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30 2. Testimony as a Sponsor of Literacy: Bernice Robinson and the South Carolina Sea Island Citizenship Program’s Literacy Activism Rhea Estelle Lathan For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. —Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider As African American women intellectuals doing this work, we are obligated, as are our counterparts within the community, to be holistic, to remember our connectedness in both places. We are free to do our own intellectual business, and at the same time we are also obligated to have that work respond to sociopolitical imperatives that encumber the community itself. We, like our sisters (the African American women whom we study), are accountable ultimately to the merging of the interest of mind, body, and soul as part and parcel of the wholeness of the knowledge making enterprise, which includes accounting for our own social obligations as members of the group. We speak and interpret with the community, not just for the community, or about the community. —Jacqueline Jones Royster, Traces of a Stream Ibegin with Audre Lorde and Jacqueline Jones Royster because they both superbly embody the objectives of this essay: to make a case for expanding definitions of literacy to include arenas where writing is in a symbiotic relationship with social and political obligations. Both Lorde and Royster are pushing for the transcendence of current intellectual frameworks, arguing that the problem is that the “master’s house” is cognitive, not spiritual; these frameworks are too rigid, allowing little space for a testament to the survival of marginalized, underrepresented people, particularly African American women. Royster and Lorde are talking about transcendence; an understanding of both sacred and secular consciousness would improve our understanding of that transcendence. Admittedly, research in critical theory, musicology, African American studies, and composition studies has successfully argued Testimony as a Sponsor of Literacy 31 that testifying is not simple commentary but dramatic narration requiring a communal reenactment of one’s feelings and experiences. In the end, conventional academic uses of testifying hold fast to master frameworks, rarely moving testifying beyond religious contexts toward an intellectual practice. I concede that several contemporary literacy scholars have begun the task of broadening the domain in which literacy is situated.1 These studies suggest there is a great deal of complex literacy activity occurring outside standard academic contexts as well as what constitutes “community literacy” within local communities. However, standard frameworks traditionally follow a “master framework,” marginalizing or ignoring “other” ways of knowing. By interrogating the intersections between sacred and secular literacy activities, I move toward a theory developed in an arena where grassroots people are aggressively fighting for and with literacy acquisition, revealing that the acquisition of knowledge requires all participants to take an active stand on the means and methods of writing instruction. Such an analysis leads to an awareness about the practices, meanings, and values of literacy activism within the context of a major literacy campaign: the South Carolina Sea Island Citizenship Education Program. Ultimately, I follow Deborah Brandt by illuminating how individual ways of knowing, interpreting, and being are connected to larger social systems. However, through an extension of Brandt’s theory of literacy sponsorship, I treat an African American cultural concept of testimony as a new and inclusive literacy tool. I explore these continuities and changes by looking specifically at the literacy activism of the late civil rights activist Bernice Robinson in an effort to expand representations of African American literacy activism. Robinson’s literacy activities provide a means of exploring one of the most significant eras in African American history: the Civil Rights Movement. Bernice Robinson is to Septima Clark what Ralph Abernathy is to Martin Luther King Jr.—essential. Therefore, my goal here is also a corrective effort to illuminate Robinson as a crucial thinker within the success of the Citizenship Education Program from its inception on Johns Island through its spread across the South and currently in Freedom School models across the United States. Like Clark, this program could not have succeeded without Robinson’s intellectual activities. If we are going to call for a well-documented effect of African American literacy activism, Bernice Robinson must be included as a central actor and thinker. Robinson was the first teacher within the Citizenship Schools, which operated first under the sponsorship of Highlander Folk School and later under the auspices of the...

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