Elaine Weiss — Spell Freedom: The Underground Schools That Built the Civil Rights Movement

Roosevelt House is pleased to present a conversation with acclaimed historian Elaine Weiss about her new book Spell Freedom: The Underground Schools That Built the Civil Rights Movement. Author of The Woman’s Hour: The Great Fight to Win the Vote, Weiss returns to Roosevelt House with the remarkable story of four activists whose audacious plan to restore voting rights to Black Americans helped lay the groundwork for the Civil Rights Movement. She will be in conversation with award-winning author and historian Dylan C. Penningroth.

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 came together behind a shared mission: to prepare Black Southerners to pass the daunting Jim Crow-era voter registration literacy tests that had been 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 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the project had grown to include more than 900 citizenship schools across the South—preparing tens of thousands of Black citizens to read, write, demand their rights, and vote.

Simultaneously, the Citizenship Schools project, as Weiss shows, nurtured a generation of activists—many of them women—by offering training in community organizing, political citizenship, and tactics of resistance and struggle. As Spell Freedom so powerfully illustrates, the project helped to establish the grassroots foundation of the Civil Rights Movement—and inspired Dr. Martin Luther King to give Septima Clark the immortal moniker, “Mother of the Movement.”

Elaine Weiss is an award-winning journalist, author, and public speaker. She is the author of Fruits of Victory: The Woman’s Land Army of America in the Great War; and The Woman’s Hour: The Great Fight to Win the Vote. Her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Harper’s, the New York Times, Boston Globe, Philadelphia Inquirer, and, most frequently, Christian Science Monitor; and her magazine features have been recognized with prizes from the Society of Professional Journalists. She has also contributed reports and documentaries to National Public Radio and Voice of America. This is her second appearance at Roosevelt House.

Dylan C. Penningroth is a professor of law and history at the University of California, Berkeley. A MacArthur “Genius” Fellow, he is the author of The Claims of Kinfolk: African American Property and Community in the Nineteenth-Century South and the award-winning Before the Movement: The Hidden History of Black Civil Rights.