Spell freedom : the underground schools that built the civil rights movement / Elaine Weiss.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Weiss, Elaine, 1952- author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

African Americans--Education--Southern States--History--20th century.

African Americans--Suffrage--Southern States--History--20th century.

Literacy tests (Election law)--Southern States--History--20th century.

Civil rights movements--United States--History--20th century.

Physical Description:

vi, 377 pages, 8 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations ; 24 cm.

Edition:

First One Signal Publishers/Atria Books hardcover edition.

Place of Publication:

New York : One Signal Publishers/Atria, 2025.

Summary:

"In the summer of 1954, educator Septima Clark and small businessman Esau Jenkins travelled 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.' In the vein of Hidden Figures and Devil in the Grove, Spell Freedom is both a riveting, crucially important lens onto our past, and a deeply moving story for our present."-- Provided by publisher.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 321-367) and index.

ISBN:

9781668002698

1668002698

OCLC:

1500641728

Publisher Number:

90101297136