Septima Clark

Septima Poinsette Clark was born on 3 May 1898 in Charleston, South Carolina, the daughter of a formerly enslaved father and a mother born free in Haiti. She trained as a teacher, but because Charleston did not permit Black teachers in its public schools at the time, she began her career on rural Johns Island, South Carolina, teaching in a small, poorly resourced segregated school before eventually returning to teach in Charleston once the city changed its policy following an NAACP campaign she had personally supported by gathering signatures.

Clark spent decades as a public school teacher, becoming increasingly aware of how limited literacy among Black adults in the segregated South directly restricted their ability to pass the literacy tests then routinely used to disqualify Black citizens from voter registration, a deliberate and widespread tool of disenfranchisement across the region. She began developing an educational philosophy centred on practical, dignity-affirming adult literacy instruction as a direct pathway to political enfranchisement.

In 1956, South Carolina passed a law barring public employees from involvement with civil rights organisations, and Clark, who had been a longtime NAACP member, refused to renounce her membership and was consequently fired from her teaching position after 40 years, losing her pension in the process. Rather than end her educational career, the dismissal freed her to work full-time on the citizenship education work she had already begun developing.

Clark joined the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, an interracial education centre that trained activists across the South, where she developed the Citizenship School model: community-based programmes teaching basic literacy alongside practical civic knowledge — how to fill out a voter registration form, understand the state constitution, and complete other paperwork required to participate fully in civic and economic life. The programme's first school on Johns Island proved successful and became a template replicated across the South.

In 1961 the Citizenship School programme was transferred to Martin Luther King Jr.'s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), where Clark became Director of Education and Teaching, ultimately training an estimated tens of thousands of citizenship school teachers and helping register significant numbers of new Black voters across the South during the height of the civil rights movement. Despite this central organisational role, Clark frequently found herself marginalised within SCLC's male leadership structure, later writing candidly about the sexism she encountered even within movement circles otherwise dedicated to justice.

Clark continued her advocacy for education and civil rights throughout her later life, and in 1976 the South Carolina legislature that had once fired her formally reinstated her pension. She was awarded the Living Legacy Award by President Jimmy Carter in 1979 and South Carolina's highest civilian honour, the Order of the Palmetto, shortly before her death in 1987. Martin Luther King Jr. himself referred to her as the 'Mother of the Movement,' recognising the citizenship schools' direct role in expanding Black political participation during the era's most consequential organising period.