Septima Clark

Abstract

Septima Clark’s life and work stands as a remarkable testament to the power of individual empowerment. After Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, one would be hard-pressed to argue that anyone else did more to build and sustain the structural foundation necessary for the successful battles of the black freedom struggle in the 1960s. While Clark’s entire life of eighty-nine years illustrates her commitment to freedom and empowerment for all, it was her work in creating, developing, and overseeing the Citizenship Education Program (CEP) of the Highlander Folk School, and later the Southern Christian Leadership Council (SCLC), that was her greatest and most significant accomplishment. The CEP, which Andrew Young called the basis of the civil rights movement,¹ grew to teach as many as fifty thousand students throughout the South and became the largest program of the SCLC. It enabled a large percentage its students to become registered voters, and perhaps more importantly, literate, while simultaneously developing its teachers into respected grassroots leadership in their home communities, creating a sizeable portion of the local leadership of the civil rights movement. The schools were a humanizing force against the dehumanization of segregation, transforming its students into agents for social justice.