How did septima clark die

African-American educator, civil-rights activist, humanitarian, training director for Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and driving force behind the influential Citizenship Schools. Born Septima Poinsette on May 3, 1898, in Charleston, South Carolina; died on December 15, 1987, on John's Island, South Carolina; daughter of Peter Porcher Poinsette (born a slave on the Poinsette plantation, later worked as a caterer on a steamship) and Victoria Warren Anderson Poinsette (freeborn in Charleston and reared in Haiti); graduated (12th grade) from Avery Normal Institute, a private school to train black teachers in Charleston, S.C., 1916; awarded A.B., Benedict College, 1942; granted M.A., Hampton Institute, 1946; married Nerie David Clark, May 1920 (died of kidney failure in December 1925); children: daughter (who died within a month of birth); son, Nerie David, Jr. (b. 1925).

Awards:

Martin Luther King Award from SCLC (1970); Race Relations Award from National Education Association (1976); the Septima P. Clark Expressway named after her in Charleston (1978); honorary Doctor of Humane Letters, College of Charleston(1978); received Order of the Palmetto from Governor Richard Riley (1982).

Unable to teach in Charleston public schools because of race, obtained a position at the Promiseland School on John's Island, South Carolina; took a position with Avery Normal School and joined in a political crusade to change the law barring black teachers in the Charleston public schools (1919); enrolled in college, earning her bachelor's degree (1942) and master's (1946); as a longtime member of the NAACP, refused to renounce her affiliation when South Carolina passed a law prohibiting NAACP membership for state or city employees; thus, fired from her teaching job at the Henry Archer School (1956); hired as director of education for Highlander Folk School (HFS) in Tennessee by Myles Horton for adult literacy programs; taught skills to enable deep South blacks to qualify to vote and become effective citizens in her Citizenship Schools, based at HFS; because of harassment by Tennessee officials at Highlander, her citizenship training was moved to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), where she continued to conduct literacy training programs that substantially increased the rolls of black voters (early 1960s); retired from SCLC (1970), age 72; elected to the Charleston School Board (1976).

Septima Clark had been teaching successfully for 40 years when she was suddenly fired for being a member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). At age 58, Septima Clark was about to become a legend of the civil-rights era.

Septima Poinsette Clark was born just as the prejudicial "Jim Crow" codes of the South were being solidified, two years after the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision by the U.S. Supreme Court. In that decision, the Court found no violation of the Constitution in the new segregation laws being imposed throughout the South. Having witnessed the transition from slavery to freedom, it must have been particularly hard for her parents' generation to bear this dramatic retreat from the march to freedom. Clark told Grace McFadden that her mother had been a proud woman because she had been free-born, never a slave. "I never gave a white woman a drink of water," Septima recalled her mother saying. In contrast, Septima's father, an extremely gentle man, had experienced slavery on the Joel Poinsette plantation near Georgetown, South Carolina. Fortunately, Clark inherited a bit of both personalities. "His nonviolence helped me to work with the people" in rough places of Mississippi and Texas, noted Clark, "and her haughtiness helped me to stay, enduring the harassment."

After a secure childhood in Charleston, Septima attended Avery Normal Institute through the 12th grade, graduating in 1916 with a license to teach. Her first position was in a small school on John's Island, where she and another teacher taught 132 children. Though the white teacher at the whites-only school on the island had only three pupils, she received a salary of $85 per month, compared to Septima's $35. This experience figured significantly in Clark's efforts on behalf of salary equalization, which she began after returning to teach at her alma mater, the Avery Normal Institute, in 1919. Inspired by the rhetoric of black leaders Edwin Halston and Thomas Ezekiel Miller, whom she heard address the issue of unequal pay for black teachers at NAACP meetings, Clark participated in a petition drive, going door to door for signatures. In addition to equal pay, the campaign worked to secure for blacks the right to teach in the Charleston public schools and the right to be named as school principals. As she has written in her autobiography, Echo in My Soul, the petition-drive proved effective in prompting the state legislature to enact their demands into law in 1920.

Septima married Nerie Clark in 1920. It was not a happy union. During the early years of their marriage, Nerie was in the navy, and a daughter died soon after birth. In 1925, after the birth of their son Nerie, Jr., the couple separated. That same year, Nerie Clark died of kidney failure; Septima remained close to his parents.

