CBH Talk | Elaine Weiss and Rashawn Davis Discuss “Spell Freedom: The Underground Schools that Built the Civil RIghts Movement”

As we approach the 60th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act, join Center for Brooklyn History for a look at an under-recognized program that laid the foundation for the voting activism of the mid-1960s. In the summer of 1954, just weeks after the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Ed decision, four courageous citizen-activists launched the Citizenship Schools project designed to prepare Black southerners to pass the daunting Jim Crow era voter registration literacy tests, whose main aim was disenfranchisement. Over the next decade this secretive undertaking established more than 900 citizenship schools across the South, preparing tens of thousands of Black citizens to read, write, and join the movement demanding the right to vote.

Author Elaine Weiss relays the story of the Citizenship Schools, and the vision and actions of its initiators Septima Clark, Esau Jenkins, Bernice Robinson, and Myles Horton, in her new book Spell Freedom: The Underground Schools that Built the Civil Rights Movement. Join her to hear this important history in a conversation led by Rashawn Davis, Executive Director of the Andrew Goodman Foundation.