Started by Esau Jenkins and Septima Clark on Johns Island SC in 1954, the Citizenship Schools focused on teaching adults to read so they could pass the voter-registration "literacy tests." Under the innocuous cover of adult-literacy classes, the schools clandestinely taught democracy and civil rights, community leadership and organizing, practical politics, and the strategies and tactics of resistance and struggle.
Septima Poinsette Clark pioneered the link between education and political organizing, especially political organizing aimed at gaining the right to vote. “Literacy means liberation,” she stressed knowing that education was key to gaining political, economic, and social power.
Long before SNCC’s Freedom Schools, Clark was developing a grassroots citizenship education program that used everyday materials to think about big questions. From reading catalogues to writing on dry cleaner bags instead of chalkboards, Clark not only found creative ways to teach literacy but also helped people become leaders. “Don’t ever think that everything went right. It didn’t,” she acknowledged. “Many times there were failures. But we had to mull over those failures and work until we could get them ironed out.”
Clark was born in Charleston, South Carolina in 1898 to a mother who was “fiercely proud” and a father who was gentle and tolerant. Both recognized the importance of education, although they came from very different life experiences. Clark’s father was formerly enslaved on the Poinsette Plantation and would tell Clark about how, as a child, he would take his master’s children to school and wait outside while they were in class. Her mother was raised in Haiti and was taught how to read and write at a young age. When they saw the conditions of Clark’s grade school as compared to those that the white children of Charleston attended, they were enraged. And so, they sent her to a woman who taught neighborhood children in her home across the street. Clark eventually went on to attend the Avery Normal School in Charleston.
Clark decided to become a teacher herself, seeing education as a tool to be put in the hands of the people to gain a better life. By 1916, Clark had received her teaching license and got a job on Johns Island off the coast of South Carolina. Blacks were not permitted to teach in public schools in Charleston. Looking for ways to pass the time in the evening, Clark began teaching adult literacy on the island after school. She would have her students write stories about their daily lives and think critically about the world around them.
Sources:
https://snccdigital.org/people/septima-clark/
https://www.crmvet.org/docs/citdocs.
https://www.zinnedproject.org/materials/citizenship-schools-documentary/
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