To provide for Nerie, Jr., Septima Clark moved in with her in-laws in Hickory, North Carolina. Then, in 1929, she moved to Columbia, South Carolina. Unable to support her son, she sent him back to Hickory to live with his paternal grandparents until he completed high school. During this period, Clark returned to school to earn an A.B. from Benedict College (1942). In the summer of 1944, she began working toward her M.A. at Hampton Institute. Taking courses for three summers, she earned the degree in 1946. Earlier, in 1937, she had taken a course, under W.E.B. Du Bois at Atlanta University, entitled "Interpersonal Relationships of Human Beings." Du Bois predicted a time when the segregation laws of the South would be abolished. His example of teaching and activism provided Clark with an inspiring model for her later work at Highlander and with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) Citizenship Schools.

In Columbia, Clark began working with Wil Lou Gray of the South Carolina Adult Education Program, who was developing a literacy training program for the U.S. army at Camp Jackson. The emphasis was on practical literacy, that is, students learned to sign their names, read paychecks, maps, bus schedules, and the like, as well as basic arithmetic. Clark would use this model for citizenship training at the Highlander School and for the SCLC, more than 20 years later.

It was while teaching in the elementary level at the Booker T. Washington School in Columbia that Clark resumed her political fight for better wages for South Carolina's black teachers. Another renowned civil-rights leader, Modjeska M. Simkins , was a math teacher in the same school. They, along with principal J. Andrew Simmons, challenged the lower pay scale for black teachers in federal court. Assisted by the NAACP, which sent Thurgood Marshall to represent them, the case was argued before Judge Julius Waties Waring of the District Court for the Eastern District of South Carolina. Waring issued a favorable ruling requiring equal salaries for black and white teachers. As a result, Clark's salary was increased. "When I went to Columbia, my salary was $65 a month. When I left I was getting almost $400 a month," she wrote in Echo.

In 1947, Septima moved back to Charleston to be nearer her mother, who had suffered a stroke. That year, Judge Waring was involved in another case brought by the NAACP, Elmore v. Rice, in which he ruled that the Southern practice of holding "whites only" primaries violated the U.S. Constitution. Waring's pro-civil-rights decisions made him extremely unpopular in the white community of Charleston and elsewhere in the state. To make matters worse, Clark developed a friendship with the Warings after she extended an invitation to Mrs. Waring to speak out against segregation before the (black) YWCA, an event reported in the newspapers. After repeated harassments and a number of violent threats against the Warings by white supremacists, the couple decided to leave the South and move to New York City in 1950. Septima Clark was also criticized by her family and friends, and by the administration of her school, for having transgressed the racial code when she visited the Warings' home and entered through the front door.

In 1954, Clark paid a visit to the Highlander School, run by Myles Horton, near Chattanooga, Tennessee. There, she found blacks and whites living and working together. The experience had a powerful impact on her, she told Cynthia Brown , because that "wasn't done" in South Carolina. When she returned to Highlander in the summer of 1955, escorting groups from South Carolina to attend integration workshops, she chanced to meet Rosa Parks , an attendee from Montgomery, Alabama. Parks appeared meek and timid, writes Clark in Ready from Within; thus, she was surprised when Parks made headlines that year by refusing to move to the back of the bus, that refusal precipitated the year-long Montgomery Bus Boycott.

Septima Poinsette Clark">

The greatest evil in our country today is not racism but ignorance.

—Septima Poinsette Clark

Simkins, Modjeska M. (b. 1899)

African-American civil-rights activist and educator. Born Mary Modjeska Monteith on December 5, 1899, in South Carolina; eldest child of Henry Clarence Monteith and Rachel Evelyn (Hull) Monteith; Benedict College, A.B., 1921; also attended Columbia University, Morehouse College, University of Michigan, and Eastern Michigan University (then Michigan State Normal School); married Andrew Whitfield Simkins (a businessman).

In 1931, after teaching at the Booker T. Washington School in Columbia, South Carolina, Modjeska Simkins was named "Director of Negro Work" for the South Carolina Tuberculosis Association. For the next 11 years, she set up clinics for TB testing at schools, churches, and sometimes on the plantations; she also circulated a newsletter and held conferences. When a jittery state senate demanded that all state employees, including Simkins, break from the NAACP, she refused and was discreetly fired. She then began her long campaign as an agitator for civil rights.

