How Underground Schools Across the South Built the Civil Rights Movement

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, CHIEF INTERNATIONAL ANCHOR: The Trump administration has been vocal about freedom of speech, as we’ve been discussing, but the recent string of event cancellations at the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library suggests otherwise. One of them was for the award-winning journalist Elaine Weiss, whose new book, “Spell Freedom,” focuses on four brave activists who laid the foundation of the civil rights movement. Other events on climate change and homelessness were also pulled from programming, a move which Weiss believes is a result of budget cuts and new leadership in the National Archives. And she joins Michel Martin to discuss the relevance of her latest work in today’s America.

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MICHEL MARTIN, CONTRIBUTOR: Thanks, Christiane. Elaine Weiss, thank you so much for joining us.

ELAINE WEISS, AUTHOR, “SPELL FREEDOM”: My pleasure.

MARTIN: You know, you’ve written a number of books, and they all kind of have something in common. Would you say what it is?

WEISS: Well, I tried to explore the untold stories in American history, not totally unknown, but sometimes not recognized for how important or how instrumental that part of our history was. And so, I wrote about women in World War I and how women, American women won the vote, and now, how black women and black men in the deep south regained their right to vote. So, I guess the thread is I do like to write about women in history because I think they’ve been a bit neglected and I like to write about how change happens in a democracy.

MARTIN: So, let’s just start with the story of where this story starts. It starts with Brown v. Board of Ed., that famous Supreme Court decision that outlawed segregation in the schools. Why do you start there?

WEISS: I start on the day, May 17, 1954, that the Brown decision is announced because it’s certainly not the beginning of the struggle for civil rights in our country, but it becomes a galvanizing moment when realized that for the first time, the American — the highest court in the land in America has decided that, indeed, separate is not equal. And while it specifically talks about desegregating public schools, it’s recognized right away that this is the opening for attacking Jim Crow segregation on all levels. So, it’s a really important moment.

MARTIN: Well, so the focus of the book is so-called citizenship schools. So, first of all, tell us what citizenship schools were and what — and why in the wake of Brown were they important?

WEISS: Citizenship schools were a very innovative and courageous way of trying to get ordinary, often poor and unlettered black citizens to be able to register to vote. Again, the Brown decision only dealt with desegregation, it did not deal with voting rights. And we’ll see for the next 15 years that desegregation moves very, very slowly. And it becomes obvious that nothing’s going to really happen until black people in the south can regain their right to vote. So, the way the citizenship schools began was to teach literacy, to teach people who had never been able to have an education because education was a tool of control in the South and like the white establishment did not want black people to be well educated. And so, very few were — actually, especially in rural areas, were literate, and they couldn’t pass the literacy tests, which were required of black people to register to vote. And so, this taught them, at the very basic level, how to hold a pencil, how to sign their names by tracing it over and over, and then learning their letters, learning to sound out words, learning arithmetic. And this was all designed to get them through the very basic onerous literacy tests. But it was more than that, it taught them to be citizens. It taught them the Constitution. It taught them what their rights really were. And it taught them that they were first class citizens as much as any other American, and they deserve all the protections and privileges of citizenship. And these — this isn’t like brick-and-mortar schools. These are informal community classes taught by your neighbors, and they teach their neighbors in their kitchens, in their garages, in beauty parlors at night with the curtains closed because it was still dangerous to be teaching literacy to black people with the intent of having them register to vote. There was danger involved.

MARTIN: You know, so I think some people — I think some people, at least one hopes that some people know that it was illegal in most places to teach enslaved people how to read and write. But after the Civil War, you know, after the period when slavery was, you know, more or less abolished, right, why is it that so many black citizens remained illiterate? Why is that?

WEISS: Because, again, it was a matter of control. So, of course, black schools in the south were segregated. And for every dollar spent on education of a white person, just pennies were expended on educating a black student. And the facilities were deplorable, there were shacks without blackboards, without — often without seats, with no plumbing, with no toilet facilities, with cast off decade’s old textbooks. And often, if you were in a rural area part of the arrangement of your family being a sharecropper were that children were also required to go into the fields. And so, their education was very interrupted. So, you’ll see that people will have maybe first or second grade education decades ago. And that’s about it. And some had none.

