Septima Clark Organizing for Positive Freedom

Abstract

Septima Clark's Citizenship Education Program served as a structural foundation for the successes of the Black Freedom Struggle's victories in the 1960s. Embracing the principles of what Ella Baker called “group-centered leadership” and Charles Payne called the “Organizing Tradition,” Clark created schools that taught reading and writing in order to allow its students to pass Literacy Tests to register to vote. Initially connected with Myles Horton's Highlander School, and later as part of the SCLC, these efforts focused on extending Blacks' positive freedom. It was Clark's ability to successfully convince Highlander leadership as to the importance of developing individuals' capabilities, or positive freedom, that led to the program's success. However, it was Clark's inability to make the leadership of the SCLC recognize the importance of developing the positive freedom of their constituents that led to the diminishing impact of the Civil Rights Movement after the victories of the mid-'60s.

Keywords:

• Black freedom struggle
• civil rights
• education
• Highlander Folk School
• literacy
• SCLC
• Septima Clark

Notes

Quoted by Horton in Myles Horton and Paulo Freire, We Make the Road by Walking: Conversations on Education and Social Change, Brenda Bell, John Gaventa and John Marshall Peters, eds. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), p. 13.

Charles M. Payne, I've Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), p. 3.

Ibid.

Ella Baker, “Bigger Than a Hamburger,” Southern Patriot 18 (1960), p. 4.

Quoted in Payne, I've Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle, p. 93.

Quoted in Ibid.

It is tempting then, to argue that the programs modeled on group-centered leadership (or the model of bridge leadership articulated by Belinda Robnett) that were most often initiated by women occurred because either there is something in Black women's experiences that predisposes them to such work or that women assumed control of such programs because it was the only leadership avenue open to them. However, to do so belittles the strength of the convictions of women like Clark (and Baker and Hamer). Clark did not build the Citizenship Education Program because it was one of the few avenues of action open to her as a woman (although this is empirically true). Clark developed the Citizenship Schools because she believed them to be the most effective means with which to create a sustainable institution capable of effecting social change. Influenced by Myles Horton, she believed that the only way to liberate the oppressed was to help the oppressed liberate their selves. Clark created her vision; she did not create a compromise.

“The Citizenship School,” 1963, HREC 24 (13).

Baker, “Bigger Than a Hamburger,” p. 399.

Andrew Young, An Easy Burden: The Civil Rights Movement and the Transformation of America (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1996), p. 139.

Septima P. Clark, “Literacy and Liberation,” Freedomways, First Quarter (1964), emphasis added.

Isaiah Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” in Contemporary Political Philosophy: An Anthology, R.E. Goodwin and P. Pettit, eds. (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1997).

Ibid., 393.

Ibid.

Also in attendance was Rosa Parks, who, a few months later, would refuse to give up her seat on a Montgomery Bus. Parks would later sight her attendance at this Highlander Workshop as part of her inspiration for her action.

John M. Glen, Highlander, No Ordinary School, 1932–1962 (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1988), p. 185.

Highlander Folk School, Extension Program—Johns Island and Charleston.

Glen, “On the Cutting Edge: A History of the Highlander Folk School, 1932–1962 (Tennessee),” 528–533, Carl Tjerandsen, Education for Citizenship: A Foundation's Experience (Santa Cruz, Calif.: Emil Schwarzhaupt Foundation, 1980), pp. 153–154.

Brown, Cynthia Stokes ed., Ready from Within: Septima Clark and the Civil Rights Movement (Navarro Cali: Wild Trees, 1986), pp. 52–54.

Tjerandsen, Education for Citizenship: A Foundation's Experience, pp. 181–187.

Septima Clark, Interview with Eugene Walker, 30 July, 1976, Clark Papers 1(9).

Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–1963 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988), pp. 576–577.

Ibid., 899.

David J. Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, 1st ed. (New York: W. Morrow, 1986), p. 366.

Ibid., p. 225.

Young, An Easy Burden: The Civil Rights Movement and the Transformation of America, p. 278.

Andrew Young to Wesley Hotchkiss and Truman Douglas, 10 June, 1964, SCLC 136(13).

Andrew Young, Memo to Septima Clark, Dorothy Cotton, and Martin Luther King, Jr., re: Citizenship Education Program, 17 December 1963.

Taylor Branch, Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years, 1963–65 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998), pp. 190–191, Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, pp. 309, 38.

Clark's critique of Moses and Foreman begs further analysis, as it runs counter to the most prominent accounts of SNCC's work by Charles Payne and Clay Carson. Septima Clark to Martin Luther King, Jr., 12 December 1963, MLK 29(18); Clayborne Carson, In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981); Payne, I've Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle.

Septima Clark to Andrew Young, 12 July 1964, SCLC 154(6).

Andrew Young to Septima Clark, 20 July 1964, SCLC 154 (6), emphasis in original.

Despite the criticisms, Clark adored King. Just to cite one example, in 1964 she wrote King to congratulate him on the Nobel Peace Prize, writing, “I see in the spirit of this recognition the living relatives of Dubois, Richard Wright, and other earlier leaders utter the words, ‘God still loves our world, we must continue to follow in His footsteps.’ May God's great goodness continue to light your pathway.” Septima Clark to Martin Luther King, 15 October 1964, King 29(18).

Septima Clark to Martin Luther King, 12 December 1963, MLK 29(18).

Brown, 77–78.

Septima Clark to Martin Luther King, 12 June 1967, MLK 29(15).

Payne, I've Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle, pp. 363–390.

Ibid., 364.

Myles Horton, Judith Kohl, and Herbert R. Kohl, The Long Haul: An Autobiography (New York: Teachers College Press, 1998), p. 84.

Ibid.

Ironically, this passage comes at the end of a chapter slamming the very progressive education techniques, with their roots in the work of John Dewey, that CEP used. Arendt's critique focused mainly on the lack of scientific data to support the implementation of progressive pedagogies. I would hope that had Arendt been aware of programs such as CEP, or other accomplishments of progressive education over the past forty years, that she would have reconsidered her position. Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (New York: Penguin, 1968), p. 196.

See Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958).