The NAACP continued to win segregation cases, the most noteworthy being the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas Supreme Court case of 1954, declaring segregated school systems illegal. Subsequently, Southern state policymakers initiated campaigns of repression against the NAACP and other civil-rights organizations. In South Carolina, in April of 1956, the state legislature passed a law making it illegal for employees of the state or city governments to belong to a civil-rights group. Since Clark would not renounce or hide her NAACP membership, she was fired from her teaching position at the Henry Archer School in Charleston (as were ten other blacks). The 58-year-old Clark, with 40 years experience as a teacher, also lost her pension. (Twenty years later, the state legislature would yield to pressure from the National Education Association and grant her a small pension of $3,600 per year.)

Myles Horton took this opportunity to recruit Clark to work at the Highlander School, located on a 200-acre farm about 50 miles to the northeast of Chattanooga, outside the town of Monteagle. Hired full-time to direct the workshops, Clark expanded this into a general program of citizenship training that eventually qualified thousands of Southern blacks to pass the literacy tests that enabled them to vote.

The Highlander School, like other organizations promoting integration and civil rights, soon drew fire from the authorities. It had often been called a "communist" organization by its critics, including the local paper. In 1957, when Martin Luther King, Jr. addressed a group assembled in honor of Highlander's 25th anniversary, a photograph was published of King standing near another man, apparently unknown to King, who was there to report the event for The Daily Worker, an American Communist Party newspaper. Reproduced widely, the photograph even adorned billboards, said Clark, to prove that King was a communist and Highlander was a "communist training center."

Such publicity attracted the attention of the Tennessee state legislature, which debated the legality of the Highlander organization. In July of 1959, the state police raided Highlander on a warrant for illegally selling liquor. They seized some dusty jugs from the basement as evidence and, because she was the manager of Highlander at the time, locked Clark in jail overnight. As a result of the raid, Highlander had its charter revoked. A panel of admittedly biased jurors, writes Donna Langston , found the school guilty on three trumped-up charges. The school property, valued at $175,000, was confiscated by the state.

Clark did not remain idle long. She developed "Citizenship Schools" in a number of places throughout the South. Her prototype was set up on John's Island, off the South Carolina coast, where most of the island's black population could not read or write. Secretly, Highlander paid for the rental of a classroom and for minimal supplies, fearing that whites would put an end to the schools if they learned of them. As William Ayers writes in the Harvard Educational Review: "Learning to read in the South of Ella Baker and Septima Clark was a subversive activity, an activity that many thought could change the fundamental structure of the Jim Crow system."

The training programs began by teaching the non-traditional students to write their names in cursive script, as required on the ballot forms. It then moved to practical reading and writing, drawing content from the daily routines of the students. The schools were organized around work schedules. Classes were more often held during winter months because there was less field work to be done then. Clark hoped that graduates would become the next wave of teachers, thereby multiplying the effect of her efforts. By 1961, 82 teachers from the Citizenship Schools were holding classes in Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, and Tennessee.

Though she began having health problems soon after her ouster in Charleston, Clark did not let it slow her work. In 1957, working at Highlander with some women from Montgomery, she suffered a heart attack and spent four days in the Sewanee hospital, integrating it in the process. It was the "first time a black person had ever been in the Sewanee hospital," she told Brown. She experienced a second heart attack in January of 1961, which forced her to rest for several weeks.

That summer, King invited Clark to move to the SCLC headquarters in Atlanta. From that base, she organized Citizenship Schools, assisted by the United Church of Christ (UCC) organization of New York, and by Andrew Young, who was working for the UCC at that time. Through them, the SCLC acquired use of the Dorchester Cooperative Community Center in McIntosh, Georgia, located about 40 miles south of Savannah, as a home base. At Dorchester, Clark, Young, and Dorothy Cotton created a well-structured program for teacher training, inviting up to 70 individuals for weeklong training sessions. The Marshall Field Foundation, which had supported Clark's work at Highlander, contributed a $250,000 grant to the SCLC for the Citizenship Schools project, enabling Clark to bring in more trainees and pay them a small stipend.

