{"id":64,"featured":0,"modified":"2025-01-24 19:55:31","latitude":32.7826610999999985551767167635262012481689453125,"longitude":-79.9344317472068581764688133262097835540771484375,"title":"Courage: Septima Clark Inspires Nonviolent Resistance, 1960-1965","address":"Kress Building, Wentworth and King Streets","thumbnail":"https:\/\/discovering.cofc.edu\/redirect\/files\/square_thumbnails\/8d330e406ac8be8e2bb9fbc44021b06e.jpg","creator":["Julia Eichelberger","Committee on Commemoration and Landscapes"],"description":"In 1960 on Charleston\u2019s King Street, high school students challenged the longstanding Southern custom that Black citizens could not sit at lunch counters where whites were served. All across the South, similar scenes were playing out: Black customers would quietly \u201csit in\u201d at a segregated restaurant, knowing they\u2019d likely be arrested for allegedly trespassing or disturbing the peace. Angry white onlookers could become violent. Some of the Charleston students didn\u2019t tell their parents they\u2019d be protesting and facing jail; white employers might fire protestors or family members for their activism.
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\r\nWhile these sit-ins were occurring, Septima Clark was continuing to lead workshops and adult education classes for people who wanted to combat racial discrimination. These classes inspired some of their students to take the risk of resisting segregation. One famous protestor, Rosa Parks, took a class with Septima Clark. One famous protestor, Rosa Parks, had taken a class with Septima Clark. Before Parks refused to give up her seat to a white bus passenger in 1955, Clark had taught her in a workshop at Highlander Folk School, where other Lowcountry residents, Bernice Robinson and Esau Jenkins, were making plans for a citizenship school on Johns Island. During group discussions, Clark encouraged the shy Parks to share her struggles with segregation laws in Montgomery. As Clark later said of her approach to teaching, \u201cI always felt that if you were going to develop other people, you don\u2019t talk for them. You train them to do their own talking.\u201d Parks decided to resist laws she once thought could not be changed. Her 1955 arrest triggered the Montgomery bus boycott, initiated by Jo Ann Robinson and led by 26-year-old Martin Luther King, Jr.
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\r\nSince 1957, Clark\u2019s citizenship schools in South Carolina had thwarted the laws that were designed to prevent Blacks from voting there. Similar laws were in place across the South, and activists came to Highlander and to Johns Island to learn how to overcome voting barriers with their own citizenship schools. Septima Clark, an extraordinarily successful teacher and manager, was becoming a well-known figure who would be called \u201cThe Mother of Civil Rights Movement.\u201d In 1960 her workshop influenced a group of students who formed the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and planned the Freedom Rides. Traveling on buses through Southern states, Freedom Riders attempted to desegregate bus station waiting rooms and restaurants, often encountering white mobs waiting to attack them.
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\r\n\u201cIt was 1962 before the major civil rights groups were ready to do something about voter registration,\u201d Clark later recalled. \u201cBut we had developed the ideas of the Citizenship Schools between 1957 and 1961. So all the civil rights groups could use our kind of approach, because we knew it worked.\u201d In 1961, Martin Luther King, Jr.\u2019s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) recognized the power of the citizenship schools program. The SCLC hired Clark to work with staff member Andrew Young to go to more communities in the Deep South, recruiting and training local people to start their own schools.
