Spell Freedom: The Underground Schools That Built the Civil Rights Movement

Elaine Weiss

ISBN 10: 1668002698 / ISBN 13: 9781668002698

Edité par Atria/One Signal Publishers March 2025, 2025

A propos de cet article

Signed by Weiss on title page. First printing.

N° de réf. du vendeur 348850

Détails bibliographiques

• Titre: Spell Freedom: The Underground Schools That Built the Civil Rights Movement
• Éditeur: Atria/One Signal Publishers March 2025
• Date de parution: 2025
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN à 10 chiffres: 1668002698
• ISBN à 13 chiffres: 9781668002698
• Reliure: Hardcover
• Édition: First Edition.
• Impression: First Edition
• État de l'article: New
• État de la jaquette: New
• Signé: Signed By Author
• Catalogues du vendeur:
  • History - American

A propos de ce titre

Synopsis

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.

À propos de l?auteur

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’s Land Army of the Great War;  and The Woman’s Hour: The Great Fight to Win the Vote. Elaine lives with her husband in Baltimore, Maryland. Find out more at ElaineWeiss.com.