On March 4th, bestselling author Elaine Weiss (The Woman’s Hour: The Great Fight to Win the Vote) will release her new book, Spell Freedom: The Underground Schools That Built the Civil Rights Movement. Spell Freedom is the incredible story of four activists whose audacious plan to restore voting rights to Black Americans laid the groundwork for the Civil Rights Movement.
In the summer of 1954, educator Septima Clark and small businessman Esau Jenkins traveled 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 united behind a shared mission: preparing Black southerners to pass the daunting Jim Crow era voter registration literacy tests that were 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 the Voting Rights Act was signed into law in 1965, the secretive undertaking had established more than nine hundred citizenship schools across the South, preparing tens of thousands of Black citizens to read and write, demand their rights—and vote. Simultaneously, it nurtured a generation of activists—many of them women—trained in community organizing, political citizenship, and tactics of resistance and struggle who became the grassroots foundation of the Civil Rights Movement. Dr. King called Septima Clark, “Mother of the Movement.” In the vein of Hidden Figures and Devil in the Grove, Spell Freedom is both a riveting, crucially important lens onto our past, and a deeply moving story for our present.
Published in time for the 60th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act and the Selma to Montgomery Marches, and at a time when voting rights are again under siege in many states, and minority voters are being subjected to outrageous suppression tactics, the innovative strategies employed by the voting rights education activists of six decades ago are starkly resonant. The historical lessons of grassroots mobilization and the power of ordinary citizens to create change in the face of racial injustice will be inspiring to modern readers.
Weiss is an award-winning journalist, author, and public speaker. In addition to Spell Freedom, she is the author of Fruits of Victory: The Woman’s Land Army of the Great War; and The Woman’s Hour: The Great Fight to Win the Vote. Elaine lives with her husband in Baltimore, Maryland. Find out more at ElaineWeiss.com.
