Ready from Within: Septima Clark & the Civil Rights Movement, A First Person Narrative - Softcover

Septima Poinsette Clark

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0865431744 ISBN 13: 9780865431744

Publisher: Africa World Press, Inc., 1990

Synopsis

30TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION Septima Clark played one of the most essential, but little recognized roles in the Civil Rights Movement. Born in 1898 in Charleston, South Carolina, she was a public school teacher until 1956, when she was dismissed for refusing to disavow her membership in the National Association for the advancement of Colored People. Subsequently, she worked for the Highlander Folk School, helping to set up Citizenship Schools throughout the South where Black adults could learn to read and prepare to vote. During the 1960s she worked with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and was a close associate of Martin Luther King, jr. from 1978 to 1983 she served as the first Black woman on the Charleston School Board. This is a first-person narrative of her life in the context of the Civil Rights Movement. Her story continues a major thread in the tapestry of the movement.

About this title

About the Author

Cynthia Stokes Brown is professor of Education at Dominican College in San Rafael, California.

From the Back Cover

Septima Clark played one of the most essential, but little recognized roles in the Civil Rights Movement. Born in 1898 in Charleston, South Carolina, she was a public school teacher until 1956, when she was dismissed for refusing to disavow her membership in the National Association for the advancement of Colored People. Subsequently, she worked for the Highlander Folk School, helping to set up Citizenship Schools throughout the South where Black adults could learn to read and prepare to vote. During the 1960s she worked with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and was a close associate of Martin Luther King, jr. from 1978 to 1983 she served as the first Black woman on the Charleston School Board. This is a first-person narrative of her life in the context of the Civil Rights Movement. Her story continues a major thread in the tapestry of the movement.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

INTRODUCTION: Searching by Cynthia Stokes Brown

It is difficult for young people to imagine what segregation was, now that it is legally gone in the United States. It is hard for newer generations to realize, whenever black and white people are gathered together at a high school commencement, or at a party, or in a restaurant, at a meeting, on a bus, or in a classroom, that only twenty-five years ago all over one large section of this country and in varying degrees in other sections, these gatherings could not have happened. They simply could not take place.

When I was a teenager in the fifties, the biggest fight I ever had with my father was not over when I could first wear a formal gown to go dancing. That was a minor fight. A major one, in my mind, was the time I arranged for my church group to visit the young people of a black church in my town.

My father refused to let me go. I stayed home, weeping in my room. My father knew the basic social fact in our town - that white people did not mix with black people. He believed that his friends and associates would not accept him, if he permitted me his daughter to do such a thing as visit a black church. He intended to live and be accepted in that town.

That town - Madisonville, in West Kentucky - consisted of about ten thousand people. A quarter of them were black and lived in separate areas on the edges of town. Since their areas had no pavement, it was simple even for a child to tell where they were. A few black people still lived in alleys behind white houses, but that pattern of blacks living behind white houses was dying out.

An arch at the southern entrance to my town proclaimed it "the Best Town on Earth." From childhood on I had some serious doubts about whether that sign was telling the truth.

I though Madisonville had just about the craziest social system that anybody could imagine. There was one whole set of facilities - schools, churches, stores, drinking fountains, funeral parlors - for black people, and another whole set for white people. Some places like buses, movie theaters, or hospitals, the two groups could share as long as each group stayed in its own section. Other places, like parks, libraries, and swimming pools, were not available at all for black people.

I didn't know there was a name for that kind of system; no one ever mentioned "segregation" in my presence or wrote it in our newspapers. All I knew was that I wasn't supposed to relate to black people in the same way that I related to white people, and even that, no one told me directly.

The rules changed as I grew from infancy to school age, and no one explained the silent code to me. When I was three and four, I had a black "mother" who took care of me in the afternoons as I played. I could sit in her lap as long as I liked, while she sang to me and told me stories.

A black woman, named Willie Mae Elliot, ran a bustling funeral parlor about six blocks from my house. My best white friend and I used to sit on the curb, waiting for Willie Mae to pick us up in her hearse on her way from the hospital to her funeral house, where we could play with our black friends.

But as soon as I attained the age of five, all my social contact with black people had to stop. They had to be treated in a different way than equals. My mother dismissed my black mother, for fear that she would bring disease - TB or polio - to us from her poor living quarters. No black children were present at the kindergarten I attended. I was suddenly cut off from a rich and happy association that I craved.

...

PART II: THE BEGINNING AND THE END

Editor's note: Septima Clark was born in 1898, thirty-five years after slavery was abolished in the southern states. For the first twelve years after the Civil War ended, federal troops occupied the South to try to guarantee the freed slaves their civil and political equality. But in 1873 a depression began that within four years became the most severe yet experienced in the United States. Farmers and workers were beginning to rebel; the northern and southern elites re-approached each other in order to protect themselves. This reconciliation between northern and southern elites became clear in the Compromise of 1877, when the Republican party made concessions to the Democratic party in order to win the disputed presidential race between Rutherford Hayes and Samuel Tilden. As part of these concessions, the Republicans agreed to remove from the South the Union troops, who were one obstacle to the re-establishment of white supremacy.

For twenty years after 1877 a fluid situation existed in the South, during which different philosophies of race relations competed for acceptance. Segregation, or the policy of setting black people apart, had been used in the North prior to the Civil War, but it was not introduced full-scale in the South until the end of the nineteenth century.

During the 1880s the whole country suffered another severe economic depression during which many people suffered dreadfully from poverty, hunger, and insecurity. The U.S. government began to fight colonial and racist wars to control the raw materials of the Philippines, Cuba, and Puerto Rico. The Supreme Court held, in a series of decisions, that segregation was compatible with the U.S. Constitution, although earlier the Court ruled segregation unconstitutional. The message went out that colored and black people were to be considered inferior. There had to be a scapegoat for the cruel disappointment of hopes suffered during the depression.

Between 1900 and 1920, the years of Septima Clark's coming of age, the South affirmed racism, and state after state enacted laws that legalized a full-scale system of segregation. These laws, which required blacks and whites to avoid contact as much as humanly possible, applied to all forms of public transportation, to sports and recreations, to employment, prisons, hospitals, schools and ultimately to funeral homes, morgues and cemeteries.

Edition details

• Publisher: Africa World Press, Inc.
• Publication date: 1990
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0865431744
• ISBN 13: 9780865431744
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 134
• Editor: Cynthia Stokes Brown