Septima Clark

Septima Poinsette Clark was born on May 3, 1898, in Charleston, South Carolina, the second of eight children. Her father, Peter Porcher Poinsette, had been born enslaved on Joel Roberts Poinsett's plantation near Georgetown, South Carolina, and worked as a house servant and later aboard a ship in Charleston harbor. Her mother, Victoria Warren Anderson, was Charleston-born but spent part of her childhood in Haiti, and proudly declared she had never been anyone's servant.

Educated at Avery Normal Institute, Clark began teaching in 1916 on Johns Island, where poor Black children were barred from Charleston's city schools. She devoted decades to teaching and to the NAACP, and in 1956 South Carolina's law barring public employees from civil-rights membership cost her the job she had held for forty years. She refused to hide her convictions.

At the Highlander Folk School, and then as director of education for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Clark built the Citizenship Schools — grassroots classes that taught adults to read, to understand their rights, and to pass the literacy tests that guarded the ballot. The model spread across the segregated South and is credited with helping some 700,000 African Americans register to vote before 1969.

Often called the "Mother of the Movement," she was honored with a Living Legacy Award in 1979 and the Order of the Palmetto in 1982. She died on December 15, 1987, on Johns Island. We honor Septima Clark, who taught a people to read their own names into freedom.