The Underground Schools That Built the Civil Rights Movement
By: Elaine Weiss
Narrator: Robin MIles Simon & Schuster Audio
ISBN: 9781668002698
Publisher: Atria Books
Publication Date: 03/04/2025
Format: Other
My Rating: TBR (ARC)
The acclaimed author of the “stirring, definitive, and engrossing” (NPR) The Woman’s Hour returns with the story of four activists whose audacious plan to restore voting rights to Black Americans laid the groundwork for the Civil Rights Movement.
In the summer of 1954, educator Septima Clark and small businessman Esau Jenkins travelled to rural Tennessee’s Highlander Folk School, an interracial training center for social change founded by Myles Horton, a white southerner with roots in the labor movement. There, the trio united behind a shared mission: preparing Black southerners to pass the daunting Jim Crow era voter registration literacy tests that were designed to disenfranchise them.
Together with beautician-turned-teacher Bernice Robinson, they launched the underground Citizenship Schools project, which began with a single makeshift classroom hidden in the back of a rural grocery store. By the time the Voting Rights Act was signed into law in 1965, the secretive undertaking had established more than nine hundred citizenship schools across the South, preparing tens of thousands of Black citizens to read and write, demand their rights—and vote. Simultaneously, it nurtured a generation of activists—many of them women—trained in community organizing, political citizenship, and tactics of resistance and struggle who became the grassroots foundation of the Civil Rights Movement. Dr. King called Septima Clark, “Mother of the Movement.”
In the vein of Hidden Figures and Devil in the Grove, Spell Freedom is both a riveting, crucially important lens onto our past, and a deeply moving story for our present.
Praise
“Spell Freedom draws us in with lucid prose, filling in the holes of American history with the work of Septima Clark and Bernice Robinson and their compatriots, who deftly wielded reading and writing as their weapons of choice in the 20th century fight for first class citizenship for all.”
—Margot Lee Shetterly, bestselling author of Hidden Figures
“Through elegant writing, masterful storytelling, and prodigious research, Weiss takes us on a journey for freedom and how that quest for liberation was grounded in the power of grassroots civic education and a belief in the people and democracy. Trials, troubles, triumphs, and tears are the mile markers on this engaging tale about the Highlander Folk School and those who willed it into being right at the very moment when it was needed.”
—Carol Anderson, author of White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of our Racial Divide
“Spell Freedom is a powerful, intimate, and enlightening book that tells the remarkable story of how a group of educators and their allies worked together to advance Black citizenship rights in the Jim Crow South. While mainstream narratives on the civil rights movement tend to focus on well-known and visible leaders, this book sheds new light on some of the ordinary people behind the scenes who led quietly–and effectively–with great courage and deep conviction in the face of adversity. This beautifully written book is a must read for anyone interested in race, history, politics and education.”
—Keisha N. Blain, co-editor of the #1 New York Times bestseller Four Hundred Souls
“Spell Freedom is a beautifully crafted and dramatic tale that testifies to the resilience of America’s dreamers and freedom fighters. How did so many ordinary people find the courage to stand up for their rights? How did they organize? How did they overcome apathy and disillusion? Elaine Weiss answers these timely questions in a brilliant book that illuminates not only the past but also a path forward.”
—Jonathan Eig, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of King: A Life
“Spell Freedom ennobles the humblest foot soldiers of the civil rights movement. Septima Clark, daughter of a slave, taught sharecroppers to sign their names and become citizens. Highlander Folk Center lifted courage with music and sacrifice. Elaine Weiss captures their alliance making history."
—Taylor Branch, Pulitzer Prize winning author of Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-63
“An inspiring and insightful tale of a group of activists who worked outside the limelight of the Civil Rights Movement, holding classes in rundown shacks in isolated communities to teach civics and education to newly empowered Black voters who would go on to become the backbone of Black political organizing in the years after the fall of Jim Crow. Their work and its legacies are a testament to civics education among the most marginalized and oppressed members of our society.”
—William Sturkey author of The Ballad Of Roy Benavidez
About the Author
Author photo by Nina Subin
Elaine Weiss is a journalist and author whose writing has been recognized with prizes from the Society of Professional Journalists, her by-line has appeared in many national publications.
She is the author of three books of narrative history: The highly-acclaimed narrative history The Woman’s Hour: The Great Fight to Win the Vote — hailed as a “riveting, nail-biting political thriller” with powerful parallels to today’s political environment. The Woman’s Hour was a GoodReads Readers’ Choice Award winner, short-listed for the 2019 Chautauqua Prize, and received the American Bar Association’s highest honor, the 2019 Silver Gavel Award.
Her first book, Fruits of Victory: The Woman’s Land Army in the Great War was excerpted in Smithsonian Magazine and featured on C-Span and public radio stations nationwide.
Her newest book, Spell Freedom: The Underground Schools that Built the Civil Rights Movement, carries readers into the heart of the 20th c. civil rights and voting rights struggle, and has won praise as a “powerful, intimate, and enlightening book” with “elegant writing, masterful storytelling, and prodigious research.”
Elaine is a popular public speaker and frequent media commentator, and was an historical advisor for the Broadway musical SUFFS. She lives in Baltimore with her husband, and they have two grown children. When not at her desk, she can be found paddling her little purple kayak on the Chesapeake Bay.
Find out more at ElaineWeiss.com.