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\r\nCitizenship schools were a crucial component in civil rights activism. \u201cOne time I heard Andy Young say that the Citizenship Schools were the base on which the whole civil rights movement was built,\u201d Clark reflected years later. \u201cAnd that\u2019s probably very much true. . . because the Citizenship Schools made people aware of the political situation in their areas.\u201d Adults who had been excluded from many aspects of modern life grew more confident as they developed their reading and writing skills and could register to vote, pay their own taxes, read the Bible or write family members. They studied the laws of their state and of the United States, learning what rights all citizens are entitled to. Their newfound knowledge helped them register to vote, but also helped them analyze issues and decide how to participate in their communities. In 1962, as the program gained momentum, Clark wrote, \u201cIt is evident that we now have within our grasp a new kind of society, a learning society made up of educative communities.\u201d
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\r\nBy 1965, 25,000 students had participated in the Citizenship Schools, taught by 1,600 teachers trained by the SCLC\u2019s program. More than 50,000 new Black voters were registered in the South. As Martin Luther King put it in his \u201cI Have a Dream\u201d speech, \u201cNow is the time to make real the promises of democracy.\u201d To Clark, literacy was not just the ability to read, but also the ability to analyze and interpret one\u2019s society. Educated citizens took these civic lessons to heart. Clark wrote in 1964, \u201cThere are many ways to communicate injustices to the American public. These dramatic confrontations were necessary to educate white people in Savannah, Georgia and to make Negroes free enough to vote wisely and speak out. . . Literacy means liberation.\u201d
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\r\nAcross the South, thousands joined in civil rights protests and demonstrations. Charleston teenagers sat in at the Kress lunch counter, a block from the College of Charleston. They participated in demonstrations, mass meetings, King Street store boycotts, and the desegregation of the municipal golf course. A few brave students, such as Millicent Brown, began the lonely process of desegregating Charleston\u2019s all-white public schools. (The College of Charleston remained all-white, having become a private school in 1949 to avoid complying with federal requirements for integrated public schools.) Elsewhere, police with billy clubs and snarling dogs attacked protestors who were marching or trying to register to vote. Violence could kill or maim protestors, who did not fight back. They were arrested, beaten, shot, and firebombed. \u201cI was in a Baptist church in Grenada, Mississippi,\u201d Clark recalled years later. \u201cWe were talking about registration and voting; we were going to show them how to fill in these blanks. Just as we finished up that meeting and walked out of church, it caught fire in every corner. . . This just shows how mean people can be.\u201d
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\r\nWhen the American public saw nonviolent citizens facing violence for exercising their citizenship rights, it became clearer that segregation, allegedly \u201cthe Southern way of life,\u201d was not a peaceful local custom, but an inherently violent system. By 1964, the movement was beginning to change the country. Congress passed President Lyndon Johnson\u2019s Civil Rights Act, banning racial discrimination in federally funded programs and in public accommodations. King was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, and Clark traveled to Norway with other leaders to see him receive the award.
