More Details

Summary:

"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."-- [Provided by publisher]

Author/Creator:

Weiss, Elaine, 1952- , author

Languages:

English

Language Notes:

Item content: English

Main Work:

Spell freedom: the underground schools that built the civil rights movement [by Weiss, E.]

Other Related Resources:

Print version: Spell freedom [by Weiss, E.F.] (First One Signal Publishers/Atria Books hardcover edition; New York : One Signal Publishers/Atria, 2025 — ISBN 9781668002698; LCCN bl2025041068)

Subjects:

African Americans — Suffrage — Southern States — History — 20th century

African Americans — Education — Southern States — History — 20th century

Literacy tests (Election law) — Southern States — History — 20th century

Civil rights movements — United States — History — 20th century

General Notes:

Description based on print version record.
Includes bibliographical references and index.

Physical Description:

1 online resource

Call Numbers:

JK1929.A2 W52 2025eb

ISBNs:

9781668002711 (electronic bk.)
166800271X (electronic bk.)

Other Control Numbers:

EBC31362972 (source: MiAaPQ)
[Unknown Type]: ybp307278620