Elaine Weiss — Spell Freedom: The Underground Schools That Built the Civil Rights Movement - with Marcia Chatelain

In the summer of 1954, educator Septima Clark and small businessman Esau Jenkins travelled to rural Tennessee's Highlander Folk School, an interracial training center for social change founded by Myles Horton, a white southerner with roots in the labor movement. There, the trio united behind a shared mission: preparing Black southerners to pass the daunting Jim Crow era voter registration literacy tests that were designed to disenfranchise them.Together with beautician-turned-teacher Bernice Robinson, they launched the underground Citizenship Schools project, which began with a single makeshift classroom hidden in the back of a rural grocery store. By the time the Voting Rights Act was signed into law in 1965, the secretive undertaking had established more than nine hundred citizenship schools across the South, preparing tens of thousands of Black citizens to read and write, demand their rights--and vote. Simultaneously, it nurtured a generation of activists--many of them women--trained in community organizing, political citizenship, and tactics of resistance and struggle who became the grassroots foundation of the Civil Rights Movement. Dr. King called Septima Clark, "Mother of the Movement."In the vein of Hidden Figures and Devil in the Grove, Spell Freedom is both a riveting, crucially important lens onto our past, and a deeply moving story for our present.PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9781668002698?ic_referral=SGLiwsqQSkbaB4IUwV1z22XKmXKtLyY8KLL3Y6a3wzswMw0zWoJWtb9Wb_gQZ2SbVqwkhLDHiE3VS4gbo3YH5NnJVvbLd14Wt0hEogDVITT25Dwsoyo5rbbEcUgyf3F84XZxhQElaine Weiss is an award-winning journalist, author, and public speaker. In addition to Spell Freedom, she is the author of Fruits of Victory: The Woman's Land Army of the Great War; and The Woman's Hour: The Great Fight to Win the Vote. Elaine lives with her husband in Baltimore, Maryland. Find out more at ElaineWeiss.com.Weiss is in conversation with Marcia Chatelain, the Presidential Penn Compact Professor of Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Her most recent book, Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America (Liveright Publishing Co./W.W. Norton, 2020) examined the intricate relationship among African American politicians, civil rights organizations, communities, and the fast-food industry. Franchise won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in History. She is currently writing a book about the 1963 March on Washington. *recorded 3/8/2025