Honoring the “The Mother of the Movement,” Mrs. Septima Clark
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver Velez
Too often when we talk of leaders of the civil rights movement, we hear a list of male names. And yet, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called Mrs. Septima Poinsette Clark “the mother of the movement.”
Today is her birthday. Let us celebrate her life, and the lives of all those she touched, organized and educated.
Septima Poinsette Clark was born in Charleston, South Carolina, May 3, 1898, the second of eight children. Her father—who had been born a slave—and mother both encouraged her to get an education. Clark attended public school, then worked to earn the money needed to attend the Avery Normal Institute, a private school for African Americans.
This video biography from South Carolina ETV tells her story.
Too often, those of us living today forget the difficulties black Americans faced in getting an education.
Clark's first educational experience was in 1904, she was six, and started attending Mary Street School. All Clark did at this school was sit on a set of bleachers with a hundred other six-year-olds, learning nothing. Clark's mother quickly took her out of that school. An elderly woman across the street from their house was schooling girls, so Clark learned to read and write there. Due to Clark's poor financial status, she watched the woman's children every morning and afternoon and in return her tuition was paid for. At this time there was not a high school in Charleston for blacks, however, in 1914 a school opened for blacks in 6th, 7th, 8th grade. After sixth grade, she took a test and went on to ninth grade at Avery. Avery was a high school founded by missionaries from Massachusetts. All of the teachers were white women, whom Clark admired. In 1914, black teachers were hired and this brought much controversy to the city, which Clark later took part in through the NAACP. Clark graduated from high school in 1916. Due to financial constraints, she was not able to attend college initially, took a state examination and began working as a school teacher on John's Island at the age of eighteen. She taught on the islands from 1916-1919 at Promise Land School and then returned to Avery from 1919-1920. She was able to return to school part-time in Columbia, South Carolina to complete her B.A. at Benedict in 1942 and then she received her M.A. from Hampton. As an African American, she was barred from teaching in the Charleston, South Carolina public schools, but was able to find a position teaching in a rural school district, on John's Island, the largest of the Sea Islands. During this time, she taught children during the day and illiterate adults on her own time at night. During this period she developed innovative methods to rapidly teach adults to read and write, based on everyday materials like the Sears catalog.
Clark recalls the gross discrepancies that existed between her school and the white school across the street. Clark's school had 132 students and only one other teacher. As the teaching principal, Clark made $35 per week, while the other teacher made $25. Meanwhile, the white school across the street had only three students, and the teacher who worked there received $85 per week. It was her first-hand experience with these inequalities that led Clark to become an active proponent for pay equalization for teachers. It was in 1919 that her pay equalization work brought her into the movement for civil rights. In an interview with Robert Penn Warren for the book Who Speaks for the Negro?, Clark explains how these experiences with her education, as well as her early experiences with growing up in a racist Charleston and teaching in the slums, prompted her to want to work towards civil rights.
Her civil rights orientation led her to working at the Highlander Folk School and to the development of Citizenship Schools:
Clark is most famous for establishing "Citizenship Schools" teaching reading to adults throughout the Deep South, in hopes of carrying on a tradition. The creation of citizenship schools developed from Septima Clark's teaching of adult literacy courses throughout the interwar years. While the project served to increase literacy, it also served as a means to empower Black communities. Her teaching approach was very specific in making sure her students felt invested in what they were learning, so she connected the politics of the movement to the needs of the people. She was not only teaching literacy, but also citizenship rights. Clark's goals for the schools were to provide self-pride, cultural-pride, literacy, and a sense of one's citizenship rights. She was recruiting the rural communities to get involved with the movement. Citizenship schools were frequently taught in the back room of a shop so as to elude the violence of racist whites. The teachers of citizenship schools were often people who had learned to read as adults as well, as one of the primary goals of the citizenship schools was to develop more local leaders for people's movements. Teaching people how to read helped countless Black Southerners push for the right to vote, but beyond that, it also developed leaders across the country who would help push the civil rights movement long after 1964. The citizenship schools are just one example of the empowerment strategy for developing leaders that was core to the civil rights movement in the South. The citizenship schools are also seen as a form of support to Martin Luther King, Jr. in the nonviolent Civil Rights Movement.
The project was a response to legislation in Southern states which required literacy and interpreting various portions of the US Constitution in order to be allowed to register to vote. These laws were used to disenfranchise black citizens. Citizenship Schools were based on the adult literacy programs Clark and Robinson had developed at Highlander. They required a week's worth of training in a program that was ultimately designed by Clark. Septima Clark hired her cousin Bernice Robinson, to be the first teacher. Bernice was also a Highlander alumna. In addition to literacy, Citizenship Schools also taught students to act collectively and protest against racism.
