Spelling Freedom: The Underground Schools that Built the Civil Rights Movement

In this revealing study, historian Weiss (The Woman’s Hour) argues that a 1950s network of educators who prepped Black Southerners to pass restrictive voting literacy tests established the framework for the civil rights movement’s later flourishing. Her narrative focuses on three Black activists from Charleston, S.C.—schoolteacher Septima Clark, hairdresser Bernice Robinson, and businessman Esau Jenkins—who founded “citizenship schools” where students studied for the tests while also absorbing civil rights lessons and freedom songs. The initial efforts were fruitful, and Clark and Robinson further developed the model at Tennessee’s Highlander School, run by the white activist couple Myles and Zilphia Horton; Clark then replicated the schools throughout the South via the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Weiss portrays the schools as under-the-radar affairs that had an outsized impact as they readied Black Americans to claim political agency, with stakes just as heroic for organizers as more confrontational direct actions (Clark was blacklisted from teaching; other citizenship teachers were jailed and beaten). The book is in part a vivid exploration of how liberation begins in the mind; the trio, Weiss writes, were first jolted into a new liberatory mindset by their experiences of radical equality at Highlander School workshops in the early ’50s, where things as simple as food being passed down a table from white to Black hands felt like a revelation. The result is an invigorating examination of the intellectual battles that precede radical change. (Mar.)