Clark, Septima

In the 1950s, widespread public resistance to the Supreme Court's ruling on school desegregation was so strong that South Carolina passed a law forbidding government employees from membership in civil rights organizations. Septima Clark taught in Charleston area Black schools for many years but was fired in 1956 because she admitted her membership in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Nevertheless, she remained steadfast in her community activism.

Septima Poinsette Clark (1898–1987) was born on May 3, 1898, in Charleston, South Carolina, one of eight siblings. Her father, Peter Porcher Poinsette, was born a slave, and her mother, Victoria Warren Anderson Poinsette, was a free woman who had spent her early childhood years in Haiti. Peter and Victoria met in Jacksonville, Florida, married and moved to Charleston. In her 1990 book, Ready from Within, edited with Cynthia Stokes, Clark described her mother as proud of her ability to read and write, a strict disciplinarian, and fearless; her father was gentle, hardworking, and committed to the children's education. Of her mother's fearlessness, Clark said it helped her to stand up to and in front of large groups that were hostile, such as the Klansmen and the White Citizens' Councils.

Clark attended Avery Institute in Charleston. She began her teaching career in an underfinanced, overcrowded, and understaffed school on John's Island, South Carolina. The Promiseland School had no glass windows and was chimney heated. It had 132 students and two teachers, who together were paid $60. Across the road was a White teacher who was paid $85 with three students. Clark went on to teach in Hickory, North Carolina, and Dayton, Ohio, and returned briefly to John's Island, but settled in Columbia, South Carolina. Throughout these moves, she was deeply aware of Black and White teachers' salary discrepancies, the vast differences in support, and the inequitable teaching conditions in the South's segregated schools.

Through her involvement with a Charleston YWCA, Clark attended a workshop session at the Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tennessee, a well-known interracial training center for labor leaders and social activists. The school was responsible for providing its attendees the opportunity to break down racist and classist barriers, to develop leadership, fight against stereotypes, and improve the living [Page 142]conditions of participants and their communities. It was here that Clark met and developed relationships with representatives of various national organizations, the NAACP, and the United Nations. She slept in dormitories with White people, engaged in dialogue, and was challenged by the advocacy question, “What do you plan to do back home?” She returned to Highlander on several occasions, and Myles Horton, the founder, asked her to become Highlander's director of workshops.

Clark assisted in the development of Highlander's Citizenship Education Program, built on literacy training and political empowerment. Several women leaders of the civil rights movement and those in training to carry on the bus boycotts, Freedom Rides, and sit-ins, met at Highlander: Rosa Parks, Fannie Lou Hamer, Ella Baker, and Dorothy Cotton. These women were later to become colleagues on the front lines of racial struggle and in the battlefields for democratic empowerment. Clark returned to John's Island and opened a citizenship school that served as a model and prototype for schools all over the South.

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