Guide to Source Material for Anti-Racist Activists and Thinkers

Septima Clark's first autobiographical work.

A memoir of Septima Poinsette Clark prepared by Cynthia Stokes Brown, Ready From Within offers a glimpse into Clark's life as a teacher, her work with the Highlander Folk School and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and her critique of the sexism she encountered while organizing.

In the mid-1950s, Septima Poinsette Clark (1898-1987), a former public school teacher, developed a citizenship training program that enabled thousands of African Americans to register to vote and then to link the power of the ballot to concrete strategies for individual and communal empowerment. In Freedom's Teacher, Katherine Charron demonstrates Clark's crucial role--and the role of many black women teachers--in making education a cornerstone of the twentieth-century freedom struggle. Using Clark's life as a lens, Charron sheds valuable new light on southern black women's activism in national, state, and judicial politics, from the Progressive Era to the civil rights movement and beyond. Freedom's Teacher's focus on education in the struggle for civil rights also shifts how historians think about the framing and focal points of the struggle's history.