Her work with the SCLC brought her notoriety. By 1963, the FBI regarded her with suspicion. That spring, as the Birmingham protests resulted in mass arrests of nonviolent demonstrators, officials wondered at the resolve and organization evidenced by the marchers. FBI officials suspected a conspiracy and "took note of a report from the Savannah office that the Negroes," writes Taylor Branch, "'were all trained' at Septima Clark's Dorchester retreat." This was false. Only a small percentage of the protestors at Birmingham had been to the Dorchester literacy and voter registration training sessions.

As newly literate black voters tried to register, they encountered more barriers, like tests without objective answers, the correctness of an answer depending on the whim of the registrar. It has been reported that even highly educated black citizens, some with doctoral degrees, were denied the right to vote in this way. Responding to such procedural devices, Clark participated in protests and in lobbying Washington to have these practices stopped. Eventually, in 1965, Congress passed the Voting Rights Act, and the federal government subsequently moved with a firm hand to end voting discrimination in the South. This greatly simplified the work of the teachers at the Citizenship Schools. The new requirement simply called for a ballot form signed in cursive writing, a skill relatively easy to teach. Preparing for the next election in 1966, Clark set up 150 Citizenship Schools in Selma, Alabama, from May 18 to August 15, 1965, paying teachers $1.25 an hour for two hours of teaching every weekday morning. They registered over 7,000, and the new voters soon made themselves heard. By 1972, Andrew Young of Georgia and Barbara Jordan of Texas became the first African-Americans elected to the U.S. Congress from any of the 11 states of the "Deep South" in the 20th century, and the number of black officeholders at all levels began to increase steadily.

When the Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965, Clark was 67 years old and ready to reduce her level of activity. The following year, after ten years of full-time civil-rights work, she bought a house for herself and her sister, which needed substantial repairs. She turned her attentions to that task. Though Clark officially retired from the SCLC in 1970, she remained active and, in 1976, became the first African-American woman to be elected to the Charleston School Board, the same board that had fired her 20 years earlier.

Late in life, Septima Clark received much deserved recognition for her work. A portion of the cross-town expressway in Charleston, from Spring Street to Coming Street, was named the Septima P. Clark Expressway in 1978. That year, she was honored by the College of Charleston, which bestowed upon her an honorary doctorate. In 1982, South Carolina governor Richard Riley awarded her the Order of the Palmetto. "If I were young again, starting all over," wrote Clark, "I'd do the same things over and over again. We do have problems. But I have lived so long that I have seen great progress."

sources:

Ayers, William. "'We Who Believe in Freedom Cannot Rest Until It's Done': Two Dauntless Women of the Civil Rights Movement and the Education of a People," in Harvard Educational Review. Vol. 59, no. 4. November 1989.

Branch, Taylor. Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954–1963. NY: Simon and Schuster, 1988.

Clark, Septima P. Echo In My Soul. NY: E.P. Dutton, 1962.

——. Ready from Within (as told to Cynthia Stokes Brown). Navarro, CA: Wild Trees Press, 1986.

Crawford, Vicki, et al, eds. Black Women in United States History: Trailblazers and Torchbearers, 1941–1965. Brooklyn, NY: Carlson, 1990.

Langston, Donna. "The Women of Highlander," in Black Women in United States History. Edited by Vicki Crawford, et al. Brooklyn, NY: Carlson, 1990.

McFadden, Grace Jordan. "Clark, Septima Poinsette," in Black Women in America, Vol 1. Brooklyn, NY: Carlson, 1993.

Salem, Dorothy C., ed. "Clark, Septima," in African-American Women: A Biographical Dictionary. NY: Garland, 1993.

suggested reading:

McFadden, Grace Jordan. Oral Recollections of Septima Poinsette Clark. Columbia: USC Instructional Services Center, 1980.

collections:

Septima Clark Collection, Robert Scott Small Library, Charleston, South Carolina; Highlander Folk School files, State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Madison; Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill; Papers of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, 1954–1970, Archives of the Martin Luther King, Jr., Center for Social Change, Atlanta, Georgia.

MichaelD.Cary , Chair, Department of History and Political Science, Seton Hill College, Greensburg, Pennsylvania