In the summer of 1954\, educator Septima C lark and small businessman Esau Jenkins traveled to rural Tennessee&rsquo\ ;s Highlander Folk School\, an interracial training center for social chan ge founded by Myles Horton\, a white southerner with roots in the labor mo vement. There\, the trio united behind a shared mission: preparing Black s outherners to pass the daunting Jim Crow era voter registration literacy t ests that were designed to disenfranchise them.
\nTogether with beau tician-turned-teacher Bernice Robinson\, they launched the underground Cit izenship Schools project\, which began with a single makeshift classroom h idden 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 establishe d more than nine hundred citizenship schools across the South\, preparing tens of thousands of Black citizens to read and write\, demand their right s&mdash\;and vote. Simultaneously\, it nurtured a generation of activists& mdash\;many of them women&mdash\;trained in community organizing\, politic al citizenship\, and tactics of resistance and struggle who became the gra ssroots foundation of the Civil Rights Movement. Dr. King called Septima C lark\, &ldquo\;Mother of the Movement.&rdquo\;
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Elaine Weiss is an award-winning journalist\, author\, and public speaker. In addition to \;Spell Freedom\, she is the author of \;Fruits of Victory: The Woman&rsquo\;s Land Army of the Great War\; and \;The Woman&rsquo\;s Hour: The Great Fight to Win t he Vote. \;Elaine lives with her husband in Baltimore\, Maryland.
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Moderating the talk will be Robin Morris\, Associate Professor and Chair of History at Agnes Scott College in Decatur\, Georgi a where she teaches courses in modern US history\, Southern history\, and public history. She holds a PhD in History from Yale University\, an MA in Southern Studies from University of Mississippi\, and a BA from Queens Un iversity of Charlotte. She is also an Atlanta area native and is a proud g raduate of DeKalb County Public Schools.
\nMorris authored Goldw ater Girls to Reagan Women: Gender\, Georgia\, and the Growth of the New R ight \;which traces women&rsquo\;s political activism from the fo undation of the Georgia Federation of Republican Women in the 1950s throug h the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1980s. Prior to graduate study\, Morris was an educator at the Levine Museum of the New South in C harlotte\, North Carolina and a middle school social studies teacher in Tu nica\, Mississippi.
\nPresented b y Adult Services
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