It’s difficult to imagine how Septima must have felt in this moment: her baby girl was dead, she had married a man her mother did not approve of, she discovered her husband was a philanderer and liar, and then he died, forcing her to leave her son in the care of her dead husband’s parents. Septima had no choice but to believe in the importance of her work and to rely on her faith. “Faith I must have and will keep to lean heavily on,” she said.[11]
Throughout her long career, Septima believed that God had spared her life on many occasions: once, when her brother saved her from suicide. Other times, she survived a plane accident, a bus wreck, and a train crash. Another, police officers caught a group of boys on their way to firebomb her house. “I’ll never know how a sheriff caught up with three white boys, all teenagers, coming to bomb the house I slept in just in time to take away the dynamite. I said to myself, ‘God kept me that night, so I’ll put my body in His care each night thereafter,’ and I did.”[12]
She continued her work with the NAACP, which helped highlight the tragedy of adult illiteracy. Many men who were drafted into the army couldn’t even write well enough to sign their names for payroll. At the time, printing was not an acceptable way to write one’s name for banking purposes—you needed to learn cursive. She helped the men who would soon be shipping out learn to sign their names and read well enough to understand directional signs and where a bus said it was headed. Education wasn’t only liberation, she came to realize; education was self-sufficiency. It was independence. It reduced your vulnerability, because it was much harder to cheat someone who could read and do basic sums. It was connection, allowing you to read and send letters to your loved ones. It was faith, because it let you read your scriptures.
Septima taught adults to read in a way that did not make them feel judged or like they were stupid. “A good teacher meets her learners where they are,” she said.[13] She created a curriculum that wasn’t reliant on the Dick and Jane readers of the day, which she felt humiliated adults with their babyish stories. Instead, they learned to read information that was important to their lives: geographical and demographic data, the names of the surrounding cities and towns, who the mayor was, and who represented them in Washington, D.C.
By the 1950s, Septima had been teaching for decades. “Why are Black teachers paid the same amount as white teachers elsewhere, but not here?” she wondered. She again worked with the NAACP to file a lawsuit that aimed to equalize teacher salaries based on equal certification. They were successful, and Septima’s salary went from $780 a year to $4,000 a year.[14]
One of the things Septima found most upsetting was that even though Black men and women had the right to vote, they often couldn’t. Literacy tests prevented them from being able to access the polls. You might be under the impression that a literacy test is just asking somebody to read some passages to make sure that they can comprehend English. You might think that they are objective tests. And sadly, you would be wrong. Scoring was highly subjective, and was always done by white southerners.
To test how effective literacy tests were at keeping African Americans from voting in the Jim Crow South, a law professor at Duke University, William Van Alstyne, conducted an experiment in the 1960s. He sent the questions found on Alabama’s voter literacy tests to all of the professors who were currently teaching Constitutional Law in American law schools.[15]
The professors were told to answer all of the questions without the aid of anything else. No books, no phoning a friend, nothing. Ninety-six law professors sent back their answers. Seventy percent of the answers that were returned were incorrect. These are generally people with the highest degrees in American law, and they answered the majority of the questions incorrectly. Consider, then, the incredible barrier that these tests represented for the average person trying to access the polls with minimal literacy skills.
—
Then, and now, one of the most effective ways to stop cultural change is to create a moral panic around it. Moral panics have been around since this country’s inception, with the Salem witch trials being among the first widely publicized (and deadly) panics. Since then, moral panics have been used as a tool to subvert and dismantle movements that the dominant caste views as a threat. And this included civil rights.
Sociology professors Erich Goode and Ben-Yehuda Nachman have identified the five stages of moral panic, which they say are “culturally and politically constructed, a product of the human imagination.”[16]
Concern: Something occurs that gives someone a sense of alarm.
Hostility: A group or subculture is then looked on with disdain or aggression as a result of the concern.
Consensus: The dominant group builds agreement that the group or subculture is the cause of the concern, and that they are justified in their hostility toward them.
Disproportionality: The threat of harm posed by the group or subculture is then exaggerated for effect.
Volatility: The moral panic erupts, and/or dies down when it is replaced with another moral panic.
In the 1940s and ’50s, the quickest way to sink an activity you didn’t like was to include it in the broad moral panic surrounding communism, which we now call the Red Scare. Civil rights? Communism. The NAACP? Communism. Highlander Folk School? Communism. Martin Luther King? Communist. Myles Horton? Communist. Clifford Durr? Communist. Eleanor Roosevelt? Communist.