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\r\nMore dangers awaited civil rights activists. They continued getting into what John Lewis would later call \u201cgood trouble,\u201d facing danger and arrest while exposing the flaws of an unjust society. Lewis and other peaceful demonstrators paid a high price for their ideals on \u201cBloody Sunday\u201d in Selma, Alabama in March 1965, when crowds marching across the Edmund Pettus Bridge were brutally beaten by police as the world watched on television. Shortly thereafter, Congress passed the Voting Rights Act that eliminated many barriers to voting. Great strides had been made, but Clark and other activists knew their work was not done. More advocacy and more citizenship education would be needed for people to address their communities\u2019 problems. ","sponsor":null,"subtitle":null,"accessinfo":null,"lede":"The Kress store in Charleston was one of many sites across the South where activists risked their jobs and their safety by protesting against segregation and registering Black citizens to vote. Many participating in the civil rights movement were inspired by Septima Clark\u2019s citizenship schools.","website":null,"related_resources":["John Lewis and Andrew Aydin. March<\/em>. Top Shelf Productions, 2016.","Katherine Mellon Charron, Freedom\u2019s Teacher: The Life of Septima Clark.<\/em> University of North Carolina Press, 2009.","Literacy and Liberation in Freedomways Magazine, Winter 1964 (reprinted at https:\/\/www.crmvet.org\/info\/cs.htm).<\/a>","Martin Luther King Jr., \u201cI Have a Dream<\/a>.\u201d 1963. National Public Radio, January 14, 2022.","Millicent Brown and Jon Hale, Somebody Had to Do It: First Children in School Desegregation.<\/a> Lowcountry Digital History Initiative, May 2015.","Septima Clark with Cynthia Stokes Brown. Ready From Within: Septima Clark and the Civil Rights Movement, a First-Person Narrative<\/em>. Africa World Press, 1990.","Septima Poinsette Clark and Women in the Civil Rights Movement. Southern Cultures<\/em> Summer 2010, pp 31-52.","Septima Poinsette Clark, Echo in My Soul<\/em>. Dutton, 1963."],"factoids":[],"files":{"https:\/\/discovering.cofc.edu\/redirect\/files\/fullsize\/8d330e406ac8be8e2bb9fbc44021b06e.jpg":{"id":616,"mime-type":"image\/png","title":"Kress Building, 281 King Street","thumbnail":"https:\/\/discovering.cofc.edu\/redirect\/files\/square_thumbnails\/8d330e406ac8be8e2bb9fbc44021b06e.jpg","description":"Students sat in at the lunch counter of this Kress deparment store in 1960. In 2023, the building housed an H & M clothing store."},"https:\/\/discovering.cofc.edu\/redirect\/files\/fullsize\/bfdd100daf08f897d5f2628df0b2b9f2.jpg":{"id":587,"mime-type":"image\/png","title":"Kress counter, Charleston boycott ","thumbnail":"https:\/\/discovering.cofc.edu\/redirect\/files\/square_thumbnails\/bfdd100daf08f897d5f2628df0b2b9f2.jpg","description":"High school students sitting in at the lunch counter of the Kress Department Store on King Street, a block from the College of Charleston, in 1960. | Courtesy of the Post and Courier. May 1960 ."},"https:\/\/discovering.cofc.edu\/redirect\/files\/fullsize\/8e8c57abbf513f272a8afad0bfc79b1a.jpg":{"id":624,"mime-type":"image\/png","title":"Rosa Parks, Mrs. Septima Clark, Mrs. Leona McCauley, Highlander Folk School, Dec. 1956","thumbnail":"https:\/\/discovering.cofc.edu\/redirect\/files\/square_thumbnails\/8e8c57abbf513f272a8afad0bfc79b1a.jpg","description":"Rosa Parks with Septima Clark, Highlander Folk School, December 1956. | Rosa Parks, Mrs. Septima Clark, Mrs. Leona McCauley, Highlander Folk School, De. [Monteagle, Tennessee] Photograph. Retrieved from the Library of Congress, <www.loc.gov\/item\/2015645720\/>."},"https:\/\/discovering.cofc.edu\/redirect\/files\/fullsize\/f9b12a90cf20c5e0377d984e6785fce6.jpg":{"id":606,"mime-type":"image\/png","title":"Photo of SPC at the head of the table at The Citizenship Education Training Center in Liberty County, GA. 1960? In Septima P. Clark Scrapbook. ","thumbnail":"https:\/\/discovering.cofc.edu\/redirect\/files\/square_thumbnails\/f9b12a90cf20c5e0377d984e6785fce6.jpg","description":"Septima Clark sits at the head of the table at The Citizenship Education Training Center in Liberty County, GA, 1960. Martin Luther King, Jr. is seated far left. | Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture, College of Charleston, Charleston, SC. "},"https:\/\/discovering.cofc.edu\/redirect\/files\/fullsize\/d0707b9340f5baabe521759cc53992ae.jpg":{"id":543,"mime-type":"image\/png","title":"Black and white photograph of Septima P. Clark teaching a group of adults in Liberty County, Georgia. 