Septima Clark

Septima Poinsette Clark was born on the third of May 1898 at Charleston, South Carolina, the second of eight children of Peter Porcher Poinsette — a Haitian-born formerly enslaved cook — and Victoria Warren Anderson, a laundress born free in Haiti. She was educated at the Avery Normal Institute of Charleston from 1912 to 1916 and qualified as a teacher in the year of her graduation. She taught at the segregated rural schools of Johns Island in the South Carolina Lowcountry from 1916 to 1919, in Columbia from 1929 to 1947, and on her return to Charleston from 1947.

She joined the NAACP in 1919 and worked through her early teaching career on the protracted campaign to allow Black teachers to teach in Charleston public schools — the campaign that achieved its objective with state legislation in 1920 — and on the subsequent campaign for equalisation of Black-and-white teacher salaries, which Thurgood Marshall (placed in this archive) won in federal court in 1945. She refused in 1956 to renounce her NAACP membership when the South Carolina General Assembly enacted a statute requiring all state employees to do so; she was fired in summary procedure with twenty-three years of pension forfeited.

She moved the same year to the Highlander Folk School at Monteagle, Tennessee — the interracial labour-organising school run by Myles Horton that the State of Tennessee would close in 1961 — as director of workshops. With her cousin Bernice Robinson and Esau Jenkins she conducted on Johns Island in January 1957 the first Citizenship School: a six-week intensive teaching adult Black South Carolinians the literacy required to pass the discriminatory state voter-registration tests of the Jim Crow era.

The Citizenship Schools spread first across the South Carolina Lowcountry and from 1961, after Highlander's closure, were administered through the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Across the decade 1957 to 1967 an estimated one thousand four hundred Citizenship Schools opened across the southern states and prepared an estimated seven hundred thousand African American adults for voter registration — the largest mass adult-literacy operation in American history.

She returned to Charleston in 1970 and died there on the fifteenth of December 1987, at eighty-nine.

She is honored here as the teacher who prepared the southern Black electorate.