The leadership schools ultimately spread to a number of Southern states, growing so large that, upon the recommendation of Myles Horton and Clark, the program was transferred to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), in 1961 though initially Martin Luther King, Jr was hesitant about the idea. Transferring the program to the SCLC was also a result of financial troubles at Highlander Folk School in Tennessee. With the increased budget of the SCLC, the citizenship school project trained over 10,000 citizenship school teachers who led citizenship schools throughout the South, representing a popular education effort on a massive scale. On top of these 10,000 teachers, citizenship schools reached out and taught more than 25,000 people. By 1958, 37 adults were able to pass the voter registration test as a result of the first session of community schools. Before 1969, about 700,000 African-Americans became registered voters thanks to Clark's dedication to the movement.
Generations of black southern voters owe her a debt of gratitude.
For a more in-depth look at Mrs. Clark’s history and contributions, I suggest the following two books. The first is Freedom's Teacher: The Life of Septima Clark by
Katherine Mellen Charron
In the mid-1950s, Septima Poinsette Clark (1898-1987), a former public school teacher, developed a citizenship training program that enabled thousands of African Americans to register to vote and then to link the power of the ballot to concrete strategies for individual and communal empowerment. In this vibrantly written biography, Katherine Charron demonstrates Clark's crucial role--and the role of many black women teachers--in making education a cornerstone of the twentieth-century freedom struggle. Using Clark's life as a lens, Charron sheds valuable new light on southern black women's activism in national, state, and judicial politics, from the Progressive Era to the civil rights movement and beyond.
The second, “Ready from Within: Septima Clark & the Civil Rights Movement, A
First Person Narrative” is a collection of interviews with Mrs. Clark, conducted by Cynthia Stokes Brown.
In 1979, Brown spent a week interviewing Clark, who was then 81 and had spent a good part of her life struggling for civil rights in South Carolina. Brown subsequently edited and rearranged Clark's story, which is variously told in standard English, an African-inspired version spoken on St. John's Island, S.C., and Charlestonese. The result is a rich tale.
We often say that we are guided by the ancestors. We stand on the shoulders of women like Septima Clark, as we continue to fight for our rights to vote.
May she always be remembered.
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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The upcoming film stars the dashing Denzel Washington leading a gang of vigilante gunslingers in a colorful cast. What’s not to look forward to? Ebony: Not a #WesternSoWhite: Director Antoine Fuqua On New Project.
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When Antoine Fuqua met with MGM to begin discussions about The Magnificent Seven, the big screen remake of the 1960s Western by the same name (which is based on the Japanese classic film, Seven Samurai), there weren’t any major actors attached to the movie. Sure, the names of the usual suspects were being tossed around, but Fuqua already had a visual in mind. Simultaneously, the #OscarsSoWhite conundrum was flooding our collective timelines. He told the MGM big wigs, “It needs to be an event; it needs to be something we haven’t seen and it needs to be more diverse.” Then he lowered the boom suggesting that Hollywood A-lister, Denzel Washington play the lead. And just like that, a role made legendary by Yul Brynner, was now going to be embodied by the Oscar winner who earned the trophy for Training Day, the film on which he and Fuqua first successfully collaborated.
Fuqua says he has been intentionally silent about the lack of diversity in Hollywood. His apprehension was in the issue becoming “hot topic” fodder for television networks to use for eyeballs and ratings and he simply didn’t want to get caught up in the noise of it all. Plus, he believed that eventually the noise would die down as summer blockbusters began to unfold. What the Paris Has Fallen director really wanted to do is not only authentically discuss Hollywood’s lack of diversity but devise effective ways to bring about more opportunities and truly move things forward. EBONY.com talked to the director about his strategy to do just that, teaming up with Washington yet again, and the personal context behind making one magnificently, gun-slinging, slick-talking, wild ride of a film.
EBONY.com: You insisted upon a diverse cast for The Magnificent Seven. Why was that so important to you and what kind of response have you received?
Antoine Fuqua: The world we live in is like a Benetton ad. It’s changed and we have to appeal to a broader audience. You want younger kids of every race to be able to see themselves in the movie. Look, you can fight, march and picket all you want but green is what talks. Skill is what talks. You have to do the work and if you do the work and successfully do it well, you can make change and Hollywood will follow. If there’s a movie about two bees dancing on the ceiling and it makes $300 million, you’ll see a lot of movies with insects dancing on the f**king ceiling. It doesn’t matter. It’s a business. People in Hollywood go home to their wives and children who look like they do. If you’re in that position, your natural thought pattern is sometimes to think ‘Superman, oh yeah he’s White.’ You can’t get mad at somebody for doing that. It’s the world they live in and for some, they only live in that bubble.
