Septima Poinsette Clark

• Born: May 3, 1898
• Birthplace: Charleston, South Carolina
• Died: December 15, 1987
• Place of death: Charleston, South Carolina

Activist and educator

A teacher and civil rights activist, Clark is best known for developing “citizenship schools” that taught African Americans across the South to read and write so that they could register to vote. The schools also encouraged grassroots activism by empowering impoverished African Americans to become politically engaged. Clark also was a tireless supporter of women’s rights who refused to take a subservient role in the Civil Rights movement because of her gender.

Areas of achievement: Education; Social issues; Women’s rights

Early Life

Septima Poinsette Clark (SEP-tih-muh POYN-set) was the second of eight children born to Peter Poinsette, a former slave, and his Haitian wife, Victoria. Having excelled at school, Clark attended Avery Normal Institute and trained to be a schoolteacher. Because African Americans were not permitted to teach in the city, she found work in 1916 on Johns Island, a remote community off the South Carolina coast. She developed a close affinity with island people that would inspire her later work.

In 1918, she returned to Charleston to teach at Avery and met a young sailor named Nerie Clark. Although her parents disapproved of his background and dark complexion, the couple married in 1919. Their marriage was troubled from the outset. Their first child, Victoria, died when she was only one month old, and Nerie was away at sea for long periods. When he returned in 1925, the couple had a son, Nerie. However, later that year, Clark discovered that her husband had been having an affair. He died of kidney failure in December.

Clark returned to teach on Johns Island, where she noted several changes in island society. People had begun to form fraternal associations and asked her to teach them to read and write so that they could keep adequate records. This stoked Clark’s interest in adult literacy. As she no longer felt able to care for her son, she sent him to live with her late husband’s parents in North Carolina. She decided never to remarry and instead dedicated the remainder of her life to teaching and civil rights activism. In 1929, she accepted a teaching job in Columbia, South Carolina, where she remained for eighteen years. She was instantly struck by the democratic atmosphere of the state capital. In this new, more open atmosphere, she emerged as a civil rights leader.

Life’s Work

Clark joined Columbia’s branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and became involved in a legal campaign for equal pay for African American teachers. In February, 1944, district court judge J. Waties Waring ruled that wage disparities were illegal. In an attempt to evade the decision, South Carolina introduced an exam to determine teachers’ salaries. For Clark, this measure was far from punitive. When she took the test, she received an A grade, and her income tripled. The pay increase allowed her to study for a master’s degree at Virginia’s Hampton Institute. In 1947, Clark returned to Charleston, where she continued to be involved in a range of civic activities, including a program immunizing Johns Island children against diphtheria. Politically, it was an exciting time for African American activists. Waring ruled in favor of a suit brought by NAACP activists that opened previously all-white Democratic Party primaries to African American voters.

In 1953, Clark’s colleague Anna Kelly invited her to Highlander Folk School, an alternative educational institution in the Tennessee mountains. Clark was impressed by the school and its ethos; the next year, she attended a Highlander-run workshop on the United Nations. She took her former pupil Esau Jenkins, a businessman and civic leader, with her. At the meeting, Jenkins outlined his plans for an adult school that would teach people how to read and write so that they could register to vote. Highlander had acquired a grant from the Schwartzhaupt Foundation to develop local leadership in the South, and Jenkins appeared to fit the bill. Because Clark had experience working with the residents of Johns Island, Highlander director Myles Horton hired her for the summer of 1955 to begin preparations for the school.

In 1956, Charleston’s school board refused to renew Clark’s teaching contract because of her affiliation with the NAACP. Horton gave her a job at Highlander and she finalized plans for the literacy school, including purchasing and renovating a derelict schoolhouse and recruiting the first teacher, Bernice Robinson, a beautician with no formal teaching experience. The school opened in January, 1957. Robinson told her students that although she was officially their teacher, they all would learn collaboratively. The school became so popular that similar classes were opened on nearby Edisto and Wadmalaw islands and in Charleston’s city center.

Since its founding in 1932, Highlander had been subject to frequent investigations over alleged communist affiliations. These culminated in the summer of 1959, when state officials raided the school. Clark was arrested, although the charges against her were dropped in 1960. The school was charged with selling goods and alcohol without a license. Horton decided that the citizenship schools were “too important to be tied to the fate of Highlander” and arranged for the program’s administration to be transferred to Martin Luther King, Jr.’s emerging Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Horton arranged for Clark to move to Atlanta to work as a director of education for the new program. Feeling personally slighted and underappreciated as a female member of staff, Clark complained bitterly.

This dispute set a precedent for Clark’s later career. As an SCLC employee, Clark criticized the way in which women were excluded from influential roles in the organization and regularly transgressed men’s expectations of her when she criticized their administration of the program. Despite these challenges, the SCLC’s Citizenship Education Project (CEP) was highly influential. Schools not only trained African Americans to vote but also inspired them to discuss political issues and challenge social injustices. Because the schools trained a cadre of grassroots activists for the organization, SCLC leader Andrew Young referred to the program as the “foundation on which the Civil Rights movement was built.”

Clark retired from the SCLC in 1970, but remained active in local politics and civic life throughout the rest of her life. In 1975, she was elected to the Charleston school board. Always willing to challenge male authority, she joined the National Organization for Women (NOW). By the time of her death in 1987, Clark had received numerous honors, including an honorary doctorate from the College of Charleston.

Significance

Through her work in developing the citizenship schools and training teachers, Clark created an innovative program that enabled African American adults to become literate, to vote in elections before 1965, and to become politically and socially engaged. King described her as the “mother of the Civil Rights movement.” Despite this maternal metaphor, Clark transgressed traditional gender roles in her personal and professional lives, openly protested women’s exclusion from formal leadership roles in SCLC, and was an early champion of African American women’s rights.

Bibliography

Clark, Septima Poinsette. Echo in My Soul. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1962. Clark’s first autobiography is a rich and detailed account of her early life and impressions of life in Charleston, Johns Island, and Columbia. It also documents her quarrels with Myles Horton but does not cover her years with the SCLC.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Ready from Within: Septima Clark and the Civil Rights Movement. Edited by Cynthia Stokes Brown. Navarro, Calif.: Wild Trees Press, 1986. This autobiography provides a rich account of Clark’s work with the SCLC and her later years.

McFadden, Grace Jordan. “Septima P. Clark and the Struggle for Human Rights.” In Women in the Civil Rights Movement: Trailblazers and Torchbearers, edited by Vicki L. Crawford, Jacqueline Anne Rouse, and Barbara Woods. Black Women in United States History 16. Bloomington, Ind.: Carlson, 1990. The first major publication documenting women’s contributions to the Civil Rights movement, this edited collection of articles contains an essay on Clark’s life, as well as chapters about Highlander and the Sea Islands.

Mellon Charron, Katherine. Freedom’s Teacher: The Life of Septima Clark. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009. Rich, detailed account of Clark’s life, although it is largely descriptive rather than analytical.

Robnett, Belinda. How Long, How Long: African American Women in the Struggle for Civil Rights. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Study in which author argues that Clark was an effective “bridge leader” who recruited men and women to the Civil Rights movement and interpreted political events and SCLC’s strategy in a way that was relevant and meaningful for African Americans living in the South.