1960s. ","thumbnail":"https:\/\/discovering.cofc.edu\/redirect\/files\/square_thumbnails\/d0707b9340f5baabe521759cc53992ae.jpg","description":"Septima P. Clark teaching a group of adults in Liberty County, Georgia. 1960s. | Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture, College of Charleston, Charleston, SC. "},"https:\/\/discovering.cofc.edu\/redirect\/files\/fullsize\/a186215dcb339880ee3f9b4749fedd21.jpg":{"id":544,"mime-type":"image\/png","title":"Color photograph of Septima P. Clark with friend outside Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Atlanta, Georgia. 1964. ","thumbnail":"https:\/\/discovering.cofc.edu\/redirect\/files\/square_thumbnails\/a186215dcb339880ee3f9b4749fedd21.jpg","description":"Septima Clark and friend outside Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Atlanta, Georgia,1964. Clark worked for the SCLC from 1961 to 1970. | Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture, College of Charleston, Charleston, SC. "},"https:\/\/discovering.cofc.edu\/redirect\/files\/fullsize\/2f0e0c2792af1f651bb253a23b61104d.jpg":{"id":545,"mime-type":"image\/png","title":"Newspaper clipping \u201cCharleston Youths Continue picketing\u201d ","thumbnail":"https:\/\/discovering.cofc.edu\/redirect\/files\/square_thumbnails\/2f0e0c2792af1f651bb253a23b61104d.jpg","description":"The \u201cCharleston Movement\u201d in 1962 included picketing and boycotts of stores that would not hire Black employees. The Mississippi Free Press reported this in May 1962. | Mississippi Free Press 1962, May 5, 1962."},"https:\/\/discovering.cofc.edu\/redirect\/files\/fullsize\/f2814b2c8ccacc4db81551c02eb6f30c.jpg":{"id":546,"mime-type":"image\/png","title":"Clipping covering Mississippi violence ","thumbnail":"https:\/\/discovering.cofc.edu\/redirect\/files\/square_thumbnails\/f2814b2c8ccacc4db81551c02eb6f30c.jpg","description":"Anyone who helped register Black voters faced the possibility of violence from white supremacists, like those who made threats to workers in Itta Bena, Mississippi in June 1964. | Charleston News and Courier (published as The News and Courier) - June 27, 1964, page 1."},"https:\/\/discovering.cofc.edu\/redirect\/files\/fullsize\/f4fd53823d66f3c3e873f7089b296b18.jpg":{"id":548,"mime-type":"image\/png","title":"News and Courier covers King\u2019s Nobel Prize ","thumbnail":"https:\/\/discovering.cofc.edu\/redirect\/files\/square_thumbnails\/f4fd53823d66f3c3e873f7089b296b18.jpg","description":"The Charleston News and Courier\u2019s coverage of Martin Luther King, Jr. receiving the Nobel Peace Prize was buried deep within section C. | Charleston News and Courier, December 11, 1964, p 32."},"https:\/\/discovering.cofc.edu\/redirect\/files\/fullsize\/e83fe08dbdc4f5a145469b7757b26768.jpg":{"id":549,"mime-type":"image\/png","title":"Passport photo","thumbnail":"https:\/\/discovering.cofc.edu\/redirect\/files\/square_thumbnails\/e83fe08dbdc4f5a145469b7757b26768.jpg","description":"Septima Clark\u2019s passport photo, 1964. When Martin Luther King, Jr. was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, he invited Septima Clark to accompany him to the ceremony. | Avery research center, SPC papers "},"https:\/\/discovering.cofc.edu\/redirect\/files\/fullsize\/324ed91eea4e9bdeabc65a026075407b.jpg":{"id":547,"mime-type":"image\/png","title":"Bloody Sunday in Alabama ","thumbnail":"https:\/\/discovering.cofc.edu\/redirect\/files\/square_thumbnails\/324ed91eea4e9bdeabc65a026075407b.jpg","description":"John Lewis was among a large group of peaceful demonstrators beaten by Alabama state troopers on March 7, 1965. The day became known as \u201cBloody Sunday\u201d and was later the subject of the graphic novel March, about Lewis\u2019s experiences. | Charleston Evening Post, March 8, 1965, p. 1. "}}}