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Chapter 5 We’ve Come a Long Way Septima Clark, the Warings, and the Changing Civil Rights Movement Katherine Mellen Charron January , , signaled a quiet new beginning in the civil rights revolution in South Carolina. That evening fourteen adults on Johns Island, a rural Sea Island six miles outside Charleston, enrolled in the first Citizenship School class, pedagogically developed by Septima Clark. Citizenship Schools taught disfranchised African Americans how to read and write so that they might register to vote. The three men and eleven women who gathered in the classroom that night wanted to exercise a right that had been guaranteed for them by federal judge J. Waties Waring a decade earlier . But they thirsted more for the ability to act on their own behalf, a feeling of self-reliance and independence, privileges they had never enjoyed because they lacked formal education. When Esau Jenkins, a neighbor and trusted community leader who had completed the fourth grade, approached them inquiring if they wanted to learn how to register and vote, they responded because he also spoke to their more personal desires. “Do you want to read the letter that’s coming from your daughter in New York? Do you want to be able to fill out a money order? Do you want to be able to pay your own taxes?” Jenkins asked.1 Such practical concerns formed an equally important part of Septima Clark’s Citizenship School curriculum; a second-step political education that empowered new voters to understand , through the lens of their own experience, how to transform the quality of their relationship to the wider society. From New York two months later, Judge Waring’s wife, Elizabeth, expressed her disapproval of Clark’s latest endeavors to their mutual friend,  Ruby Cornwell: “I wrote her that her pursuits and methods were old past era ones that had proved to be useless—the road she is taking seems to be walking away from the issue, treading old trodden paths of words and not deeds—worthy words but substitutes for the reality of action.”2 Perhaps Waring’s critique is understandable, given that ten years earlier her husband had upheld the right of black Carolinians to vote in the Democratic primary.3 Certainly this served as one of the more dramatic inaugurations of the civil rights era in the Palmetto State. To the impatient Elizabeth Waring, her friend’s less dramatic educational approach looked too much like the gradualism preached by white Southern moderates. By any conventional definition of the word “political,” what Clark pursued through the classes on Johns Island was not bold or even realistic. Yet as subsequent decades of unfolding activism would reveal, it was Elizabeth Waring who was clinging to “old trodden paths,” and Septima Clark and her Johns Island colleagues who began charting a new world in . From the South Carolina Low Country, Citizenship School classes spread into several Southern states under the aegis of the Highlander Folk School, an interracial adult education center in Tennessee, until attempts by the state to revoke its charter forced Highlander to transfer the program to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in . That same year Clark left her position as educational director at Highlander and went to work for SCLC, where she continued to train a network of Citizenship School teachers, “people with Ph.D. minds who never had the chance to get an education,” to conduct classes in their communities . During the first two years of SCLC’s administration, , Citizenship School graduates registered to vote, and by  , pupils studied in  classes in eleven Southern states. According to Andrew Young, the Citizenship Schools “really became a foundation for Martin Luther King’s non-violent movement,” with graduates playing “a very strong role” in most of SCLC’s campaigns.4 Because they incorporated more than teaching students how to register and vote, Citizenship Schools also fostered a shift in local civil rights movements as ordinary people gained the training and confidence to act when and where traditional community leaders would not. These adult students were among the core of “local people” John Dittmer described a decade ago.5 It is possible that Septima Clark could have never succeeded where so many had failed had she not befriended the Warings during the earliest years of the civil rights era, but the alliance cost her dearly. A wealthy, white, Charleston aristocrat, Waties Waring’s decisions on behalf of We’ve Come a Long Way  [3.142.135.86] Project MUSE (2024...

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