Freedom's Teacher: The Life of Septima Clark (review)

This book joins a growing literature on women in the black freedom struggle in the twentieth century. Freedom's Teacher, however, is more than a biography of Septima Clark. Besides telling the story of one of the civil rights movement's unsung heroines, it surveys black life in the South from Reconstruction up to the 1980s. In grounding her text in the rise and fall of Reconstruction, Charron offers perhaps the most important lesson of Clark's life, one she would have learned as a child: what men have done other men and women can undo. Freedom's Teacher also reads like a collective biography of black womanhood during the period in question. The nameless cadre of women in whose path Clark walked as well as the stream of teachers who followed in her wake is here documented. In Charron's capable hands, Clark's life has at long last received the full-length attention it deserves.

Freedom's Teacher centers on four recurring and tightly woven themes that Charron indentifies in Clark's life. Chief among these themes is the redemptive quality of education, both for the individual and for the society. The reader learns in the opening chapters that Clark's parents, Peter and Victoria Poinsette, like many African Americans in the Reconstruction South, toiled to provide an education for their children. When financially possible, the Poinsettes sent Clark and her siblings to private schools and even splurged on music lessons. Later in life, Clark would labor in both urban and rural classrooms, teaching in workshops and communities, and ultimately—in her "retirement"—advising and setting policy as a member of Charleston's school board. At considerable personal costs, Clark maintained a lifelong engagement with education, fighting segregation, improving community life, and increasing black participation in local, state, and national politics.

Increasing black political participation constitutes the second theme of Charron's biography. Evident throughout the text is Clark's persistent belief that citizenship and political advancement are tied to education. From her first paid teaching position on the poor and rural Johns Island to her lifelong work in Highlander Folk School and the Citizenship Education Programs of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), Clark remained firm in her belief that black citizenship could only be achieved through increasing black literacy. Charron demonstrates that teaching literacy was often—though not always—a safe and inconspicuous way for black women to participate in the growing black freedom struggle. Under the rubric of teaching African Americans to read and write, Clark and the cadre of teachers she trained throughout the South offered an education in citizenship that included, among other things, an introduction to local politics, instruction in filling out forms and petitions, a crash course in the relationship between paying taxes and governmental spending, and assistance in voter registration. Clark insisted that her teachers meet students at their level, addressing their concerns before the teachers' own. Citizenship would be taught in the process of addressing student needs.

Clark's insistence that education must first adapt to local conditions (which were very disparate in South Carolina) and only then conform to institutional goals repeatedly puts her at odds with her male colleagues. Herein lies the third theme in Charron's text: black women, such as Clark, operated in a historically woman-centered context advancing methods that both protected their autonomy as black women and served their communities by adapting to local conditions. The flexibility for which Clark argued represents a knowledge system passed from one generation of black women teachers to another, a strategy that was foreign to many men who were more frequently supervisors than teachers. Indeed, Clark's pedagogical and organizing style would put her in conflict with Highlander leader Myles Horton and the SCLC's Martin Luther King, Jr. Both men lacked an appreciation of the relationship between teaching community members to solve their own problems and teaching literacy to advance the movement, a strategy that...