Freedom's Teacher

In the mid-1950s Septima Poinsette Clark (1898–1987) a former public school teacher developed a citizenship training program that enabled thousands of African Americans to register to vote and then to link the power of the ballot to concrete strategies for individual and communal empowerment. In this vibrantly written biography Katherine Charron demonstrates Clark’s crucial role — and the role of many black women teachers — in making education a cornerstone of the twentieth-century freedom struggle. Using Clark’s life as a lens Charron sheds valuable new light on southern black women’s activism in national state and judicial politics from the Progressive Era to the civil rights movement and beyond.