Septima Clark played one of the most essential, but little-recognized, roles in the Civil Rights Movement. Known as the “queen mother” of the Movement, she was literally “freedom’s teacher.”
Clark developed citizenship training programs that enabled thousands of African Americans to register to vote and to link the power of the ballot to concrete strategies for individual and community empowerment. Her first workshops not only sought to increase literacy, but they were also meant to enable black communities.
These workshops on citizenship rights— actually civil rights—spread across the south. She was so central to the movement Dr. Martin Luther King insisted that she join the group going to Oslo for his Nobel Prize ceremony.
Septima Clark, whose father had been a slave, was born Septima Poinsette, the second of eight children, on May 3, 1898, in Charleston, S.C., and died December 15, 1987. In 1916 she finished high school, and unable financially to attend Fisk University as her teachers had hoped, and as an African American, forbidden to teach in the Charleston public schools at that time, she took the state examination that would enable her to teach in rural areas.
In 1919 Septima returned to Charleston to campaign for a law allowing black teachers in the Charleston public schools. A law to that effect passed in 1920, the same year that she married Nerie Clark, a navy cook. Nerie died from kidney failure just five years later.
In 1927 Clark moved to Columbia, South Carolina and continued to teach and to pursue her education, studying during summers at Columbia University in New York City and with W.E.B. DuBois at Atlanta University in Georgia. She received a bachelor’s degree from Benedict College in Columbia in 1942 and a master’s degree from Hampton Institute (now Hampton University) in 1945.
During this time she was also active in several organizations, among them the NAACP, with whom she campaigned, along with Thurgood Marshall, for equal pay for black teachers in Columbia.
In 1956 South Carolina passed a law prohibiting public employees from belonging to any civil rights organization. When Clark would not renounce her membership in the NAACP, she was fired. That was a good break for the Civil Rights Movement as she was hired immediately at the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, where she had conducted citizenship workshops the previous two summers.
The Highlander School was founded in 1932 by Myles Horton with the purpose of having people educate each other about their community problems. First, the emphasis was economics and the union movement. After WW II civil rights for African Americans became a significant focus.
Participants in Clark’s workshops at Highlander included a range of individuals—including college presidents, Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, and many other leaders from the movement as well as ordinary citizens and youth.