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For generations, BLACKs have faced barriers to owning a home and the wealth it brings. In Atlanta, where predominantly black neighborhoods are still waiting for the recovery, the link between race and real estate fortune is stark. Washington Post: ‘This can’t happen by accident.’
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When the new subdivisions were rising everywhere here in the 1990s and early 2000s, with hundreds and hundreds of fine homes on one-acre lots carved out of the Georgia forest, the price divide between this part of DeKalb County and the northern part wasn’t so vast.
Now, a house that looks otherwise identical in South DeKalb, on the edge of Atlanta, might sell for half what it would in North DeKalb. The difference has widened over the years of the housing boom, bust and recovery, and Wayne Early can’t explain it.
The people here make good money, he says. They have good jobs. Their homes are built of the same sturdy brick. Early, an economic development consultant and real estate agent, can identify only one obvious difference that makes property here worth so much less.
“This can’t happen by accident,” he says. “It’s too tightly correlated with race for it to be based on something else.”
The communities in South DeKalb are almost entirely African American, and they reflect a housing disparity that emerges across the Atlanta metropolitan area and the nation. According to a new Washington Post analysis, the higher a Zip code’s share of black residents in the Atlanta region, the worse its housing values have fared over the past turbulent housing cycle.
Nationwide, home values in predominantly African American neighborhoods have been the least likely to recover. Across the 300 largest U.S. metropolitan areas, homes in 4 out of 10 Zip codes where blacks are the largest population group are worth less than they were in 2004. That’s twice the rate for mostly white Zip codes across the country. Across metropolitan Atlanta, nearly 9 in 10 largely black Zip codes still have home values below that point 12 years ago.
And in South DeKalb, the collapse has been even worse. In some Zip codes, home values are still 25 percent below what they were then. Families here, who’ve lost their wealth and had their life plans scrambled, see neighborhoods in the very same county — mostly white neighborhoods — thriving.
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THOSE who have spent years travelling in Africa have learned to do so with good humour. A decade ago, when Angola’s economy was booming, one businessman remembers being forced to share his posh hotel room with a total stranger. More recently, another tells how the water dried up at his smart lodging in Lagos, Nigeria’s heaving commercial capital, leaving him to shower using soda from the minibar. A third recalls inquiring about gym facilities at a big-brand hotel in Ethiopia’s capital, Addis Ababa, only to have an ancient exercise bike dumped at his door.
Bills can be even scarier than the service. Low supply, high construction costs and power problems push charges at international hotels above $500 per night in certain cities. Even at those prices, the lights can go off.
Other than housing bigwigs, hotels create employment (more than two direct jobs for every room, one World Bank study reckoned) and support local industries. Africa badly needs more of them. Khaki-clad tourists have been washing up on its shores for generations, but with fewer wars breaking out their numbers are increasing. The UN’s World Tourism Organisation says that 56m holiday-goers visited the continent in 2014. Within 15 years, it predicts that figure will more than double. And although overall regional trade measures a tiddly 12% of the total, airlines now link east and west Africa, so more locals are travelling internally, too.
Hoteliers are trying to keep up. W Hospitality Group, a Lagos-based consultancy, counts 365 hotels in the African pipeline this year—an increase of almost 30% on the number planned or under construction in 2015. The Hilton is doubling its presence in Africa and AccorHotels, whose brands include Sofitel and Ibis, recently signed a deal to open 50 properties in Angola, which is currently negotiating an IMF bail-out. Nowadays only a handful of Africa’s poorest countries are without big-name hotels. International chains are investing in lower-cost brands, not just watering holes for the rich and famous. Local groups are moving over borders, helped by online booking sites which raise their profile. Azalaï, a Malian company, has bought a string of government-ownd hotels across west Africa. Kenya’s Serena Hotels has 35 destinations in the east and south.
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Traditional forest dwellers, known for their capacity to cooperate, have become embroiled in and displaced by one of the conflicts that typify the Democratic Republic of Congo as an election crisis looms. New York Times: In Congo, Wars Are Small and Chaos Is Endless
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Deep in the forest, miles from any major city, lies an abandoned cotton factory full of the dispossessed.
There is no police force guarding it. No electricity or running water inside. No sense of urgency or deep concern by the national authorities to do much about it.
Instead, as the days pass, hundreds of displaced people make cooking fires or sit quietly on the concrete factory floor. Dressed in rags, they stare into space, next to huge rusted iron machinery that has not turned for decades. They are members of the Bambote, a marginalized group of forest dwellers who are victims of one of the obscure little wars that this country seems to have a talent for producing.
“It’s like we don’t exist,” said Kalunga Etienne, a Bambote elder.
