essentially non-violent. We consciously taught the message that we all lose when there is violence and we can all win if we can find a way to resolve our differences without being destructive. I think the civil rights movement really demonstrated that.”

On Leadership Development:
77-78 “When I heard the men asking Dr. King to lead marches in various places, I’d say to them, “You’re there. You going to ask the leader to come everywhere? Can’t you do the leading in these places?” I sent a letter to Dr. King asking him not to lead all the marches himself, but instead to develop leaders who could lead their own marches. Dr. King read that letter before the staff. It just tickled them; they just laughed. . . . I thought that you develop leaders as you go along, and as you develop these people let them show forth their development by leading.”

103 “You know, the measure of a person is how much they develop in their life. Some people slow down in their growth after they become adults. You can hardly tell they are changing at all. But you never know when a person’s going to leap forward, or change around completely. . . . I’ve seen growth like most people don’t think is possible. I can even work with my enemies because I know from experience that they might have a change of heart any minute.”

126 “Things will happen, and things will change. The only thing that’s really worthwhile is change.” (prefiguring Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower)

[Susan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoy first person memoirs/ narratives from foot soldiers from the Modern Civil Rights Movement. Septima Clark got involved in her fifties/ sixties, and was the Director of Workshops of the Highland Folk School, going around 11+ states in the South to teach (or set up schools to teach) literacy to adults so they could register to vote. With the help of a co-writer/editor (whose introduction also gives useful perspective on what it was like to be a white girl in the segregated South), Septima Clark tells a powerful and straightforward story of taking action because it was the right thing to do, despite challenges, threats, and obstacles. This is a short book, easy to read, but powerful in its message.

[Joyce · Rating 5 out of 5]

I appreciated the writing. Clark's description of teaching in a classroom without a chalkboard stirred memories. An elderly retired teacher, who later became the superintendent of schools in Kittson County, Minnesota, told me a story of teaching in a rural Minnesota school without a chalkboard. She had tarpaper tacked to the wall to use as a chalkboard.

[Brian Jones · Rating 4 out of 5]

“I just thought that you couldn’t get people to register and vote until you teach them to read and write. That’s what I thought, and I was so right.” - Septima Clark

[Teresa Lara · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great story of the life of an inspirational lady!

[Kiana · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mother Septima Poinsette Clark, thank you. I didn't know she taught in the same city I teach now. It's giving me ideas.

[Lea Peck · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read for grad school.

[Tanya Saraiya · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredible. Septima Clark is an inspiration, and I love how Cynthis Stokes Brown captured her voice.