Women’s History Month: A woman to know
Septima Poinsette Clark embodied the mission of the League of Women Voters, though she likely never realized it. She bridged education and activism, ultimately supporting the Civil Rights Movement.
“Literacy means liberation,” she believed. Like the earliest suffragists, she saw education as critical to gaining and holding freedom.
Her passion for education and democracy began in her first school experiences in her hometown of Charleston, South Carolina. Around age 6, she attended an “ABC Gallery,” where about 100 children sat on bleachers in a baseball stadium. Teachers primarily ferried students to the bathroom and back, she recalled in a 1976 interview for the Southern Oral History Collection. Her mother, dissatisfied with the lack of instruction, placed her with one of the many elderly women in Charleston who ran small schools from their homes. Her teacher was strict about ensuring students learned to read and write.
Clark’s mother had learned to read and write in Haiti after her parents died and her older brother took her there.
“She [Clark’s mother] boasted that she was never a slave; she was a free issue, and so she never had to go through the regulations of a slave,” Clark said in the interview.
One of Clark’s teachers was Mrs. Tuttle, a white woman from New England who moved to Charleston to teach. A supporter of civil rights, she lived as her students did.
Clark recalled that Tuttle took her students to the Opera House downtown, sitting with them in the third-floor balcony.
“She went to the Congregational church that was manned by a Black preacher,” Clark said. “She stayed in Charleston all that time and never attended a white church. She did go to a Jewish synagogue, though, to learn about some customs she wanted to teach us.”
Encouraged by her teachers, Clark attended Fisk University, a historically Black college. She later became a teacher and joined the NAACP, though in 1956, South Carolina outlawed NAACP membership for city and state employees to discourage Black teachers. She eventually married, moved to Dayton, Ohio, joined the AME church, and lost a baby. The child’s death led her husband to abandon the family. With another child to support, she earned her bachelor’s degree from Benedict College.
In 1947, she returned to South Carolina to care for her ailing mother and became involved with the segregated Black YMCA. She helped start a credit union to support Black teachers who were denied loans for graduate degrees due to their race.
As the 1950s progressed, South Carolina’s white population increasingly restricted Black voter registration. By then, Clark was educating adults in workshops across New England, Tennessee, and Georgia, working with Esau Jenkins to establish citizenship schools. These schools taught semi-literate adults to read and write so they could register to vote. At the time, voter registration restrictions varied by state but often included requirements such as signing one’s name in cursive, reading aloud sections of election law, answering 20 to 30 questions, or paying a poll tax.
After years of grassroots activism, Clark’s work educating Black citizens on their voting rights drew the attention of civil rights leaders. While working with the Highlander Folk School—a progressive education center focused on social justice—Clark traveled through small towns in South Carolina, teaching literacy and voter registration despite widespread resistance to integration.
When the State of Tennessee shut down Highlander in 1960, its founder, Myles Horton, had already anticipated the closure. He had spoken with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who saw the value of Clark’s program and invited her to bring it to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). With Highlander’s doors padlocked, Clark transitioned seamlessly to SCLC, working alongside Wyatt T. Walker, King’s executive director, to expand citizenship schools across the South. Though initially undervalued in a male-dominated movement, Clark’s impact on voter education and grassroots organizing became undeniable.