Civil rights leader Dorothy Cotton remembered that there was a “large billboard on a major highway with Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt’s photograph, and that of Dr. Martin Luther King, with a caption indicating that they were ‘at that communist school’ in Tennessee.”[17]
Determined to capitalize on the threat of a communist infiltration, South Carolina made it illegal for any government employees to be a member of the NAACP. Septima wasn’t having any of that nonsense. (Dorothy Cotton later reported that, at Myles Horton’s funeral in 1990, the fact that civil rights work was viewed as communism was joked about. “They wouldn’t know communism from rheumatism,” Horton’s friends laughed.)[18] When employees were required to fill out a form listing all of their group memberships and attesting that they were not in the “communist” NAACP, Septima refused to hide her membership. She knew it was likely that she would be terminated, but she was unwilling to live a lie.
And she was terminated by the Charleston Public Schools. Which only gave her more time to devote to her activism. She didn’t have time to sit around being angry, not when there was so much to be done. “You know the measure of a person is how much they develop in their life,” she said. “Some people slow down in their growth after they become adults. But you never know when a person’s going to leap forward or change around completely—I’ve seen growth like most people don’t think possible. I can even work with my enemies because I know from experience that they might have a change of heart any minute.”[19]
If I were a preacher or motivational speaker, I would have exclaimed Septima’s words in a fever pitch, and then I would drop my voice to barely above a whisper, repeating in staccato what you just heard for emphasis. “I.can.even.work.with.my.enemies.because.I.know.from.experience.that…” My voice would swoop back up, projecting to the back of the room: “THEY MIGHT HAVE A CHANGE OF HEART ANY MINUTE! At any minute!” My arms would move wildly, underscoring what it is we should all walk out of the room knowing: “How can our enemies have a change of heart if we don’t work with them? How can they be convinced that they’re on the wrong path if we cut them out of our lives? How can we possibly hope to influence someone with whom we have no relationship?”
And then, I would get close to the microphone, my body still. “They can’t,” I would whisper. “They CAN’T. Your enemy won’t change because you refuse to sit with them at a dinner table! We have but one hope, one hope,” I would repeat. “The hope that change is always possible if we refuse to give up on people!” My speech/sermon would probably go on to give other examples of people who saw extraordinary change only after they persevered in the face of extraordinary adversity.
And then at the end, I would come back to Septima’s message. I would repeat the hope that she did not feel, but that she chose. I would remind the audience that Septima was fired from her job. She was denied equal pay and job opportunities. I would remind them that her students were learning in the dark with no books. I would say that her baby died and her husband was a liar and that she nearly perished, over and over and over, that people tried to kill her, but still, she refused to give up on her enemies. “WHY?” I would ask. “WHY? Because she knew that her enemies might have a change of heart at any minute. Any minute. But only if she stayed in the game. Only if she refused to give up hope.” And then I would hope that the audience would leave my talk encouraged by the idea that their labors are not in vain. That despite current evidence to the contrary, their enemies were capable of change. But only if they refused to quit. Only if they chose to hope.
Septima, who had already attended a workshop at Highlander, began teaching there after she was fired from Charleston Public Schools. Rosa Parks was one of her students, and Parks later took what she learned at Highlander and became the face of a movement. Septima went on to develop an educational program that you’ve probably never heard of. But it became a cornerstone of the civil rights movement.
What we need, Septima argued, was Citizenship School. Classes for adults who couldn’t read that would teach them literacy AND how to access the polls. How to order from the Sears catalog AND how to write a letter to your congressman. The first Citizenship School, a collaboration between Septima, Myles Horton, Septima’s cousin Bernice Robinson, and Esau Jenkins, a political organizer, was set up on Johns Island, where Septima had taught so long ago.[20]
Every location they planned to use for the two-hour-long, twice-a-week classes ended up canceling the class, because, communism. Even churches that were sympathetic to their cause worried that they would be firebombed or targeted by the state. Eventually, Esau was able to obtain a grant for a building, and at the front, he put a small store. Hidden in the back of the store, behind a wall of freezers and produce, was a classroom they could use. Because the shop was a Black-owned business, it was unlikely any white people would even step foot inside, much less discover the secret classroom.
Bernice Robinson was tapped to be the teacher because she was a hairdresser. When Septima and Esau asked her to consider it, she kept saying things like, “Wait, why would I do that? I’m a hairdresser, not a teacher” or “I don’t know how to teach adults how to read.”[21] Bernice Robinson is one of many people throughout history who felt completely ill-equipped to step forward into their calling, but who just moved forward anyway.
