Septima Clark

Septima Poinsette Clark — the "Queen Mother of the Civil Rights Movement," as Martin Luther King Jr. called her — understood that the most revolutionary act in the Jim Crow South was teaching Black people to read. Her Citizenship Schools, which began on Johns Island, South Carolina, in 1957, taught literacy and civic education to thousands of Black adults across the South, directly enabling them to pass the voter registration tests designed to keep them disenfranchised.

Born in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1898, Clark was the daughter of a formerly enslaved father and a free-born mother. She began teaching in a one-room school on Johns Island in 1916 because Black teachers were barred from teaching in Charleston's public schools. She spent decades teaching, organizing, and fighting for equal pay for Black teachers — succeeding in 1945 when a federal court ruled in their favor.

Clark's Citizenship Schools, developed at the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, became the Southern Christian Leadership Conference's most effective organizing tool. By 1970, over 800 Citizenship Schools had been established across the South, and an estimated 700,000 Black voters were registered as a direct result. Andrew Young called the Citizenship Schools the foundation of the entire civil rights movement. Clark received the Living Legacy Award from President Carter and continued advocating for education until her death at 89.