Spell Freedom

The Underground Schools That Built the Civil Rights Movement

Elaine Weiss

• Publisher: Atria/One Signal Publishers
• Year: 2025
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781668002711
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

“Spell Freedom draws us in with lucid prose, filling in the holes of American history with the work of Septima Clark and Bernice Robinson and their compatriots, who deftly wielded reading and writing as their weapons of choice in the 20th century fight for first class citizenship for all.” —Margot Lee Shetterly, bestselling author of Hidden Figures

The acclaimed author of the “stirring, definitive, and engrossing” (NPR) The Woman’s Hour returns with the story of four activists whose audacious plan to restore voting rights to Black Americans laid the groundwork for the Civil Rights Movement.

In the summer of 1954, educator Septima Clark and small businessman Esau Jenkins travelled to rural Tennessee’s Highlander Folk School, an interracial training center for social change founded by Myles Horton, a white southerner with roots in the labor movement. There, the trio united behind a shared mission: preparing Black southerners to pass the daunting Jim Crow era voter registration literacy tests that were designed to disenfranchise them.

Together with beautician-turned-teacher Bernice Robinson, they launched the underground Citizenship Schools project, which began with a single makeshift classroom hidden in the back of a rural grocery store. By the time the Voting Rights Act was signed into law in 1965, the secretive undertaking had established more than nine hundred citizenship schools across the South, preparing tens of thousands of Black citizens to read and write, demand their rights—and vote. Simultaneously, it nurtured a generation of activists—many of them women—trained in community organizing, political citizenship, and tactics of resistance and struggle who became the grassroots foundation of the Civil Rights Movement. Dr. King called Septima Clark, “Mother of the Movement.”

In the vein of Hidden Figures and Devil in the Grove, Spell Freedom is both a riveting, crucially important lens onto our past, and a deeply moving story for our present.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Prologue
• Chapter One: Monteagle Mountain
• Chapter Two: Henrietta Street
• Chapter Three: Esau’s Bus
• Chapter Four: The Judge
• Chapter Five: Red Roadshow and Black Monday
• Chapter Six: Radical Hillbilly
• Chapter Seven: Prepare
• Chapter Eight: Deliberate Speed
• Chapter Nine: The Woman from Montgomery
• Chapter Ten: We Shall
• Chapter Eleven: Rosa’s Bus
• Chapter Twelve: Been in the Storm
• Chapter Thirteen: Champions of Democracy
• Chapter Fourteen: The Grocery Store
• Chapter Fifteen: Pencils
• Chapter Sixteen: Anniversary
• Chapter Seventeen: Communist Training School
• Chapter Eighteen: A Dangerous Place
• Chapter Nineteen: Our America
• Chapter Twenty: We Are Not Afraid
• Chapter Twenty-One: Padlock
• Chapter Twenty-Two: Sit at the Welcome Table
• Chapter Twenty-Three: Wade in the Water
• Chapter Twenty-Four: Tent City
• Chapter Twenty-Five: Literacy to Liberation
• Chapter Twenty-Six: Freedom Rides
• Chapter Twenty-Seven: Born Again
• Chapter Twenty-Eight: Ready from Within
• Chapter Twenty-Nine: Tremor in the Iceberg
• Chapter Thirty: Project C
• Chapter Thirty-One: A Living Petition
• Chapter Thirty-Two: Practicing Democracy
• Chapter Thirty-Three: Lay Our Bodies on the Line
• Chapter Thirty-Four: Ain’t Nobody Gonna Turn Us ’Round
• Chapter Thirty-Five: Signatures
• Chapter Thirty-Six: Eyes on the Prize, Hold On
• Chapter Thirty-Seven: Sister Help to Trim the Sail
• Chapter Thirty-Eight: Going Home
• Chapter Thirty-Nine: Good Chaos
• Epilogue
• Photographs
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Notes
• Index
• Copyright