Septima Clark took her project on the road throughout the south, conducting workshops and training teachers. The late Guy Carawan, the white Highlander singer who did more than anyone to make “We Shall Overcome” the anthem of the movement, often said the most important thing he ever did in life was to be Septima Clark’s chauffeur.
In April of 1960, Clark hosted the first regional conference of students involved in the new sit-in movement, and apparently energized the youth to go to North Carolina two weeks later for a second conference, at which they organized SNCC (the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee). She hosted the youth while facing trumped-up charges by authorities in Tennessee who continually tried to intimidate and close Highlander.
In 1961 Clark moved to the SCLC and worked with Dr. King as director of education and teaching. By 1970 she had overseen the establishment of about one thousand citizenship schools throughout the Deep South, and it is estimated that she was responsible for training about ten thousand leaders.
Rosa Parks well-remembered the first time she met Septima Clark. It was at a civil rights workshop at Highlander in the summer of 1955. African-Americans and sympathetic whites had begun to meet quietly, secretly, throughout the South to plan their counterattacks against the segregation system and to train the new corps of volunteers for that fight. These volunteers would come to be called civil rights workers. Septima Clark, already a 30-year veteran of the struggle, was one of the principal trainers.
“At that time I was very nervous, very troubled in my mind about the events that were occurring in Montgomery,” Rosa Parks says. “But then I had the chance to work with Septima. She was such a calm and dedicated person in the midst of all that danger. I thought, ‘If I could only catch some of her spirit.’ I wanted to have the courage to accomplish the kinds of things that she had been doing for years.” After the sessions with Clark, Parks returned to Montgomery saying she had a firmness and self-confidence she had not felt before. Three months later she refused to give up her seat on a bus so that a white person could sit down, the act which many people regard as the beginning of the modern Civil Rights Movement.
Septima Clark had that type of inspirational effect on most of those she taught, and many of her students had that type of effect on the rest of the world.