Spotlight for Spell Freedom: The Underground Schools That Built the Civil Rights Movement by Elaine Weiss

 

Spell Freedom: The Underground Schools That Built the Civil Rights Movement by Elaine Weiss

Published:  March 4, 2025 by Atria/One Signal Publishers

Genre:  Non-fiction, Amerian History

Taken from Goodreads:  The acclaimed author of the “stirring, definitive, and engrossing” (NPR) The Woman’s Hour returns with an eye-opening and inspiring account of four activists—Septima Clark, Myles Horton, Esau Jenkins, and Bernice Johnson—and their work to ensure the voting rights of Black Americans.

In the summer of 1954, Esau Jenkins and Septima Clark travelled to Tennessee’s Highlander Center, a rural interracial training school for social change founded by Myles Horton, a white educator with roots in the labor movement. There, the three united behind a shared preparing Black southerners to pass the suppressive literacy tests required to vote in the era of Jim Crow.

Together with beautician-turned-teacher Bernice Johnson, they launched the effort known as the Citizenship Schools project. By the time the Voting Rights Act was signed into law in 1965, this audacious, grassroots undertaking had grown into a subversive network of nine hundred schools, not only preparing thousands of Black citizens to vote, but creating a generation of activists trained in community organizing, political citizenship, and essential tactics of resistance and struggle.

In the vein of Hidden Figures and Devil in the Grove, Spell Freedom is both a crucial and inspiring lens into our past, and a deeply moving and necessary narrative for our present.

 

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Meet Elaine Weiss:  Elaine Weiss has served as the national coordinator for the Broader, Bolder Approach to Education (BBA) since 2011, in which capacity she works with three co-chairs, a high-level task force, and multiple coalition partners to promote a comprehensive, evidence-based set of policies to allow all children to thrive. Major publications for BBA include two 2013 reports, Market-Oriented Education Reforms’ Rhetoric Trumps Reality and Mismatches in Race to the Top Limit Educational Improvement. She has also authored over two dozen blogs for the Huffington Post, the Washington Post Answer Sheet, and other publications, and been interviewed for numerous radio shows. Elaine came to BBA from the Pew Charitable Trusts, where she served as project manager for Pew’s Partnership for America’s Economic Success campaign. In that capacity, she worked with researchers to assemble evidence on the economic benefits of early childhood investments and worked with state partners to engage business leaders to promote effective early childhood programs. Ms. Weiss was a member of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s task force on child abuse, and served as volunteer counsel for clients at the Washington Legal Clinic for the Homeless.