Septima Clark
Junious Ricardo Stanton
We’re continuing our series of African American Female history makers many the larger society are not aware of but who nonetheless made significant contributions on behalf of our people and the greater society. Today we are going to share the story of Septima Poinsette Clark (May 3, 1898-December 15, 1987) an educator, human rights activist, political organizer and strategist.
Septima Clark was born in Charleston South Carolina on May 3,1898 the second of eight children. Her parents encouraged her to get an education. She attended the public schools in her area then worked to save enough money to enroll in Avery Normal School a private school for African-Americans. In the early 1900’s Blacks were not allowed to teach in South Carolina public schools so following graduation from Avery Clark went to teach at a Black school at John’s Island not far from Charleston.
In 1919 Clark returned to Charleston to teach at Avery Institute. Her activism began when she joined the NAACP and attempted to get Charleston to hire African-American teachers. She persuaded folks to sign her petitions but social change was a long time coming. In 1920 she married Nerie Clark but he died five years later from kidney failure.
She continued her education during the summer and taught during the rest of the year. She earned a B.A. from Benedict College in Columbus South Carolina and earned a Master’s at Hampton in Virginia. All the while she was an active member of the NAACP and even participated in a class action lawsuit to force South Carolina to pay Black and white teachers the same; a suit the NAACP ultimately won.
When the South Carolina legislature passed a law prohibiting public employees from joining civil rights organizations she refused to resign from the NAACP. Subsequently she was fired after forty years working as a teacher! Undeterred she continued to teach on a grassroots level, agitate and organize and teach organization skills to a new generation of activists.
“By the time of her firing in 1956, Clark had already begun to conduct workshops during her summer vacations at the Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tennessee, a grassroots education center dedicated to social justice. Rosa Parks participated in one of Clark’s workshops just months before she helped launch the Montgomery bus boycott. After losing her teaching position, Myles Horton hired Clark full time as Highlander’s director of workshops. Believing that literacy and political empowerment are inextricably linked, Clark taught people basic literacy skills, their rights and duties as U.S. citizens, and how to fill out voter registration forms. When the state of Tennessee forced Highlander to close in 1961, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) established the Citizenship Education Program (CEP), modeled on Clark’s citizenship workshops. Clark became SCLC’s director of education and teaching, conducting teacher training and developing curricula.”
https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/encyclo... Clark had to grapple with virulent s*xism within the civil rights movement but credited Martin Luther King Jr. for being open to women in leadership positions. When the SCLC took over the citizenship schools program, Clark became the director of its education and teaching programs establishing over eight hundred citizenship school programs until her retirement from the SCLC in 1970.
Mrs. Clark made transition on December 15, 1987 at the age of eighty-nine. Mrs Clark authored two autobiographies: Echo in My Soul, and Ready from Within: Septima Clark and Civil Rights and she is credited with being a driving force within the American Civil Rights movement.
-30-
Posted By: Junious Stanton
Saturday, March 13th 2021 at 8:26AM
You can also
click
here to view all posts by this author...