MARTIN: Septima Clark is one of the people who you feature, you know, in the book. And she may be one of the only people that many people will have heard of. She was an educator. How did that happen? How was she able to get enough education in order for her to be an educator? And I’m going to ask you how she fits into the story of the citizenship schools.

WEISS: Septima Clark born and raised in Charleston, daughter of a former enslaved father. She grows up quite poor, but a family that really valued education, and she loved reading and writing in school. And her parents scrimped to pay the tuition to some private elementary schools. And then, she is able to go to the Avery Institute, which is the premier private high school in Charleston, which had trained many of the black leaders in the city for decades.And she becomes a teacher at age 18 and is able to be a teacher for the next 40 years and uses that education in the civil rights movement. So, that’s how she is able — she can vote. She joins the NAACP when she is 18 or 19 years old, she joins the executive boards of the NAACP in her cities, and she is dedicated to breaking down the walls of Jim Crow society, and that she is one of the people who are educated and realize that those who aren’t are at such a disadvantage and they can’t participate either in modern life or in the life of their country.

MARTIN: So, tell us about the Citizenship Goals. Who started them? Whose idea was this? Tell us about him.

WEISS: It was the idea of Esau Jenkins, who’s this marvelously creative man on one of the sea islands off the coast of Charleston. And he has a fourth-grade education, but he’s gone back to night school. And he’s a businessman. He’s what we might call a social entrepreneur. He is doing good. And he has this idea that his neighbors on the island are always going to be neglected and subjected to the power of the white society and an injustice in the courts unless they have political power. So, he has a business running a bus, a jeepney bus back and forth from John’s Island to Charleston every day, taking workers who live on the island and are domestics or factory workers in town. And on the bus, he trains them, he has the Constitution typed up by his wife. He hands out these sheets and he drills them on aspects of the Constitution so they could answer, because you not only had to read, you had to interpret the legal aspects of this arcane language. And he drills them on it, and then he accompanies them to the registrar office to see that there’s no shenanigans. But he realizes he needs help on this, and he finds that help with Septima Clark, who he actually knows, because they both live in Charleston and active in the NAACP. And he brings this idea to a place in Tennessee called the Highlander School, which is a social justice training center. And there, they get the idea to take the — his — the sense of teaching the Constitution of the state, getting them through the literacy test, but broadening it to basic literacy so they can actually read. Most of them were memorizing this. And then it’s the first citizenship is established behind the shelves of a grocery store on John’s Island. And it’s in a room where there is no windows. They don’t want white people to know that they are teaching blacks to read and write in order to vote.

MARTIN: But you also tell in the book about what the consequences for other people when they did try to vote. So, talk a little bit about that, if you would.

WEISS: Well, there was just a whole system of suppression of the black vote. And I’m not talking about what we would call suppression today. It was violent. If you even attempted to try to register to vote, by the time you returned home, the registrar would have called your employer and you’d be fired from your job, would’ve called your landlord, or the man who owned the property where you were sharecropper, you’d be evicted, your loans would be pulled, your truck would be repossessed. The pharmacy wouldn’t fill the prescription for your sick baby. Night riders would come and shoot into your home. In one town in East Tennessee there’s an organized effort to go register to vote. All of the black families are evicted. 200 people live in a tent camp for two years. So, the repression was violent and cruel and ubiquitous.

MARTIN: There’s a really interesting — there’s another interesting character, Myles Horton.

WEISS: Yes.

MARTIN: Who runs this, the Highlander Folk School. Now, he’s a really interesting character. He’s white. He’s not African-American. He runs this school. He is not beloved by the powers that be, you know, because of it. But — so, to tell us his story. He doesn’t just — he doesn’t start out, actually, as a way to educate black folks per se.