This is what the Democratic Republic of Congo, the biggest country in sub-Saharan Africa and one that has stymied just about all efforts to right it, has become: a tangle of miniwars.
More than 60 armed groups are operating in North Kivu and South Kivu Provinces, including a growing Islamist insurgency, whose fighters have hacked hundreds of people to death. Beyond that, there are remnants in the Uele area of the Lord’s Resistance Army, a rebel group that specializes in abducting children and turning them into killers; predatory rebels in Ituri; Bakata separatists in Katanga; armed factions in Maniema; fighters in the Nyunzu area; and youth militias in the capital, Kinshasa.
Deep in the forest, miles from any major city, lies an abandoned cotton factory full of the dispossessed.
There is no police force guarding it. No electricity or running water inside. No sense of urgency or deep concern by the national authorities to do much about it.
Instead, as the days pass, hundreds of displaced people make cooking fires or sit quietly on the concrete factory floor. Dressed in rags, they stare into space, next to huge rusted iron machinery that has not turned for decades. They are members of the Bambote, a marginalized group of forest dwellers who are victims of one of the obscure little wars that this country seems to have a talent for producing.
“It’s like we don’t exist,” said Kalunga Etienne, a Bambote elder.
This is what the Democratic Republic of Congo, the biggest country in sub-Saharan Africa and one that has stymied just about all efforts to right it, has become: a tangle of miniwars.
More than 60 armed groups are operating in North Kivu and South Kivu Provinces, including a growing Islamist insurgency, whose fighters have hacked hundreds of people to death. Beyond that, there are remnants in the Uele area of the Lord’s Resistance Army, a rebel group that specializes in abducting children and turning them into killers; predatory rebels in Ituri; Bakata separatists in Katanga; armed factions in Maniema; fighters in the Nyunzu area; and youth militias in the capital, Kinshasa.
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Earlier this week, Jim VandeHei, a former executive editor of Politico, wrotean op-ed article for The Wall Street Journal accusing the Washington political establishment of being out of touch with “normal America.”
“Normal America is right that Establishment America has grown fat, lazy, conventional and deserving of radical disruption,” he wrote, citing his regular visits to Oshkosh, Wisconsin, and Lincoln, Maine, as his credentials of normality.
It’s a familiar accusation in a year in which most presidential candidates are trying to pretend they have nothing to do with the coastal elite, and after one — Ted Cruz — spent weeks attacking “New York values.” Even PBS, a standard-bearer of the media elite, recently featured a quiz designed to assess in-touchness with “mainstream American culture” with questions about fishing, pickup trucks and living in a small town.
But that sense that the normal America is out there somewhere in a hamlet where they can’t pronounce “Acela” is misplaced. In fact, it’s not in a small town at all.
I calculated how demographically similar each U.S. metropolitan area is to the U.S. overall, based on age, educational attainment, and race and ethnicity.1 The index equals 100 if a metro’s demographic mix were identical to that of the U.S. overall.2
By this measure, the metropolitan area that looks most like the U.S. is New Haven, Connecticut, followed by Tampa, Florida, and Hartford, Connecticut. All of the 10 large metros that are demographically most similar to the U.S. overall are in the Northeast, Midwest or center of the country, with the exception of Tampa. Two of them — New Haven and Philadelphia — are even on Amtrak’s Acela (that’s “uh-SELL-ah”) line. None is in the West, though Sacramento, California, comes close at No. 12.
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Voices and Soul
by
Justice Putnam
Black Kos Poetry Editor
Now residing in Chicago, where he has taught at the University of Chicago, Columbia College, and Northwestern University, Ed Roberson was born and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. After Studying art in his youth and graduating from the University of Pittsburgh, he traveled widely, experiencing the music of cities and the falling of light on wind dappled countrysides. Experimenting with unusual syntax, words and phrases, Roberson explores and then shapes a Poetic on race, history and culture.
”I’m not creating a new language. I’m just trying to un-White-Out the one we’ve got,” Roberson said in a 2006.
May I ask you who
your grandmother died
Her blackness
you pretended we’d assume
a servant’s in the photograph
May I ask
did she die herself?
I know you all light
under an umbrella don’t tan
and she could be seen
as she had been made too
dark for what the son do.
I saw her years ago after she died
And again today in the market
I asked her I had to
know if she was who I knew ...
“Only two things you really has to —
tha’s to stay black and die.”
Black, yes, but if black leads some to pretend
that you have died
except you’re black and alive
who are you?
She is as hundreds of years old as
the stories of the lies
of grandmothers in the cellar ...
May I ask who
your grandmother died if she died
herself?
-- Ed Roberson
"May I Ask"
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