The Gullah people of the island were suspicious of outsiders. They knew Septima because she had gained their trust, and Bernice was her relative. But really, there was a bigger reason that Bernice was chosen. As a hairdresser, Bernice knew how to listen. She talked with people for hours every day, heard their problems, and made them feel important. Those were the soft skills many other people lacked.
On the first day of classes, Bernice told her students, “I’m not going to be the teacher. We’re going to learn together. You’re going to teach me something, and maybe there are a few things I might be able to teach you, but I don’t consider myself a teacher, I just feel that I’m here to learn with you. We’ll learn things together.”[22] She helped the class make a list of what they wanted to learn about, and Bernice began to devise lessons. Septima helped her come up with a system of using a large piece of cardboard with someone’s name written on it, so they could trace their name over and over to practice signing it in cursive. As word spread, even more Johns Island residents showed up for the classes, despite the fact that they had already begun.
Groups of teenage girls were brought by their parents, and Bernice kept them busy by giving them crocheting and sewing projects to do while they listened. Soon, the classroom was not just packed, but another thirty-five people stood in the store, craning their necks, trying to listen to the instruction. At the end of her first Citizenship School, every one of Bernice’s fourteen official students received their voter registration certificates.[23]
One of Bernice’s students was a sixty-five-year-old woman who could not read or write a single word. At the end of the Citizenship School, Bernice wrote all of her students’ names on the board. Bernice said, “I will never forget the emotion that I felt when she got up, took the ruler out of my hand and said, ‘There’s my name, A-N-N-A, Anna. There’s my last name, V-A-S-T-I-N-E.’ Goose pimples came out all over me.”[24]
Within a few years, more than thirty-seven Citizenship Schools sprung up on the Sea Islands of South Carolina. Students of the Citizenship Schools went on to do things like begin low-income housing projects, credit unions, a nursing home, and other key infrastructure within their communities. In four years, Black voter registration in communities with Citizenship Schools was up 300 percent.[25] All because Septima continued to choose to hope.
As the Citizenship School program expanded across the South, Highlander insisted that all classes had to be taught by African Americans. By 1968, Citizenship Schools had helped move tens of thousands of Black voters onto the voter rolls, and most of the leaders of the civil rights movement had been trained by Septima, Bernice, or other Highlander teachers.
And this momentum, this ever-rising tide of Black voters? The people intent on preserving white supremacy and the status quo of the South just couldn’t handle it. They stepped up the moral panic rhetoric. The FBI and the state of Tennessee created reports that were picked up by news stations around the country that painted Highlander as a hotbed of communism. They revoked their tax-exempt status. The state of Tennessee took away their school charter, and the concept of Citizenship School had to be transferred to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the organization headed by Martin Luther King.
And then the government set their sights on the leader that was making such a difference: Septima herself. She was a known teetotaler, but the police arrived at the door one night and arrested Septima for breaking alcohol laws. They had found what they believed to be illegal whiskey at the home of Myles Horton, but it didn’t belong to Septima. They threw Septima, who was now a grandmother, into the back of a squad car while her young granddaughter wailed, “WHERE ARE YOU TAKING MY GRANDMOMMIE?”[26] The idea that a Black woman was at the helm of a group training the next generation of activists was an idea that some people would have done anything to stop.
Twenty-four
America1950s
During the Cold War, the period in which Claudette’s story unfolds, government officials and historians tap-danced as fast as they could to distance the United States from the Nazis, downplaying exactly how much inspiration the United States’ racial segregation laws provided to the Third Reich. But the evidence is copious. Hitler emulated America’s westward expansion in his annexation of territory in Europe, and its treatment of Native Americans in his programs to remove Jews from places he felt should be occupied by Aryans. According to historian James Q. Whitman, “The Nazis took a sustained, significant, and sometimes even eager interest in the American example in race law”—racial segregation laws like the ones present all over the South.[1] In other words, the Nazis looked to our racial discrimination policies and liked what they saw.
And here was Claudette, in 1955, more than ten years after Hitler shot himself in a bunker. The United States had become the world’s greatest superpower because of our war production, economic prowess, and victory against Germany and Japan, but we were still arresting and assaulting Black children for sitting on a bus. Strapping them into electric chairs to pressure them to confess to crimes they did not commit.
The Supreme Court had issued their initial opinion in Brown v. Board of Education the year prior, and a follow-up opinion, Brown v. Board of Education II, earlier in 1955. The dominant narrative surrounding Brown v. Board of Education is that it integrated schools. Separate but equal was unacceptable. The Supreme Court said it, the schools did it. Black students were equal to white students.
