Katherine Mellen Charron
Assistant Professor of History
North Carolina State University

“Teaching Citizenship: Septima Poinsette Clark and the Role of Education in the Black Freedom Struggle”
Tues., Apr. 8
3:30 p.m.
Royall Room
George Watts Hill Alumni Center
Carolina campus

The James A. Hutchins Lectures are presented with support from the UNC General Alumni Association.

Civil rights activist Septima Poinsette Clark is best known for her role in developing the Citizenship Schools. During the 1950s and 1960s, thousands of disfranchised African Americans passed through the Citizenship School classes in which they learned to read and write in order to pass the literacy tests required by southern states to register to vote. Beyond preparing black southerners to gain access to the voting booth, Clark’s pedagogy taught them how to wield the power of the ballot to transform everyday life. First sponsored by the Highlander Folk School, the Citizenship Schools spread throughout the South after the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) adopted the program in 1961. Clark migrated from Highlander to SCLC and helped make citizenship education a cornerstone of SCLC’s movement mobilization strategy. Nearly sixty-years old when the first class commenced, Septima Clark brought four decades of practice as a southern black public school teacher and civic organizer to designing the classes. Focusing on three moments in Clark’s life, this talk will show that the roots of the Citizenship Schools lay in the historic experiences of African American women educators and in a frequently misunderstood tradition of African American schooling in the segregated South. It will also highlight the degree to which Clark’s adult education program represented an important site of black women’s activism and leadership within the movement.

Katherine Mellen Charron holds a doctorate in history from Yale University and is currently an assistant professor of history at North Carolina State University. A native of North Carolina, Charron received her masters in Afro-American Studies from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Her research interests include African American, southern, and women’s history. Her book about Septima Poinsette Clark is forthcoming from UNC Press.