Portrait of an Educator

Septima Clark

Septima Poinsette Clark began her teaching career in 1918 when she was 20 years old. She first taught in an isolated rural school on Johns Island, off the coast of South Carolina. Clark had been a teacher in the African American schools of the segregated South for many years when she took a job as a seventh grade teacher in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1947. As she described her work there, “But soon my assignment was changed, and I was put in charge of a group of problem pupils in grades four through seven.” She was proud of the progress she made with her pupils, but she would soon confront new problems. As the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was winning the court battles that would eventually lead to the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, many African American teachers faced a difficult decision regarding their participation in the organization. As Clark described it:

There weren’t too many black people who considered the NAACP worthwhile. They were still afraid, you know, so it was a very small group at first. But after many years of work by its lawyers, the United States Supreme Court ruled, in 1954, that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional. After that decision, the school authorities in South Carolina passed out questionnaires to every teacher requiring us to list all the organizations we belonged to. I refused to overlook my membership in the NAACP, as some of the teachers did. I listed it.

Source. Cynthia Stokes Brown, editor. Septima Clark and the Civil Rights Movement: Ready from Within. African World Press, 1990.

The next year the South Carolina legislature passed a law that said that no city or state employee could belong to the NAACP. You see, our legislature was joining others across the Deep South in a systematic campaign to wipe out the NAACP. . . .

It wasn’t too long before I got my letter of dismissal. The Board of Education wrote me that it would not be renewing my contract to teach remedial reading at the Henry Archer School. My goodness, somehow or other it really didn’t bother me.

Clark never returned to public school teaching after her dismissal in 1955, but her career as an educator in the civil rights movement was just beginning. While she was attending a workshop at the Highlander Center in Tennessee (one of the centers of civil rights organizing in the South) along with Eleanor Roosevelt and representatives from the Sea Islands where she had first taught, it quickly became clear that there was a desperate need for adult literacy education if African Americans were to claim the voting rights for which the movement was fighting. Many states used literacy tests to keep Blacks from voting. Along with a few other African American educators, Clark took the lead in organizing Citizenship Schools on the Sea Islands and eventually across the South. In order to achieve a high level of literacy for these adult students and to keep the focus on the goal of their active political participation, Clark and her colleagues decided not to use traditional textbooks, but rather have the students learn to read by studying the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the South Carolina state constitution. In 1961, the Highlander Center turned the Citizenship School program over to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and Clark and Andrew Young (who had recently been hired at Highlander and who went on to serve in the U.S. Congress and as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations) shifted to the SCLC staff. For Clark, gaining the right to vote—a difficult-enough task for southern Blacks in the 1950s—was only the first step. She also taught people to ask questions like “Do you have an employment office in your town?” or “How come the pavement stops where the Black section begins?” Her focus was always on helping people in “asking questions like that, and then knowing who to go to talk to about that, or where to protest it.” Education, Clark believed, was a key element, but only an element, in a long road to freedom that wound through the schools, the voting booth, and the political organization of her people. Thinking about Septima Clark:

 Do you agree with Clark that literacy is important to civil rights? Can they be separated?  Clark taught her students to read the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights and her own state's constitution. What might Freedom Schools or Citizenship Schools use as a curriculum today?  If Clark was alive today, what issues do you think would most upset her? Most please her?  Clark lost her teaching job because of her membership in the NAACP. Are there parallel things a teacher might get fired for today? Are there reasons it might be worth it to get fired?

You can learn more about Clark's life and work by exploring the following Web links and publications.

The Educator's Life:

Clark Biography Extensive retelling of Clark's life, personal quotes, and works. http://www.usca.edu/aasc/Clark.htm

Clark's Impact on the Civil Rights Movement Traces Clark's life from her earliest years as a student, teacher, and community member in rural and urban South Carolina to becoming an activist in the civil rights movement. (2009)

Charron, Katherine Mellen, Freedom's Teacher: The Life of Septima Clark. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009.

Related Work and Research:

Highlander Research and Education Center Clark organized Citizenship Schools at Highlander Center—now Highlander Research and Education Center in Tennessee. See the ways her work continues. http://www.highlandercenter.org/

Selected Publications:

Clark, Septima, & Cynthia Stokes Brown. Ready from Within: Septima Clark and the Civil Rights Movement. Wild Tree Press, 1986.