Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 2,146

This is the grave of Septima Clark.

Born in 1898 in Charleston, South Carolina, Septime Poinsett grew up poor. Her father had been the slave of the South Carolina planter and slaver Joel Poinsett, a personal servant to this terrible human. After the war, her father got away from there and worked in shipping, as was common in this very hard job for black men. He went to Haiti once, met a woman, they married, and Septima was their daughter. The family was very poor, as one would expect. Clark started school at age 6. So did most kids, but far fewer stuck it out like Clark. She would watch white girls as a babysitter in order to raise money for her tuition. There wasn’t a public school for black kids in Charleston at this time; the Supreme Court never enforced “separate but equal” in Plessy, it was just separate. Eventually, in 1914, a school was opened. Then the NAACP pushed for hiring black teachers. Clark was involved in the protest movement for that. It was her first. It would not be her last.

Clark taught for awhile after graduate school, lacking money to go to college. But she saved and worked and scrimped and eventually graduated from college in….1942. That’s a long time. But then she went to Hampton for a master’s degree! But there’s a lot of history in there. She got involved with the NAACP while teaching on the Sea Islands in the late 1910s and then stayed involved when she moved to Charleston for another teaching job. She married a man named Nerie Clark, who lived in North Carolina. Her mother disapproved because he was from a different state. Given that she was from Haiti and her own husband from South Carolina…I dunno, people are weird. It wasn’t an easy marriage in any case. She and her husband didn’t get along, she fell into a period of depression, the 20s and 30s were not good decades for her.

It was really the early 40s when Clark becomes the person who later would be one of the legends of the civil rights movement. She was a middle aged woman when she broke out of her depression, started attending college in the summer, managed to take classes with W.E.B. DuBois at Atlanta University, and even went to New York to take classes at Columbia. At the same time, she began to be more actively involved with the NAACP, at the very time when the growing black economy thanks to World War II led to a lot more donations and thus activity from that organization. She became a fixture in Charleston in the 1950s and in 1956, was named VP of the Charleston branch of the NAACP.

In 1954, Clark made a lifechanging decision. She attended a workshop at the Highlander Center in Tennessee. Myles Horton’s folk education school had moved from being a conduit to industrial organizing of workers after World War II to being a training ground for civil rights. Highlander was strictly integrated and if whites didn’t like it, they were welcome to leave. Of course, the white South thought it was communist since what was racial intermixing if not communism? She proved tremendously adept at civil rights education. Since she had taught her whole adult life, she knew how. That alone did not make a great organizer. But Clark was ready to be activated, she just needed the spark. It was Horton who did that. He saw how she blossomed and he soon hired her as the director of workshops at Highlander.

Now, working at Highlander meant being fired back in Charleston. She didn’t care. She was very brave. White authorities targeted her. She was arrested in 1959 for whiskey possession, but it was a trumped up bullshit charge they had to drop. Grundy County would soon close Highlander, using a spurious charge of illegally selling alcohol (the fridge had beer and you were supposed to leave a quarter or whatever to pay for it in a jar), but it would reopen shortly after northeast of Knoxville, where it remains today.

So black students would come to Highlander or Highlander educators would go to them. Literacy and citizenship workshops were the highest priorities. It was Clark who taught Rosa Parks at Highlander, shortly before the latter chose not to move from the front of the bus in Montgomery. Clark brought her cousin Bernice Robinson to Highlander to run this with her. This all put her in contact with the great organizer Ella Baker, who wanted to adapt Clark’s citizenship schools to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s plans to organize Mississippi, which of course happened.

Clark started spreading her citizenship schools around black communities in the South. Teachers would come to Highlander for training and then go back to their own communities. The idea was that if the literacy test was a thing, then we would learn to pass it, but it really extended far beyond that, both in terms of the just the power literacy gave, plus both the claims to citizenship and the better jobs that would result.

In 1961, the project got transferred to Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference. This happened because Highlander just couldn’t handle the size of it anymore, plus that was the year it was dealing with Grundy County trying to close it. This made Clark the first woman on the SCLC board, which given the deep sexism of these ministers who ran it, including King, was a big step. Among those who actively opposed Clark’s inclusion was Ralph Abernathy, who thought women should play no such leadership role. King honestly didn’t want her around either, but he knew how important her work was to the movement so he reluctantly agreed. Sigh.

Clark retired from the SCLC in 1970. Her citizenship schools had really transformed the South. Few if any individuals did more to promote grassroots change. Maybe Ella Baker is her equal. She then sued the Charleston school district for firing her back in 1956 for her Highlander job and won a big settlement that included all her back pay.

Clark spent the last years of her life as a senior respected figure in the movement, as the black community consolidated power in the 1970s, an underrated decade for civil rights organizing since so much of it happened on the local level. She wrote a couple of memoirs, received an honor from Jimmy Carter, was an honorary doctorate, all the things she deserved.

Clark died in 1987. She was 89 years old.

Septima Clark is buried in Old Bethel United Methodist Church Cemetery, Charleston, South Carolina.

If you would like this series to visit other leaders of the civil rights movement, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Ella Baker is in Queens and Esau Jenkins is in Johns Island, South Carolina. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.