WEISS: Right. So, Myles Horton is born and bred in the Cumberland Mountains of Tennessee, grows up poor. His family were sharecroppers and also teachers and he begins to understand that the power to change life in Appalachia, where he grows up is really with the people. He — you can’t rely on the laws or the powers that be to change it. And so, he gets — he studies theology and sociology and gets the idea of this starting a school. It’s not really what we would call a school, it’s a training center, a place where, from the beginning was integrated, which is against the laws of Tennessee. He very proudly said that Highlander School was the only place in the south where blacks and whites could tea and pee together. They could live together. They ate together at the same tables. All of this totally illegal by Jim Crow laws. And he’s very proud. He calls himself a radical hillbilly. And he’s focused at first on the labor movement and it becomes — Highlander becomes a training center for union organizers. But then he realizes, around 1950, that race is the real determining factor that’s keeping the south behind. And he says, we’ve got to tackle this before we can improve anything. And so, he shifts the emphasis of the training center to race relations and desegregation.

MARTIN: So, it’s a fascinating story, you know, that you tell, pointing out how they organized and taught themselves and taught their neighbors so that they could not subvert democratic systems, but actually participate in them fully. Now, you’d think that would be an inspiring story that people would be very interested in hearing, but I understand that last month you had a book event scheduled at the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library in Atlanta, which is overseen by the National Archives, and this event was suddenly canceled. Why?

WEISS: They said the event was canceled. They explained to my publisher that there were staffing difficulties, because there were — because like most federal employees, staffing has been slashed by this administration. But the thing that was concerning was that, although it had been approved and was all the way up on the website, and was announced my event in mid- March it clearly needed to be reassessed by the new administration, and the president had fired the archivist of the United States just a couple weeks before. And all the top leadership of the National Archives, which runs the presidential, is responsible for the Presidential Libraries had been pretty much forced out. So, there was a very new administration at the National Archives. Programming had to be re-approved, and there were three events, book events at the Carter Library in March that were canceled, that had been approved before. And —

MARTIN: Do you know what the others were?

WEISS: Yes, these were — one was a book about homelessness, and the other was a book about climate change. And mine’s about race and voting rights.

MARTIN: So, do you think it’s related to the content of the book, basically?

WEISS: I think that is a logical conclusion because this is happening in many government agencies right now under the new administration.

MARTIN: Well, I can tell you, I think I have it here. It says the press office didn’t answer directly whether it had discussed the events with the Carter Library, but in the statement, it said it, quote/unquote, “entrusts leadership at each Presidential Library to make programming decisions.” And it says that programs and events must always advance and uphold NARA, the National Archives’ core mission to preserve the records of the United States and make them available to the public on this issue. Leadership at the Carter Presidential Library is empowered to make their own decisions about scheduling events and programs. So, what does this bring up for you?

WEISS: It was disturbing to me, because I realized I was probably not alone. And I’ll be fine. The book talk has been rescheduled at another library in Atlanta. And I think the other authors also will be rescheduled. But this speaks to a larger issue. And we’re seeing that with the administration trying to assert control over many of our cultural and scholarly and scientific organizations. And I think this is disturbing. And there’s an emphasis right now with the — in the Arts Endowment and in the Humanities Endowment to promote patriotic education and what they would call patriotic expressions of American history and American arts. And what I would say is, I think the story of the citizenship schools and the incredibly brave thousands of black Americans who participated in these and taught them and raised up their neighbors to demand their rights as American citizens is the most patriotic story I can imagine. And I think this is the kind of patriotism we should be celebrating. And these are the kind of people who really defend democracy. These are the people who defend democracy, lift it up to its highest, highest ideals, the ideals that we talk about a lot as American ideals, but they were holding us to the line and saying, OK, act on them. And I think that’s the most patriotic thing an American can do.

MARTIN: Elaine Weiss, thanks so much for talking with us.

WEISS: Thank you. A great pleasure, Michel. Thank you.